...the duchess was a child when Aroden died. That means he's the only one here who even knows what all the old traditional taxes are.

"Ah. Perhaps we ought to start by knowing what sources of funds are traditionally available to the monarch, before we agree to restore them. It has been a while but I will try to recall them to mind... There was the one-third part of all internal tariffs collected, and the three-fifths part of all external tariffs. The salt tax, naturally. The poll tax. The supplemental halfling tax. The due on incomes and properties, with exemptions for the church and nobility. The tax on acreage. The paper tax, in times of war or emergency - which this is, of course. The royal shipbuilding dues. The restitution paid by monstrous persons - that one should be abolished, possibly, in favor of raising the head tax... Those are the unexceptional ones. If we're all agreed on those we can start debating exceptional taxes."

Jaume is SO GLAD the chair is an Abadaran and will not be taxing things left and right just because they're there. You have to pay for state services somehow but this is ridiculous. Please?

"I observed that this taxation schedule worked quite well and the Empire was prosperous and had the power to take on any external enemy short of Hell."

Aspexia-Isona thought of more taxes but isn't going to mention them in the hopes that maybe if everyone forgets they exist they'll stop being collected.

"I think we should keep the one about making monsters pay restitution."

"Perhaps it can be revised," he concedes, "but of old it was often misapplied, to subjects of the king who rightly owed no restitution for they had done no wrong. Perhaps an additional tax on Evil Beings instead?"

He really was not expecting "monsters are bad" to be as controversial as it seems to be.

"I'm fine with saying the tax should be for evil monsters."

"How does one tax evil monsters, in practice, or is it a tax on whatever land fails to expel them?"

"Monstrous persons. Actual monsters just get killed, not taxed. Though thank you for reminding me, there is also the royal fifth of any treasure recovered from the place of a haunting or of the nesting of a dragon or dragon-like creature."

" - I'm sorry, can I ask what a monstrous person is?" She wouldn't ask but it sounds like no one else knows, either.

"Ah - I'm not very familiar with the full history of the term, but my understanding is that it once meant - dragonspawn, tieflings, orcs - subjects of the king who had some monstrous heritage but were still, ultimately, people. But by my day it had expanded to include the deformed and in the most egregious cases the merely ugly." Lady Raimon would be taxed as a monstrous person, but he's too much of a gentleman to say that aloud or even to glance in her direction.

"As a matter of efficiency, you ought to tax monstrous people more than other people because the best taxes are those on traits that cannot be altered, and on peoples who are nonetheless best off as your subjects. A man, sorely taxed, might leave, but where would a tiefling go?

As a matter of morality, rather than efficiency, taxing tieflings encourages tolerating tieflings and it's better to be rid of them as a relic of Hell, so I'm opposed."

"The Slavery Committee wants to set all the slips free. I bet you could raise some extra money just by saying they count as monsters and making them pay the tax for it."

"Duchess, while I might find acceptable a narrow tax on tieflings, to tax the merely ugly for their ugliness is cruel. Are we at least agreed that the tax on monstrous persons must be reformed, if it is to be restored at all?"

"Delegate Barro, halflings are not monsters. Though if they are all to be freed perhaps we should let lapse the supplemental tax on halflings as well as the tax on monstrous persons..."

"Why let the tax lapse rather than make the halflings pay it? We don't want them going around being idle in enormous numbers, the famine will be even worse than it's shaping up to be already."

"I don't think we should be getting rid of taxes on monsters when honest men will have to make up the slack."

"From an efficiency standpoint," she muses, "I think the right principle is to tax the beautiful rather than the ugly. I am naturally opposed out of self-interest."

"Perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean by that? The first part, of course, the second is obvious to anyone with eyes."

wtf

"It is a hobby in Axis to study efficient taxation - that is, taxation that does not discourage that which you wish to encourage. Taxes on trade goods, for instance, are an obvious necessity in the Material because no one would maintain the roads without their fair cut but they do make trade more expensive, and so the lord tilts the scales against the very thing he most desires. By contrast, a tax on a trait that cannot or cannot easily be changed - such as being a tiefling, or possessed with unusually fair features - alters no one's conduct. This makes the latter kind of tax superior, where it can be employed. It discourages no one from their natural pursuits, while still increasing revenue. I don't find this logic applicable to tieflings as we ought to be rid of them entirely, but for orcs or halflings, say, I think it follows."

"And when you say a tax on beauty is more efficient than a tax on ugliness, why is that?"

"Does this not rest on the assumption that it will be prohibitively difficult to emigrate, for the fair or the helltouched or any other such group? As it has been, but I had been under the impression that was a thing of the past."

"Where would they go? Is there any country on the face of this planet which welcomes tieflings? If we were to tax beauty, of course, this would be much more of a problem."

"The beautiful are in many respects advantaged in life - they make better marriages, have more friends, I've seen it argued that even the Goddess favors them more. They have more to take, then, than the hideous, and being flattered by their obligation may be less inclined to evade it."