Here’s just a few of the more bizarre taxes that have been levied over the years;
Danegeld
History teaches us that you didn’t want to mess with a Viking because he would pillage, plunder and burn your village you before you even saw his pointy hat cresting the horizon. Vikings were well aware that no one wanted to mess with them thus they used that reputation to their advantage. Sure, they could have kept up all that pillaging, but it’s tiring and generally thankless work. Better to have someone pay you to simply not do it. But who would do such a thing? Everyone, for generations, that’s who.
Vikings first received payment to just go away when they attacked Paris back in 845. Happy that they could get ill gotten booty without suffering through the annoyance of hacking apart snooty, Dark Ages Frenchmen, the Vikings took their money and left. For a while. In 991, they returned and decided to sack part of England, but King Aethelred handed over 10,000 pounds worth of silver, which even to this day can ward off nearly any Norwegian. It was also around this time, after their second pay off, the Vikings realized the rest of Europe was peopled by rich idiots and there was nothing stopping them from threatening to attack whenever they needed money for wenches and grog.
More payments were made to the Vikings in 1002, 1007, 1012 and 1016. Payments up to this point totaled over 136,000 pounds of silver, enough to fund nearly one season for the New York Yankees.
In time, the tax became a useful tool to pay for whatever stuff the King needed money for, long after Vikings had retired to a paradise of non-bathing and obesity in some frigid retreat free from pillaging and Grendels. William the Conqueror used the tax to pay for other wars and it’s likely most people went ahead with paying it out of fear that, even if it seemed suspicious, better than waking up with an angry Viking kicking the heck out of you.
Beards
Obviously some governments really just needed money and didn’t particularly care how foolish they looked in their attempts to get it. Henry VIII, not particularly known as the coolest head in history to begin with, decided to charge a beard tax on his people back in 1535. He had his own beard that was likely living tax free up in the palace, but the common man was required to pay out if he wasn’t in the mood for shaving every day. And given that this was 1535, your average Gillette razor was probably just a sharp piece of metal and shaving cream was your own panic sweat as you tried not to nick an artery.
Henry’s daughter brought the beard tax back during her reign and had it vary depending on the age and status of the man wearing the beard. Presumably old, poor people with excellent Santa Claus beards were getting hit the worst while young knights in soul patches were just paying pocket change.
And because a good idea is timeless, in the early 1700s in Russia, Tsar Peter I introduced his own beard tax, meaning the Russian people either had to pay up or invest in scarves to make it through the winters.
Everything
Speaking of Tsar Peter, it’s worth noting he didn’t stop at beards. Whether through greed or insanity, Peter really wanted as much money as he could get his hands on, so he went about taxing pretty much everything that people would conceivably have handy. He put a tax on beehives to keep those honey barons in check, he taxed horse collars so the people who weren’t walking wouldn’t get a free ride, hats got taxed, boots, basements, chimneys, food, clothing and anyone who was born a male faced a tax. And because why stop there, births in general were also taxed, along with marriages and burial of the dead. And if all you were doing was standing still, naked, in the middle of nowhere, you still owed a tax for something because a soul tax was introduced in 1718. And if you believed you had no soul and were an atheist, then you owed a religious dissenter tax.
Illegal Drugs
Probably under the theory that anyone’s worth a try, no less than 10 states have tried to place a tax on narcotics. Yes, the very principle of the tax is kind of mind blowing, but states like Kansas decided it couldn’t hurt. There, dealers are expected to purchase tax stamps to place on the product and they promise to take no personal information from the dug dealers when they show up to purchase the stamps.
Though it sounds pretty foolish on the surface, it’s actually a crafty ploy by the government to nab drug dealers during prosecution, as anyone who doesn’t purchase the stamps can also be charged with tax evasion, taking them down in an Al Capone reign of glory.
Long Distance Tax
Few people realize it but from 1898 until 2006, if you had a phone, you were funding the Spanish American war. For over 100 years, there was a 3% excise tax on long distance calls, the purpose of which was to help fund a war which took place between April and August of 1898. As time went on, events like the First World War and the Depression continued to put a strain on the American economy, so the government kept the tax in place. Years became decades and finally, in 2006, someone put a stop to a tax that had milked the populace for billions. In fact, it was determined that $15 billion should be refunded to tax payers.
Flushing Tax
In 2005, Maryland introduced a $30 tax for flushing your toilet. The plan was to put the money into repairing sewage treatment plants by effectively giving everyone in the state a pay toilet. But if there’s one thing people don’t like it’s when the government imposes an intrusive tax that has a built in “no way out” clause, as very few of us are accustomed to going to the washroom outdoors these days.
Taxpayers were all hit, regardless of whether they had septic systems and private water sources or they were hooked up to the city, meaning many thousands of angry phone calls had to be fielded but since the plan was to pull in nearly $70 million in tax revenue, the state government wasn’t about to let this one go and most people who protested ended up paying eventually.
Emails look awfully outdated today when things like Twitter, Google Wave, and Facebook grab the headlines. Still, email-killers have come and gone and the communications service is alive and kicking with no signs of slowing down. WordPress decided to acknowledge this, albeit a tad late, with a new feature it’s launching for blogs using WordPress.com – email subscriptions. 
Lawsuits aren’t anything new for Google, but one in Italy could mean jail time for several Google employees if they’re found guilty. The four men are charged with several privacy violations and libel over a user-uploaded video, hosted on Google Video in 2006. The prosecutors are now asking for one year in jail for three of the executives, David Drummond, senior VP of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google, George Reyes ex-CFO at the company and Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel, and six months for libel for Arvind Desikan, senior product marketing manager at Google. 
The Sun Oracle deal is dragging on with no end in sight. Oracle is sticking to its guns, while the EU is not letting go of its objections. The software giant has now asked EU regulators for a hearing set for December 10 to argue its case for buying Sun, according to Reuters citing people close to the matter. This comes after Oracle asked for more time to prepare. 
Developers are abuzz over the latest thing to come to Google Chrome. It’s not a new feature in the browser itself, it’s the Extensions Gallery which is about to launch bringing add-on goodness to Chrome. The browser has had some support for extensions for several months, but now that Google thinks it’s ready for a wider roll out, developers are not wasting any time and starting to support the platform. Aviary, a startup specializing in web-based image editors and now even audio editors, has been working on a Chrome extension of its own similar to the Firefox add-on it already offers. 
