King William III in 1696 pioneered the window tax, which charged property owners based on their number of windows. The intent was to spare the poor and dun the wealthy. The thinking was that windows represented a rough proxy of a taxpayer’s wealth: Bigger and more opulent houses had more windows.
The tax was similar to a graduated income tax, in that every additional window above certain specified levels incurred higher charges. The tax raised much less revenue than the government hoped, because owners responded by boarding up windows and building houses with fewer of them.
Landlords, who faced especially hefty tax bills because they were assessed on the total number of windows in their tenements, tried to reduce their payments by covering even the smallest apertures. The result, as Messrs. Keen and Slemrod explain: “Poor ventilation spread disease; lack of light led to a deficiency of vitamin B that stunted growth—what the French came to call the ‘British sickness.’ ”
Charles Dickens railed that “the adage ‘as free as air’ has become obsolete by Act of Parliament. Neither air nor light have been free since the imposition of the window-tax.” In an essay, “Red Tape,” Dickens lampooned the paper-pushing government bureaucrats who assessed the tax and turned a blind eye to the plight of the poor. “A most unnatural per-centage of them were, in consequence, scrofulous, and consumptive, and always sliding downward into Pauperism.”
While progressive in theory, the window tax was regressive in practice. Landlords passed some of the tax on to tenants in higher rents. That exacerbated the era’s economic disparities. Reformist writers of the era decried it as a sunlight tax.
By today’s lights, the tax may seem absurd. But is it any more so than progressive wealth-tax proposals, which would charge the affluent based on paper fortunes that can be as fleeting as the London sun?
Like the window tax, a wealth tax would encourage tax avoidance and produce an array of excess burdens. A November ballot initiative in California would charge residents with more than $1 billion in net worth a 5% tax on their fortunes as of Dec. 31, 2026. Many billionaires have already moved out of the state to avoid being subject to the tax.
Others will surely devise schemes to avoid it. For instance, the initiative exempts real estate. Look for billionaires to sell shares in companies and expand their palace empires. The result of the tax avoidance will be less government revenue, fewer jobs and stunted innovation—excess burdens. Expect state taxes for everyone to increase to compensate for the loss of billionaires.
For more information see Allysia Finley “A Lesson on Wealth Taxes From Charles Dickens” The Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2026.
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