```Muhimman proudly writes his name slowly, carefully, one letter at a time, grinning broadly as he finishes. He’s just 11 years old and was a good student who had dreams of being a doctor.

School frightens him now. Earlier this year, a cleric at the religious school he faithfully attended in the southern Punjab town of Pakpattan took him into a washroom and tried to rape him. Muhimman’s aunt, Shazia, who wanted only her first name used, said she believes the abuse of young children is endemic in Pakistan’s religious schools. She said she has known the cleric, Moeed Shah, since she was a little girl and describes him as an habitual abuser who used to ask little girls to pull up their shirts.```
This damn writing style. I really dislike it. We had a famous journalist in Germany, he wrote in that exact style, turns out he made entire stories up. Not just lying about a detail or two, or twisting a narrative. Completely made up.

This style enables it. All these details about Muhimman, above, sound authentic and sympathetic, but you could copypaste that precise sentence intwo fifteen articles and it'd have the exact same effect.

How to have a Proper Anti-Elite Elites in Society:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Composition_of_the_tribunals
"One of the most striking aspects of the organization of the Inquisition was its form of financing: devoid of its own budget, the Inquisition depended exclusively on the confiscation of the goods of the denounced. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of those prosecuted were rich men."

The Spanish Inquisition was the epitome of an overworked bureaucracy

I would say Pre-Salary they were not a true bureaucracy, when paid only by confiscations they were more like contractors than employed staff.

There used to be a time when tax collectors weren't paid a salary but they were sold the right to collect the taxes for themselves

The state basically got the revenue from selling the rights to tax this and this amount

Though back then taxes were based more on property value than income (also the reason why Romans came up with the census)

Income taxation is actually relativel novel

Even if it exists on paper in the third world really it doesn't apply there to this day

African states would prolly be better able to tax it by using the old model

Iirc Romes tax income was mainly based on tarifs and on property

Yeah that too

Afaik Romans taxed Britain more pre conquest than post

Yeah

And of course they had to pay to prevent uprising and whatnot

Egypt was the most profitable region

Iirc this was also the reason they didn't expand into Jemen

Much cheaper to trade with them then to conquer them

Maybe they should've had something like internal tariffs

the romans were proto georgists then?

Because that's the easiest way to tax

Of course only until you can effectively tax property and whatnot

They had a tax for all trade that past trough Mare Nostrum

@Galahad No the property values changed from time to time and this was taken into account with the census

Georgism is more rigid

And punishes large land owners

Sicily and Egypt were iirc two of the most valuable roman teritories

Yes

why sicily

Food

sorry for the questions im not an expert on this by any means

Massive grain production

Rome itself was basically a huge waste of money

ah that makes sense

i assume its because sicily was less mountainous that the italian mainland?

and better soil maybe

It's also one of the reasons they never conquerd Germany

Sicily has good land

They did but didn't hold on to it for very long afaik

Germany was econolicaly usless