This chapter shows how the Legislative Advisory Commission, a reviser type of legislature established by factions with high levels of unity and embeddedness during Argentina’s last dictatorship, amended and rejected a high share of government bills, and forced the executive to reverse, temper, or withdraw important initiatives on taxation, budgetary policy, and defense policy, which complicated the implementation of economic adjustment programs and facilitated the takeover of government by the hardliners, which ultimately led to the defeat in the Falklands War and the collapse of the authoritarian regime.

This chapter shows how the Brazilian Congress, operating in a dictatorship in which factions had unstable and uneven levels of unity and embeddedness, oscillated betwen working as a reviser and as a notary legislature. Quantitative analyses and case studies of tax policy, budgetary policy, and constitutional reforms show that while Congress was institutionally empowered to amend and reject government initiatives, it was more likely to exercise its lawmaking powers against initiatives sponsored by nondominant factions that were less able to retaliate, and less likely to be able to sustain its decisions against the executive when the presidency was controlled by a military faction with high levels of unity and embeddedness. Still, repeatedly probing the boundaries of representation, Brazilian legislators managed to frustrate important economic policies and to force the military into initiating the transition to democracy.

This chapter shows how the Spanish Cortes, a notary type of legislature established by factions with lower levels of unity and embeddedness during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, amended a share of government bills, thus informing the dictator of the extent of dissent about his initiatives, but rarely rejected any, and was therefore unable to impose significant policy changes, thus helping instead to secure Franco’s rule over the regime’s economic and institutional policies until his dying day.

A survey of the evidence for textile production and trade shows extensive market activities, supported by state enforcement of agreements. The most intrusive form of state intervention was the imposition of a monthly quota to be delivered by weavers, accounting for up to half of their production volume. This may have represented the transformation of an existing quota arrangement attested in New Kingdom Egypt. However, the cash-based Ptolemaic system, in which weavers were compensated and could substitute cash payments for their deliveries, had a different dynamic. The stable demand offered by the quotas offset some of the risk of production for the market by the weavers. This arrangement made the state into an oversized market player, but the textiles it collected were not sold through retail concessions but put to practical use or exported. In addition, weavers and other occupations were subject to taxation in cash, the state levied customs and sales taxes, and it derived revenues from flax cultivation and sheep husbandry, likewise without exercising exclusive control and using private contractors. Attempts at local monopolies were rather undertaken by professional associations.

Governments command tax revenue to provide services. The US government’s revenue is lower than that in Western European nations. The latter provide services such as universal healthcare, paid parental leave, and free education. A large portion of the US government’s revenue supports the military, which comprises almost half of the world’s total military expenditures. The richest 400 American families pay the lowest tax rate today, in sharp contrast to their paying the highest share in the 1950s. The federal government borrows to pay for services rather than resort to taxing the rich. Americans seem more accepting of not redistributing wealth than Western Europeans. Policies not supported by the elite are unlikely to become law. Poorer people are less likely to vote in the US. Since the 1950s, US states with the most liberal policies have had better mortality trends than conservative states. Americans prefer medical care spending over public health and social spending. Neoliberalism has increased economic inequality and produced a rightward political shift. Reparations can improve racial inequalities

descibes the setting up and deliberations of the Meade Committee on Tax Reform and its report, also Meade’s Intelligent Radical’s Guide to Economic Policy and the award of his Nobel Prize

According to Dazai Shundai, the provision of food and goods to all the people is an essential element of good government. Wealth as measured in food and goods will then lead to a strong military. Some have considered the ideal of “enriching the country and strengthening the military” to be contrary to Confucian teachings, but this is mistaken. Currency should be seen as secondary to food and goods and does not in itself represent true wealth, a fact that many have lost sight of in Edo and other urban centers of Tokugawa Japan. In farming, it is crucial to extract the full productive potential of the land, which requires an understanding of the different types of land and the uses that each of these serves; an ignorance of these different uses has led to harmful policies that try to convert all land into paddies. The stabilization of prices is another important role for government and helps prevent merchants from exploiting price fluctuations for private gain. A system of government-managed granaries can be used to stabilize rice prices, provide relief in times of famine, and provide low-interest loans to samurai in times of need.

Royal tribute was a tax based on ancestry that linked free people to the colonial government and the Spanish monarch. For families, royal tribute was about more than the immediate pressure of tax payment. Registration as a taxpayer could alter a family’s status, or calidad, for generations. Using tax rolls and case studies of people who resisted registration, this chapter argues that families took varied strategies to try to keep off the tax registers and establish alternative expressions of their loyalty to the Spanish crown. The cases demonstrate the interpersonal, political, and gendered conflicts that arose when individuals with African ancestry resisted the obligation of royal tribute. Officials and bureaucrats denounced the actions of those who confronted agents of the tribute regime. By refusing registration, or discouraging others from complying, men and women prompted officials to reflect on what loyalty from Afro-descendants entailed.

If Edward I had died in the course of his conquest of Wales in the early 1280s, his successor would not have been the notorious Edward II, but King Alfonso I, born at Bayonne in 1273, and named after his godfather, the queen’s brother and king of Castile. In fact, Alfonso was to die a child in 1284, just as Edward’s first two sons had done, but the details of his life are a reminder that English kingship was not just – or even, at times, very – English. The kings of England, descended from Normans and Angevins in the male line, wished to be leading figures on the European stage, and they jealously defended lands, rights and connections across the continent, as well as in these islands.

Crown finance in late medieval England had a lot of moving parts, not all of which fitted together. This chapter looks initially at income and expenditure, before examining the ways in which the financial system was managed, massaged and manipulated. The many moving parts which ultimately contributed to the evolution of a public financial system, forged in an often charged but fundamentally stable partnership with parliament through a period of protracted war, were one of the keystones of the expanding political society – king, nobility, gentry, merchants – which lay at the heart of the late medieval and early modern English state. The formative century in this process was circa 1260 to 1360 but, despite the political upheavals, ever more frequent financial crises and declining taxation revenues of the century which followed, it proved strong enough to withstand the challenges.