I could do without the partisan bashing of Democrats, but it’s also true that they left themselves wide open for this sort of attack by coming up with the scheme to plunder money collected only from PGE customers and supposed to be used for new energy efficiency gains in order to pay off an overdue [...]

One of the key weaknesses of the Roman Empire was its reliance on tax farming (the actual term, by the way)–the practice of selling offices to private interests in return for a given sum of money to be obtained from the residents of the provinces governed. The tax farmers bought their offices and then were [...]