Meaning:
Unfair overcharging which is so blatant the perpetrators make no attempt to
conceal it.
Background:
This isn't used to describe actual robberies - whatever time of day they
might take place. It is a figurative phrase that associates an instance of
unfair trading with actual robbery. Not just any old robbery, but one so
unashamed and obvious that it is committed in broad daylight.
Daylight robbery really was the robbery of daylight.
It would be nice to locate the origin of this phrase, so let's go back to the
1690s. Like many English monarchs, William III was short of money, which he
attempted to rectify by the introduction of the much-despised Window Tax. As
the name suggests, this was a tax levied on the windows or window-like
openings of a property. The details were much amended over time, but the tax
was levied originally on all dwellings except cottages. The upper classes,
having the largest houses, paid the most. Some wealthy individuals used their
ability to pay as a mark of status and demonstrated their wealth by
ostentatiously building homes with many windows.
What the Cavendish family, who owned Hardwick Hall (built 1590s), thought
about it isn't recorded. On the one hand, they had cause for complaint - the
property was famous for its many windows and light and airy interiors, as
celebrated in the rhyme: "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall". On the other
hand, they were extremely rich and well able to pay.
Taxes are rarely popular, but the Window Tax, which was considered to tax the
very stuff of life, that is, light and air, was singled out for particular
loathing. People went to great pains to avoid paying it and many windows were
bricked up for that reason. Many examples of buildings with brick window
panels, sometimes with painted-on trompe l'oeil windows, still survive.
The sight of such windows is so much part of the English architectural folk
memory that the example pictured, of a recently built property in Poundbury,
Dorset, appears to have been built with fake bricked-up windows, even through
the tax itself is long since abolished.
...
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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I was shocked to learn that a young friend was hit by a $700+ registration fee
for his Tesla as I only paid $177 to renew my 2010 Honda Fit last year.
Obviously, some got it even worse. It was like the property tax, he told me, as
the rate was decided by the value of the car and there was a special EV fee to
make up for the state's loss of gasoline tax. In other words, it felt like the
starry-eyed California EV drivers doing their bit to save the environment from
fossil fuels got shortchanged by our trail-blazing climate-fighting state.
I'd better warn him of daylight robbery. Monarchy or democracy, rulers win
the mass by billing the rich and ripping off the would-be rich. The way things
are going in the golden state, they might bring back the Window Tax some day.
