Wheat and taxes (E)

Akimbo: A Podcast from Seth Godin

Midroll Media

Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Which came first?

Akimbo is a weekly podcast created by Seth Godin. He's the bestselling author of 20 books and a long-time entrepreneur, freelancer and teacher.

You can find out more about Seth by reading his daily blog at seths.blog and about the podcast at akimbo.link.

To submit a question and to see the show notes, please visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Somehow, I'm not sure why, I've become friends with four of the greatest bakers of our time.
0:08.3	Mari Rubin, Kathy Dumas, Apollonia, Poulogne, and Dan Leder can turn wheat and other grains into something extraordinary.
0:19.2	But before we can talk about wheat, we need to talk about taxes.
0:25.0	Hey, it's Aj. And this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.
0:34.1	Like most people, I had a pretty benign view of how civilization came to be. People were tired of
0:41.3	walking around all the time. They liked the idea of having a house and a yard, maybe even a cat.
0:50.3	A house is a very, very, very fine house. And so they settled down. Once they settled down, they realized they could farm. And farming felt
0:59.5	way more reliable than picking berries or traveling around following animals. And then once they
1:07.9	settled down, I figured, they had to pass the hat to create resources so they could do things like build roads or protect the village.
1:17.6	On close inspection, though, I'm not sure this fairy tale narrative really holds up.
1:23.9	Maybe it all happened in a completely different way, backwards, in a reverse order.
1:32.2	Lots of people complain about taxes, but we don't usually talk about the history of taxation.
1:39.2	Search all you want online. You're not going to find very much in the way of a definitive history. One reason for
1:45.7	this is that taxation has been around forever, or at least as far as we can find recorded
1:51.7	history. The Chinese have been taxing people for more than 5,000 years. Taxation figures heavily
1:58.8	in the Old Testament, mentioning both how Pharaoh took a tax on everything that was grown, and how sacrifices were required at the temple.
2:10.7	But how exactly did we end up with taxation? What is it and what is it for, and what does any of this have to do with bread?
2:21.5	The author James Scott has a theory. I'm going to take that theory and expand it a little bit,
2:27.6	knowing that while it makes sense and I think holds water, I have no proof at all. So here we go.
2:33.9	Let's begin with this.
2:36.1	For time immemorial, some people have tried to dominate others.
2:40.4	Some people have been stronger or have used their will to bully others into doing what they need done.
	...

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