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Comment by danielvf | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes. The term came from the late Middle Ages when some people with a castle and soldiers were essentially thieves with open power and quasi legal cover. Their primary income was what they took, not taxes from lands they ruled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron

The Rhine river hills are covered with the castles of robber barons who took protection money from ships. I had ancestors who lived in Central Europe who lived near enough to a robber baron. From time to time, the baron's men would ride out from their castle and steal everything they could carry from neighboring villages.

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> Their primary income was what they took, not taxes from lands they ruled.

> The Rhine river hills are covered with the castles of robber barons who took protection money from ships.

How exactly does this differ from "taxing"?

Because they took money from merchant ships instead of peasants, where barons are supposed to get their taxes :/

(Actually, shipping tolls on the Rhine were supposed to be set according to guidelines set by the Holy Roman Emperor; the robber barons violated these guidelines)

In both cases there was no rulership going on, and in both cases the robbery being done was in areas not under the robbers baron's de-jure authority.

When you build your own castle and set up toll stations on roads and rivers, there is rulership going on. You're it!

The wikipedia article suggests that the robber barons weren't difficult to stamp out, because they lived openly in giant castles. They existed because there wasn't a government above them to squash them. Filling a power vacuum doesn't make you a bandit, it makes you a warlord.

taking something called "protection money" sounds like extortion to me, but now we're splitting hairs.

You get something back from taxes - things like health care (in Europe at least), infrastructure, R&D investment, education, and so on.

Political systems that don't have proper checks and balances always devolve to caste banditry - which is not quite the same thing as getting something useful for your money.

This does not reflect any understanding of taxes before, say, the 19th or 20th century.

Hammurabi certainly didn't devote his funds to public health care or public education. Infrastructure, yes. R&D... probably not. Monuments, public religion, and the military would have figured in his budget.

What you get back from taxes is stability. If robber barons kept ships from being attacked (other than by themselves) along their stretch of the river, they were fulfilling the necessary function of a taxing agent.

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