Taxation is the fundamental mechanism that nearly all governments around the world use to raise money — ubiquitous, hated, seemingly unchangeable. As the saying goes, nothing in life is certain but death and taxes.

And yet, the North Korean government has claimed for decades that it is perhaps the world’s only tax-free nation, boasting that it abolished personal taxation in the mid-1970s. One sometimes comes across regime sympathizers online who trumpet this claim as evidence of the greatness of Juche socialism.

The reality is far more complicated. While the DPRK may have been tax-free