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Prologue
It is a truth little remarked on by scholars that tax law
has been a fount of literature for 5,000 years. The oldest
literary work still extant--the Epic of Gilgamesh--is a long
narrative of a friendship begun during a protest against
government exactions.2 In more recent times, some of our
language’s most notable authors have used fiction to delve into
tax policy: consider Shakespeare’s criticism of the supply-side
effects of a 16-percent tax rate;3 Swift’s precocious suggestion
of a system of voluntary self-assessment;4 and Dickens’ trenchant
observation on the problems of multijurisdictional taxing
coordination:
[The town’s] people were poor, and many of them were
sitting at their doors, shredding spare onions and the
like for supper, while many were at the fountain,
washing leaves, and grasses, and any such small
2 David Ferry, “Gilgamesh, A New Rendering In English
Verse”, 14-15 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1992).
3 Shakespeare, “Henry VIII”, act I, sc. ii. (“A sixt part
of each? / A trembling contribution! Why, we take / From every
tree, lap, bark and part o’ th’ timber; / And, though we leave it
with a root, thus hack’d, / the air will drink the sap.”)
4 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage to Laputa,
Etc. 162 (W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York, 1964) (1726). (“The
highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the
other sex, and the assessment according to the number and natures
of the favours they have received; for which they are allowed to
be their own vouchers. . . . The women were proposed to be taxed
according to their beauty, and skill in dressing; wherein they
had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their
own judgment.”) See generally Levmore, “Self-Assessed Valuation
Systems For Tort and Other Law”, 68 Va.L.Rev. 771, 779 (1982).
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