"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."

This conversation is....... bizarre.......... but he's a pretty normal looking guy so if they want to tax beautiful or ugly people more that seems fine?

"There once was a tax on beards. Abominable thing, the king changed his mind after a year. Whether that is a tax on beauty or ugliness I suppose is a matter of taste."

"How did this tax compare to the price of razors?"

"It was high enough that the common folk were nearly all shaven for the year, though none of them neatly and many no doubt with a kitchen-knife or a workman's tool."

Hmm. Does "no new taxes" actually mean "no bringing up old taxes?" Maybe she should bring up taxes on things her family neither does nor wants to do?

"In Sirmium there's also the manticore tax and the dwarf tax and the fen tax, and I thought those were all kingdom-wide?"