Page 103 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 1 Issue 1 Q4

Death and Taxes
e phrase “death and taxes” was rst observed in Daniel Defoe’s e Political History of the Devil, published in 1726. It was later Benjamin Franklin who lifted the phrase from Defoe and made it the perennial sound bite that it is today. “Our new constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes,” he wrote in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789. One of the great politicians of all time, one of the founders of democracy itself, the very man who became a poster boy for the French Revolution, in this statement places the immutability of tax and death at a higher level of permanency even than the democratic ideals he authored.
Most unfortunately, and with uncanny prescience, Franklin seems to have got it spot on. In today’s context, in which the second-largest economy in the world is an authoritarian regime and in which the bastion of capitalism and trade in the form of the United Kingdom has voted e ectively to exit the free market, it would clearly seem that tax, and especially death tax, has more chance of survival than the democratic ideals of the 18th century. One suspects that Franklin would have been surprised to learn how far his ideas have come, and perhaps somewhat disappointed in their implementation.
“It was later Benjamin Franklin who lifted the phrase from Defoe and made it the perennial sound bite that it is today. ‘Our new constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes’.”
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