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A fascinating history... —Kirkus Reviews ...an acidly witty guide. —Wall Street Journal
- Sales Rank: #1105702 in eBooks
- Published on: 1992-12-27
- Released on: 2012-07-24
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
This sweeping anecdotal survey of taxes through the ages aims to support the author's libertarian attacks on the current U.S. tax system and his call for a flat tax of 10% to replace the current income tax system. Tax attorney Adams ( Fight, Flight, Fraud: The Story of Taxation ) considers taxation a vital force in molding history; his discussions of civilizations ranging from that of ancient Greece to the French ancien regime are sometimes intriguing. For example, he suggests that the offer of tax immunity, rather than religious ideology, may have fueled the spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries. But Adams does not engage other historians to argue his ideas, and he can be inaccurate with facts--forgetting Hugo Black, he writes that by the time of Nixon's presidency, the Supreme Court "had not had a Southerner for a hundred years." Some of his proposed reforms seem worthy--establish a crime for tax extortion, decriminalize the tax law--but others are dubious, such as the suggestion that members of Congress and federal judges be "immune" from the IRS. Moreover, his argument that low taxes were crucial to the "miracle economies" of Asia is simplistic; still more glaring is his failure to assess the impact of the Reagan administration's tax policies.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Adams, a tax attorney, presents the history of taxation from ancient times to the present. He studies tax law and collection procedures in ancient Egypt, Rome, Israel, Asia, Europe, and the United States, describing how taxation played a pivotal role in such earth-shattering events as the fall of Rome, the signing of the Magna Carta, and the American Revolution. The author analyzes lessons learned through study of the past and recommends measures for possible tax reform. The selected bibliography provides an excellent guide to further research. This important, timely study is highly recommended for business and history collections.
- Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A fascinating though monochromatic libertarian history of tax policy from Babylon to Bibi Anderson, by a home-grown Will Durant of the accounting profession. Adams (a Buffalo tax attorney) explains the rise and fall of civilizations by the kinds of taxes levied and the means used to collect them. In ancient Egypt, for example, although the Pharoah's scribes taxed harvests, imports, exports, domestic sales, and slaves--everything except income, the tax on which is a modern innovation--only with tax immunity for priests and a consequent perception of tax inequity did rebellion and imperial collapse ensue. The Rosetta stone, like much of early history, is seen by Adams as a tax record. Rome fell because the egalitarian tax reforms of Emperor Julian were vitiated and finally overturned by his greedy, arbitrary successors. The Moslem hordes of the Middle Ages are seen as mild-mannered revenue agents, which explains why Islam spread so widely before the world's first excise tax unhinged its empire. Later, Enlightenment thinkers equated liberty with tax consent and defined tax freedom as a ``natural right'': The American Revolution codified that strain of thought, and Adams holds to it here as well. In his final chapters, he argues that post-WW II American tax policy replicates the errors of the Romans and the scribes--including widespread antidemocratic tax ``spying'' and taxation basically without consent--and he predicts disaster if reform isn't forthcoming. Adams will annoy liberals by not judging a tax on the merits of its use: He defines a good tax as one that's accepted by its subjects and that promotes industry and privacy. Out of step with current White House thinking, then, but making points well worth considering. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Everyone who pay taxes should read this book.
By Odysseus at home
This is one of those books that are so important that every student in the world should read it. Instead, "Capital" by K. Marx, among others, is the number one, two and three. Why? I don't know. People love the idea that the State is the solution to the problem of living. Perhaps, to a certain point, but not THE solution. The State is very expensive and inefficient. People often say, yes, but there's no alternative. In my country, this is the problem that fills the newspapers, the TV news, the radio news, the internet forums. And there's an incredible consensus: we need more taxes.
Here enters Charles Adams.
Our government in Chile decided to modify the tax structure of the country making it more heavy to us, the taxpayers. But not only that, it did it more complex, more hard to grasp and convoluted. This reformation in Chile is so big and twisted --and absurd--, that is more like a nonsense, a bad joke. And every single step of the discussion and the debate, every sympton of this social evil (when it is out of control), appears in "For Good and Evil." As long as we read the book we realize (we Chileans) that we haven't left any single sin untouched. With this reformarion, we, as a society, are guilty of every tax crime we have perpetrated.
I mean, against ourselves.
Charles Adams has written not only a highly informative book, full of insight and discussion, but also a beautiful one. He's a good writer, a very good one indeed. That's why the four hundred and eigty pages are not noticed. Sumer, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Middle Ages, the Russians, up to the present, go before us telling the story of the world from the tax perspective. And believe it or not, it works.
Which means: What the author tells us is happening today as it did yesterday and it will continue as long as we live on Earth.
Troughout the ages, taxes have had several branches: the collection, the collector or taxman, the tax payer, and the control system. Our Internal Revenue Service today, which is an extension ot the oldest control systems dating back to the time of the pharaohs, is more a police system than a service. It knows everything about us. It is today as it was in Ancient Egypt or Russia. What they do to us it's happening just in front of our very eyes, and we don't notice it. We breath it without knowing that is not fresh air at all, without taking into account that it isn't based on a very solid floor: that of the morality. Yes, virtue is one thing. Discution and fixation of taxes quite another.
To make this book works as an explanation of the rise and fall of almost every empire or democracy, or their crisis and periodic hard times, Adams found in taxes the bridge that links the power of the State with the individual. Taxes are the synapses between power and individual: too much or too little of a given neurotransmitter, we feel the effects. That is the reason why taxes should be under control, that's why we need to separate the power of spent from the power of tax, that's why not to control the intrusion (as it should be) of the State in our affairs is so serious.
We made it work this way, now we have to fix it.
I don't know what will happen in the U.S., but in my country the tax system is getting bigger and bigger, from the collection of taxes up to the very control of our lives. Nobody sees, I mean, the common guy like me, that this curious monster is not going to change. Take this into account: our IRS in Chile is the most modern and advanced public "service" we have had ever. Nothing compares. It crosses and observes everything.
Adams has given us this book as a concession to the good criteria and to the moderation that Montaigne told us about in his Essays, and that have to govern our acts. He tells the history and the story, but not only that. He gives us the solutions and the alternatives we have at hand. So this book is not only about the problem, is about the way to solve it. And the way to do it passes just through our dignity as citizens. It's not a choice we have, is a mandate: we have to do something --as history teaches that people did when their rights were overruled-- when taxes give way to robbery.
My underlines are hundreds. Here is my favorite and with it I put an end to my review: "Freedom from oppresive taxation caused the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and revolts and rebellions throughout history too numerous to mention. The War of the Rebellion, as it was officially called, has at its core what has been at the core of most rebellions from our earliest historical records, taxes."
76 of 78 people found the following review helpful.
Many of the other reviews miss the point
By JF
Many of the reviews posted are so obviously biased for and against taxes or big governement as to make their review worthless.
The book has 38 chapters, nearly every one discusses taxation in a different society starting in ancient Egypt and disucsses taxation by the Greeks, Roman, Russians, French, English, and finally Americans among others. The point is not that taxation is bad, but that corrupt systems of taxation are bad and that taxation above a certain level is bound to fail since people will find ways to avoid it. This is not made up history, there are 23 pages of endnotes and a twelve page bibliography.
There are a number of illustrations, as well as, well written stories from the Rosetta Stone (it was actually a grant of tax immunity); to how Muslims taxed infidels more in order to get them to convert; to Lady Godiva (she made her ride get the King, her husband, to remit the heavy taxes he imposed on the Coventry);, to taxation as one cause of the Civil War that few are aware of (there are 16 endnotes on this chapter alone, many from articles written during the Civil War).
This is a facinating book that should be required reading for every member of Congress.
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
For Tax Warriors: a historical frame of reference
By Jim Hudspeth
This book is a "must read" for anyone who is serious about understanding the history of economics and taxation, regardless of point of view. If you are a libertarian you will enjoy it - and learn a lot. If you are a tax and spend liberal, you will probably just learn a lot.
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