If one thing unites all Americans, it’s the conviction that paying taxes is a pain. Even those like myself who don’t mind contributing their fair share to keep seniors off the street hate having to fill out all of the paperwork, especially if our taxes are complicated. The Tax Foundation estimates that filling out tax forms eats up 6.5 billion hours of work a year, for an economic cost of something like $313 billion. There’s a better way—but for depressing reasons, the United States probably won’t take it.

I recently traveled to the Faroe Islands, a small, semi-autonomous part of Denmark out in the North Atlantic, for a joint reporting project for The American Prospect and the People’s Policy Project. The idea was to investigate the country’s tax authority, which is called TAKS. I’d heard it is the cleanest and most efficient in the world.

Even with those expectations, what I found impressed me. The Faroes haven’t just set up a centralized system that automatically collects tax revenue and disburses welfare payments; they also continuously monitor all […]