First, most discussions of government budgets focus on allocations across sectors and activities, focusing on the accounting cost of services provided. We consider the question of taxes as price versus tribute for contemporary India and make three points. In this view taxes are a bane of the civilized. In this view taxes are not a necessary evil (as in the pairing of “death and taxes” as inevitable) but a positive good: more taxes buy more “civilization.” The other view is that taxes are “tribute to Leviathan”-a pure involuntary extraction from those engaged in economic production to those who control coercive power producing no reciprocal benefit. One is taxes are the “price we pay for a civilized society” (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). There are two dominant narratives about taxation.
