Karl Marx: In medieval society, therefore, taxes were the only bond between the emerging bourgeois society and the ruling feudal state, a bond which compelled the state to make concessions to bourgeois society, to meet its needs and adjust itself to its growth. In modern states this right to grant and refuse taxes has been turned by bourgeois society into a means of controlling the government, the body administering its common interests. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2758