Rebellion, rascals, and revenue : tax follies and wisdom through the ages / / Michael Keen, Joel Slemrod

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910554235303321
• Autore: Keen Michael
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Princeton, New Jersey : , : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• ISBN: 0-691-19998-1
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (1 online resource 537 p.)
• Disciplina: 336.2009
• Soggetti: Taxation - History
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Part IV. Taxes don't Collect Themselves.; Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di contenuto: Searching for the Holy Grail -- War Profiteers and the Corporate Tax Revisited -- Give Me Land, Lots of Land -- Conscripting Wealth -- Limiting the Damage -- The Cleverest Man in England -- Broaden the Base, Lower the Rate (Maybe) -- Shaping a Tax System -- How Many Feathers? -- 11. Citizens of the World -- Squeezing a Rice Pudding -- Havens from the Tax Storm -- The Rich Are Different from Us -- They Don't Live Here Any More -- Don't Tell -- False Profits -- If I Were You, I Wouldn't Start from Here -- A Farewell to Arms (Length Pricing)? -- Tumbling Taxes; The Big Picture -- Part III. Changing Our Ways -- 8. Breaking Bad and Making Good -- Do the Right Thing -- Family Matters -- Taxing Knowledge -- Tax Bads, Not Goods -- Saving the Planet -- Wind-Breaking Cows, Scary Dogs, and Cute Cats -- The Wages of Sin -- The Vile Custome -- The Curse of the Drinking Classes -- Sex, . . . -- . . . Drugs, . . . -- . . . But Not Much Rock and Roll -- Unhealthy Living -- Just Say No? -- 9. Collateral Damage -- Spurring Ingenuity -- Stranger Things -- Drawing a Line -- Excess Burden -- No Fire without Smoke -- A Window on Excess Burden -- 10. How to Pluck a Goose; A Crime of Passion and the French Income Tax -- Old Fears and New Directions -- 6. Some Are More Equal Than Others -- Taxing Femininity -- Peculiar Tax Institutions -- Leaps of Faith -- Outsiders -- Strangers in a Strange Land -- Taxes as Punishment -- Hard ; Choices -- 7. Stick or Shift? -- False Starts -- Burgling Other People's Intellect -- You Must Remember This -- Buddy, Can You Spare 1/20th of a Dime? -- Things Aren't Always What They Seem -- Helping the Working Poor (or Their Employers) -- Are Tax-Free Municipal Bonds a Giveaway to the Savvy Rich? -- The Murky Incidence of the Corporate Tax; Doing Your Bit -- Paying Your (Feudal) Dues -- Crossing the Line -- And There's More -- Jobs for the Boys -- A Tax on Stupidity -- Part II. Winners and Losers -- 4. Fair Enough -- Heads on Pikes -- Poll Taxes and the English -- Noble Causes -- Trying to Be Fair -- Pay for What You Get? -- Pay What You Can? -- Show Me a Sign -- Taxing by Class -- Taxing by Community -- Taxing the Finer Things in Life -- Presumptions of Prosperity -- 5. This Colossal Engine of Finance -- The Work of Giants: The Income Tax in Britain -- The Dred Scott Decision of the Revenue; Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Part I. Plunder and Power -- 1. Any Public Matter -- Bengal to Boston -- Never Such Disgrace -- Why Bolivia Is Landlocked -- Taxing the Light of Heaven -- Not Everything Is About Tax. But . . . -- 2. The Way We Were -- A Quick Gallop through the Long History of Taxation -- How Much? -- Warfare and Welfare -- Babbage's Nightmare -- Debt, Default, and Princes -- Making Money -- 3. By Another Name -- Elizabeth I to Spectrum Auctions -- Selling Sovereignty -- Cheap Labor -- Working for Nothing -- A Rich Man's War and a Poor Man's Fight
• Sommario/riassunto: A gripping account of taxation told through lively, dramatic, and sometimes ludicrous stories drawn from around the world and across the ages Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair. Sometimes they fail grotesquely, as when, in 1898, the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra Leone by imposing a tax on huts—and, in repressing it, ended up burning the very huts they intended to tax. Sometimes they succeed astonishingly, as when, in eighteenth-century Britain, a cut in the tax on tea massively increased revenue. In this entertaining book, two leading authorities on taxation, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod, provide a fascinating and informative tour through these and many other episodes in tax history, both preposterous and dramatic—from the plundering described by Herodotus and an Incan tax payable in lice to the (misremembered) Boston Tea Party and the scandals of the Panama Papers. Along the way, readers meet a colorful cast of tax rascals, and even a few tax heroes.While it is hard to fathom the inspiration behind such taxes as one on ships that tended to make them sink, Keen and Slemrod show that yesterday’s tax systems have more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian England’s window tax now seems quaint, but was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Great’s tax on beards aimed to induce the nobility to shave, much like today’s carbon taxes aim to slow global warming.Rebellions, Rascals, and Revenue is a surprising and one-of-a-kind account of how history illuminates the perennial challenges and timeless principles of taxation—and how the past holds clues to solving the tax problems of today.

Aesthetics of religion : a connective concept / / edited by Alexandra K. Grieser and Jay Johnston

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910796607103321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berlin, [Germany] ; ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : , : De Gruyter, , 2017; ©2017
• ISBN: 3-11-046045-9
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (512 pages)
• Collana: Religion and Reason ; ; Band 58
• Disciplina: 294.337
• Soggetti: Religion and civil society
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Includes index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Foreword -- Table of Contents -- What is an Aesthetics of Religion? From the Senses to Meaning-and Back Again / Grieser, Alexandra / Johnston, Jay -- List of Figures -- PART I. Fields and Topics -- Grasping the Formless in Stones: The Petromorphic Gods of the Hindu Pañcāyatanapūjā / Aktor, Mikael -- Religion, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Expressionism / Hamilton, John T. / Renger, Almut-Barbara -- Screening the Father of Lights: Documentary Film and the Aesthetics of the Nonfictional in Contemporary Religion / Hermann, Adrian -- The Literary Aesthetics of Religious Narratives: Probing Literary-Aesthetic Form, Emotion, and Sensory Effects in Exodus 7-11 / Feldt, Laura -- PART II. History and Politics -- Below the Horizon of Meaning: Figuration, Disfiguration, Transfiguration / Largier, Niklaus -- The Performative Knowledge of Ecstasy: Jane E. Harrison's (1850-1928) Early Contestations of the Textual Paradigm in Religious Studies / Brunotte, Ulrike -- What Does a Reformed City Look Like? - Changes in Visible Religion During the Reformation in Bremen / Auffarth, Christoph -- Standing, Not Walking - The Hieratic as a Key Term of an Anthropologically Based Aesthetics of Religion / Mohr, Hubert -- PART III. Comparison and Transfer -- Blue Brains: Aesthetic Ideologies and the Formation of Knowledge Between Religion and Science / Grieser, Alexandra -- Aesthetic Dimensions and Transformative Dynamics of Mimetic Acts: The Veneration of Habib-i Neccar Among Muslims and Christians in Antakya, Turkey / Kreinath, Jens -- Aestheticisation and ; the Production of (Religious) Space in Chennai / Svašek, Maruška -- Moving Religion by Sound: On the Effectiveness of the Nāda-Brahman in India and Modern Europe / Wilke, Annette -- PART IV. Concepts and Theories -- Esoteric Aesthetics: The Spiritual Matter of Intersubjective Encounter / Johnston, Jay -- Aesthetics of Immersion: Collective Effervescence, Bodily Synchronisation and the Sensory Navigation of the Sacred / Schüler, Sebastian -- The Governance of Aesthetic Subjects Through Body Knowledge and Affect Economies. A Cognitive-Aesthetic Approach / Koch, Anne -- Religion in the Flesh: Non-Reductive Materialism and the Ecological Aesthetics of Religion / Vásquez, Manuel A. -- PART V. In Conversation: Essays About the Connectivity of an Aesthetics of Religion -- Subjects and Sense-Making / Cummins, Fred -- Consumer Culture and the Sensory Remodelling of Religion / Gauthier, François -- Social Aesthetics, Atmosphere and Proprioception / Heidemann, Frank -- Semiotics and Aesthetics: Historical and Structural Connections / Yelle, Robert -- The Artificiality of Aesthetics: Making Connections on the Erie Canal / Plate, S. Brent -- Authors Biographies -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: This volume is the first English language presentation of the innovative approaches developed in the aesthetics of religion. The chapters present diverse material and detailed analysis on descriptive, methodological and theoretical concepts that together explore the potential of an aesthetic approach for investigating religion as a sensory and mediated practice. In dialogue with, yet different from, other major movements in the field (material culture, anthropology of the senses, for instance), it is the specific intent of this approach to create a framework for understanding the interplay between sensory, cognitive and socio-cultural aspects of world-construction. The volume demonstrates that aesthetics, as a theory of sensory knowledge, offers an elaborate repertoire of concepts that can help to understand religious traditions. These approaches take into account contemporary developments in scientific theories of perception, neuro-aesthetics and cultural studies, highlighting the socio-cultural and political context informing how humans perceive themselves and the world around them. Developing since the 1990s, the aesthetic approach has responded to debates in the study of religion, in particular striving to overcome biased categories that confined religion either to texts and abstract beliefs, or to an indisputable sui generis mode of experience. This volume documents what has been achieved to date, its significance for the study of religion and for interdisciplinary scholarship.