The Puppeteer's Strings

How taxation is a story that hides a deeper function

Photo by János Venczák on Unsplash

The Common Story of Taxes

From childhood, most of us are told a simple and persuasive story. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Without them, there would be no schools, no hospitals, no clean water, no firefighters, no streetlights, no armies standing guard at the nation’s borders. This is the story of taxes as contribution, as moral obligation, as proof that we are citizens who care about the common good. The act of paying is recast not as loss but as duty. To pay one’s “fair share” is to show responsibility, to stand in solidarity with one’s neighbors, and to invest in the collective project of society. Politicians know the strength of this story, which is why campaign slogans so often echo it, insisting that taxes are a measure of fairness, that they ensure no one free rides on the sacrifices of others.

The story is internalized long before we question it. Teachers frame it as civics, employers frame it as payroll deductions, and the media frame it as a civic rite that funds the state’s benevolent machinery. The phrase “your taxes at work” is meant to calm suspicion and replace it with pride. It tells us that the pothole repair crew, the public library, or the community clinic is not a gift from above but the direct result of our own contribution. In this sense, taxation is moralized as reciprocity. We pay, and in return society endures.

But what if this story is incomplete? What if taxation does more than fund civilization, and perhaps does something else entirely? Today, let’s look past the common story and to examine taxation as it really functions: not as a neutral channel of money but as a deep machinery of coordination, legitimacy, and power. To see taxation this way requires stripping away the moral halo and examining it in its historical diversity, its political effects, and its ecological entanglements. The conclusion may be unsettling, for it suggests that taxation is less about collective flourishing than about structuring obedience, enforcing growth, and producing legitimacy for institutions of power.

The Conventional Frame

Within the discipline of economics, taxation is taught in neat categories. It serves four core purposes: revenue, redistribution, stabilization, and correction. Revenue is straightforward: governments must finance their activities, and taxation is the primary tool. Redistribution is the familiar idea of progressive taxation, where those with more income or wealth contribute a greater share to reduce inequality. Stabilization refers to fiscal policy as a counterweight to business cycles, with tax cuts in recessions and increases in booms. Correction refers to taxes that change behavior, like levies on cigarettes, alcohol, or carbon emissions.

These categories are illustrated with tidy examples. Progressive income tax ensures equity by asking the wealthy to shoulder more. Value-added tax is efficient because it collects revenue at every stage of production and consumption. Pigouvian taxes correct market failures by making harmful activities more expensive. In this framing, taxation is a rational tool, wielded like a wrench to tighten or loosen economic gears.

The frame is powerful because it presents taxation as technical, neutral, and inevitable. Disagreements are confined to calibration: how steep should the rates be, which goods deserve excise taxes, and how much redistribution is optimal. Taxation is never questioned in its essence, only in its details. The citizen is trained to see tax debates as quarrels over design rather than as arguments about deeper power structures. To enter the conventional frame is to accept that taxation is simply an instrument of public finance, without recognizing that it is also a system of surveillance, exclusion, moralization, and ecological dependency.

Heterodox Challenges

If we move beyond mainstream economics, we find challenges that fracture the conventional picture but do not escape its boundaries. Libertarian thinkers describe taxation as theft. To them, the coercive seizure of property by the state is morally indistinguishable from robbery, even if it is legalized. This view reframes taxation as a violation rather than a civic duty.

Neoliberal perspectives, though less moralistic, shift the focus to growth. Taxation is seen not as neutral but as a lever to encourage investment, innovation, and competitiveness. Tax rates must be low enough to stimulate enterprise yet high enough to sustain the state’s functions. Here, taxation is less about justice and more about calibration of incentives for market actors.

Modern Monetary Theory goes further, suggesting that taxation does not, in fact, fund spending for sovereign states that issue their own currency. Instead, taxation enforces demand for that currency, shapes aggregate demand, and prevents inflation. In this view, taxes are tools of monetary sovereignty, not mere revenue collection.

Each of these heterodox accounts pushes us closer to the truth by exposing contradictions in the conventional story. They reveal taxation as coercive, as growth-oriented, or as currency-enforcing. Yet they remain tethered to the assumption that taxation is inevitable, the baseline from which policy must proceed. Even the libertarian rejection of taxes does nothing to question what functions the state is seeking to fulfill through taxes. None of these views asks the more radical question of what taxation is doing beneath its economic justifications, or what alternative systems of coordination might exist.

The Many Forms of Taxation

To see taxation clearly, we must look at its historical and cultural diversity. Taxes have never been uniform. They have taken countless forms, each shaping society in different ways.

Poll and head taxes levied a flat fee on every individual. They were easy to collect but notoriously regressive, pressing hardest on those with the least. Land and property taxes stretch back to agricultural societies that measured cereal output or counted hearths and windows. These evolved into modern property taxes and, more recently, wealth taxes. Labor and service taxes drew not on money but on bodies: the corvée of medieval Europe, the Incan mit’a system, and mandatory military service were all taxes of time and toil rather than coin.

Tribute and ceremonial levies reveal another dimension. In Oceania, ritual obligations bound communities through cycles of giving and receiving. In parts of Africa, tribute signified allegiance more than revenue. Aztec codices document levies that combined resource extraction with ritual display. These taxes were less about efficiency and more about symbolic order.

Customs duties and tariffs arose along caravan routes and in harbors. A toll on merchants or a fee at a port became the ancestor of modern trade wars. Excises and monopolies targeted specific goods such as salt, tobacco, or alcohol, making daily consumption itself a taxable event. Resource rents and royalties extended taxation into nature, charging fees for access to forests, mines, fisheries, and later, oil fields.

Fines, fees, and licenses blurred the line between justice and revenue. Courts, guilds, and municipalities extracted funds under the guise of regulation. Income and corporate taxes are surprisingly recent, gaining traction only with the advent of payroll withholding during the twentieth century. Consumption taxes like VAT and GST are now central pillars of state finance across much of the world. Extraordinary levies, from war taxes to emergency surcharges, appear whenever the state claims a crisis. Today, even international coordination shapes taxation, as states attempt to prevent profit shifting by multinational corporations through global minimum taxes.

Each of these forms is not just a revenue device but a mode of coordination. They define who is counted, what is measured, and which activities are bound into the state’s fiscal system. They reveal taxation as a cultural practice, an ecological strategy, and a political tool, not just as a financial necessity.

What Conventional Accounts Miss

The conventional frame misses the core reality: taxation is not neutral. It disciplines populations by making participation compulsory and noncompliance punishable. It surveils by requiring declarations of income, property, and transactions. It legitimates states by presenting coercion as fairness and by linking public goods to the rhetoric of shared contribution.

Taxation structures inclusion and exclusion. Citizens are taxpayers; those who do not or cannot pay are cast as outsiders, whether they are undocumented workers, subsistence farmers, or informal traders. Fiscal dependence on resource throughput locks states into growth. Without expanding taxable activity, budgets falter, and legitimacy wanes. Thus, taxation ties political stability to perpetual economic expansion, regardless of ecological cost.

Culturally, taxation is moralized. To pay is to be virtuous, to refuse is to be greedy or criminal. Stories of duty and fairness saturate the discourse, masking the fact that taxation is always coercive at its core. Justice within taxation is often framed as distributive by asking who pays how much, but this is only the surface. Procedural justice asks who sets the rules, who enforces them, and who gets to contest them. Recognitional justice probes deeper, asking whose lives are erased or penalized by being excluded from taxable categories. Indigenous economies, ecological systems, and informal networks are often destroyed simply because they do not fit the fiscal mold.

In short, taxation is less a neutral tool of public finance than a political technology for ordering society.

The True Roles of Taxation

When viewed without the veil of conventional narratives, taxation appears as a machinery of coordination and control. It enforces monetary sovereignty by requiring that people use state-issued currency. It produces legitimacy by linking public services to the claim that they are funded by taxes, even when monetary realities are more complex. It recycles revenue not simply into goods and services but into stabilizing dominant forms of capital, through subsidies, bailouts, and legal loopholes.

Taxation disciplines populations by monitoring, auditing, and punishing them. It is not only about money but about the capacity to compel compliance. Most profoundly, taxation locks societies into high-energy, high-throughput economies. Because fiscal solvency depends on growth, taxation ties the survival of governments to the expansion of taxable activities. This makes it not just an economic mechanism but an ecological trap, binding societies to paths of extraction and consumption that cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Seen this way, taxation is not the funding of civilization but the organization of legitimacy, discipline, and growth dependency. It is a system of coordination that ensures the reproduction of existing power structures.

Taxation as the Currency of Control

To call taxation the currency of control is not a rhetorical flourish but a sober observation. It is the binding agent between populations and the state, the mechanism that transforms coercion into duty and extraction into legitimacy. The common story that taxes fund civilization hides more than it reveals. Taxation’s true power lies in how it coordinates people, stabilizes capital, and sustains growth, not in how it pays for public services.

This does not mean we should abolish taxation without reflection, nor does it mean that collective financing of shared goods is undesirable. It means that we must be clear about what taxation really does before imagining alternatives. If taxation is always a form of coordination, then the real question is not whether to tax but how to design fiscal systems that support collective flourishing rather than control. Can we imagine forms of contribution that bind people together without coercion, that stabilize economies without locking them into ecological overshoot, and that generate legitimacy without disguising domination as fairness?

The challenge is immense, for taxation is deeply woven into the fabric of modern states. Yet only by questioning the common story can we begin to glimpse other possibilities. To ask what taxation really is, rather than what we are told it is, is to take the first step toward imagining a fiscal system grounded in reciprocity, justice, and ecological balance. Until then, taxation remains less the price of civilization than the currency of control.