John Morton’s 500-Year-Old Tax Trick Still Bleeding the Planet Dry

John Morton, Dead Since 1500, Still Manages to Keep Europe in a Headlock

LONDON—While the rest of us struggle to survive the 2020s—crypto winters, climate tantrums, and the occasional attempted coup—one English clergyman who’s been mouldering in his grave for five centuries continues to dictate fiscal policy from beyond the veil. Meet John Morton, late Archbishop of Canterbury, Tudor bean-counter, and the only man whose Excel file is literally carved in stone. The “Morton’s Fork” he forged in 1487 still gleams, skewering taxpayers on every continent with the same brutal elegance it once reserved for reluctant English nobles.

Morton’s Fork, for the blissfully uninitiated, was a diplomatic way of saying “heads we win, tails you lose.” If you looked rich, clearly you could pay more tax; if you looked poor, you were obviously hiding money—so cough up anyway. It was the spiritual ancestor of today’s global tax regimes, from Greece’s presumptive income calculations (yes, owning a swimming pool proves you’re a millionaire) to Uganda’s mobile-money levy that catches peasants and plutocrats in the same digital net. In Brussels, the European Commission is currently debating a “minimum effective tax” for multinationals: Morton would have applauded the loophole-riddled draft, then taxed the applause.

The Fork’s genius lies in its moral flexibility. It doesn’t care whether you’re a Florentine merchant in silk or a Bangladeshi gig-driver on a rattling scooter; it simply insists that your existence is proof of taxable capacity. The World Bank estimates that governments leave US$483 billion on the table each year through evasion. Morton would scoff: “Only” half a trillion? Clearly the living lack imagination.

And so the Fork travels. The IMF, in its benevolent wisdom, now recommends “presumptive taxes” for the informal sector—Mortonism wrapped in technocratic jargon. Across the Atlantic, the IRS’s Automated Underreporter program assumes discrepancies are fraud unless proven otherwise; call it TurboTax of Damocles. In India, demonetization was sold as an anti-corruption crusade but behaved like a nationwide Fork, presuming every cash hoarder guilty until poor. The policy’s architect now enjoys a cushy post at the G20, proving that mortality, not morality, is the only reliable career killer.

Global finance has merely upgraded Morton’s hardware. Swiss banks once kept ledgers with quills; now they keep them with firewalls. The Paradise Papers revealed trillions stashed offshore—Morton would note the theological irony: paradise, after all, is where the blessed escape taxes entirely. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens in 143 countries now file personal income taxes, a bureaucratic ritual that owes less to Adam Smith than to a long-dead bishop who realized that guilt plus arithmetic equals revenue.

Even death itself is no refuge. Spain’s “succession tax” claws at grieving heirs; Japan’s authorities once demanded inheritance on unrealized crypto gains, forcing mourners to liquidate grandma’s Bitcoin at knife-point. Morton would chuckle—if his jaw still had tendons. The Fork has become a multi-headed hydra: carbon taxes that assume you drive too much, digital service taxes that presume you scroll too profitably, wealth taxes that calculate your art collection’s appreciation while you sleep. The pandemic merely accelerated the trend; governments printed trillions, then wondered why inflation felt like a retroactive tax on breathing.

And yet, the Fork persists because we, the living, secretly admire its candor. It tells the brutal truth modern politicians sugarcoat: the state needs money, and the rest is commentary. From Lagos to Lima, citizens grumble, pay, and repost memes comparing tax collectors to medieval torturers—never quite admitting the torturer is us, armed with smartphones instead of pikes. In that sense, John Morton achieved immortality not through miracles but through the eternal willingness of humans to fleece one another with a straight face.

So raise a glass (taxed at 27%, unless it’s duty-free) to the late archbishop. Somewhere in the celestial ledger, he’s tallying your sins and your VAT. He’s been dead since 1500; the rest of us just haven’t caught up.