There's always taxation

En route from Frankfurt to Koblenz and after passing the town of Bingham, for almost 60 minutes the train weaves its way through a valley and along the steeply terraced slopes, following every turn of the Rhine. At every bend of the river you are looking out of the window at history. The fortresses of Marksburg, Castle Ehrenbreitstein, Burg Lahneck, and the Pfalzgrafstein; the Palatine Count’s Rock, built around 1327, on a mid-river island, are only a few of the many ruins visible on the hills across the river. I’ve made this journey many times and I never tire of the magnificence of it and rightly so have UNESCO inscribed this area of the Upper Middle Rhine, as a World Heritage site.

I was aboard again today, enjoying a glass of Pils and the wintery afternoon view and flipping through God and Mammon, Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790 – 1860’. I say flipping through because I don’t normally read text books but a colleague had pressed it upon me as I was leaving Frankfurt.
I was half reading and half watching the ruins pass by and thinking about the past owners of these castles, which were all built of greed. How would they have reacted to our present world financial crisis? Probably they would have increased the tax on the boats passing up and down the river.