I never said you were in denial, I said I was reminded of that phrase. The unreliability of government inflation statistics is well known. Shadowing Reality by John Williams explains it well enough. He claims its a bipartisan effort which reduces fiscal expenses by manipulating the CPI.
Then run the numbers on a 60-hour workweek, which ups the yearly wage to $300, making $800 more than two and a half times the average wage. $28K in today's dollars is still way too low to be believable.
I'm reminded of the Architects phrase from The Matrix, "Denial is the most predictable of human responses."
That's the civil war tax. The accuracy of today's government inflation statistics are contested, for example see ShadowStats as an alternative (although it doesn't go back to the civil war). Per the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the average hourly pay rate was $0.098 per hour in 1860. Assuming 40 hours of work a week and 52 weeks per year, that equates to about $200 per year, which means $800 was four times average yearly wages.
Today's average yearly wage is somewhere around $60,000 per year. Multiply that by 4 and you're at $240,000. I'm not sure I'd characterize that as rich, but it's certainly upper middle class.
My point is that your inflation statistic of $800 in the 1860s being equivalent to $28,000 in today's dollars is not particularly believable.
When the income tax started, it was supposed to only apply to the wealthy. Roughly 100 years later, Warren Buffet infamously said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary. So much for that.
There's very little reason to believe a wealth tax would be any different.
My limited understanding of the history was that during the patent medicine era, medicines had proprietary formulas and varying compositions. For example, many formulas had cannabis extract, others contained opium. The initial regulations therefore were done for medical purposes of drug purity. Edited to add, it wouldn't surprise me if the overuse of opium in the patent medicine era led directly to judging the medical usefulness of these drugs, although it's just a guess.
While it's just a guess, pharmaceutical lobbying is likely why. None of that happened before the FDA was created sometime in the early 1900s.
Right now we're in the political stages of considering the regulating of internet access to minors, the addictiveness of social media is not regulated.
And if a pharmaceutical or drug has addictive properties with no medical uses, the government outlaws it by scheduling it as having abuse potential. Seems like a big double standard.
“Get out of our country!” he yelled, holding the unlit flag. “This is a Christian country!” He soon threw away the unlit flag and unwrapped a basic rainbow Pride flag and unfurled it in the wind. Someone then laughed at him.
And hey, beating the bejesus out of kids is one of the fundamental pillars of US culture. How dare financial "scrutiny" get in the way of deeply entrenched custom.
In the case of trash collection, the fine has been put in place by the trash-collection corporations. How that specifically may analogize to household-chore robots: I'm not sure. There are possibilities, but picking one among many and saying it will certainly be that one seems likely to be like gambling. Perhaps the robotic company requires you to sign an end-user agreement with lots of fine-print legalese.
The motive is money, but I didn't say anything about governments, that was your interpretation, and I'll admit it is a possibility. These robots are said to be AI, and I'd be very surprised if they don't also have wireless communications of some kind, but to whom and whether those communications can be hacked are all unknowns.
In California, decades ago we used to be able to throw away our household trash in one container. Now we have 3 containers, and it's recently become a fine-profit center: if folks don't properly separate their recycling, greenery, and trash components, the AI-surveillance cameras mounted on the trucks will catch it and fine the subscriber (never mind that these trash-recycling-greenery containers are unlocked and on the street where anyone can open and toss something in). In similar fashion, if society adopts robots for household chores, how long until household inspections are held to fine people (as a profit center) who don't keep their homes sufficiently neat?
Dementia.