Great analogy
“The billeting of troops, a common form of fiscal punishment, is to modern forms of systematic taxation as the drawing and quartering of would-be regicides (so strikingly described by Michel Foucault at the beginning of Discipline and Punish) is to modern forms of systematic incarceration of criminals. Not that there was a great deal of choice involved. The state simply lacked both the information and the administrative grid that would have allowed it to exact from its subjects a reliable revenue that was more closely tied to their actual capacity to pay. As with forest revenue, there was no alternative to rough-and-ready calculations and their corresponding fluctuations in yields. Fiscally, the premodern state was, to use Charles Lindblom’s felicitous phrase, “all thumbs and no fingers”; it was incapable of fine tuning.”
-James Scott Seeing Like a State
