Governments Getting Money: Tax

Where do governments get their money from?
Picking apart how tax works sounds dull, but is one of the most important parts of understanding the economy. We talk about taxes as redistributing wealth, which implies that there’s some kind of pre-existing distribution of wealth that the tax system reshuffles. The thing is, the whole concept of governments relies so heavily on taxation that this language can be misleading. Tax represents everyone in a society pooling some money together to set up the foundations of what that society will look like. So what happens if we can’t pull together enough money?