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THOSE DIRTY ROTTEN TAXES: The Tax Revolts that Built America

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Those Dirty Rotten Taxes is, as the title implies, polemical in nature. Adams has strong views and does not shy from expressing them. Adams claims that excessive taxation was central to American history. There is much truth to this claim. The American War of Independence was driven largely by taxation, but not merely the absolute level. Taxes had been higher in colonial America, the colonists objected to arbitrary taxation without representation, not just the absolute level of taxation. That being said, Adams is still on to something important. Unjust taxation does serve to motivate political action. Tax revolts became less common and more tame with the passage of time precisely because many Americans have come to accept and even embrace our current tax system. That is, many Americans need to be shaken out of their complacency and delusions. The hard hitting prose of Those Dirty Rotten Taxes should be effective in its capacity to motivate the complacent. Delusional leftists are harder to deal with, as they tend to be dogmatic, if not intellectually dishonest. Be that as it may, Those Dirty Rotten Taxes is great as a polemical history of American taxation.

Author Charles Adams is a former lecturer at UCLA and a tax consultant with the CATO Institute, a Washington D.C. Think Tank. He has written many publications on the subject of taxes, with most all of them attacking the present system of income tax and discussing ways to improve the system of internal revenue collection.

This book is mostly a lesson in history and it explains in detail how certain taxes came into being and how the American people reacted. Much of the coverage here is old news, like the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the protests that led to the American Revolution. But then there are other taxes that are not so well- known, like the tariffs that led to the Civil War in the 1800's. Most people think the Civil War was fought over slavery, but this was only one reason among many. Adams shows how Lincoln deliberately used taxes to antagonize the South, leading ultimately to war, which was exactly what he wanted.

The income tax is the one that most Americans know best, because it's the tax that everyone pays at present. Woodrow Wilson was president when the income tax became law. Officials who passed the tax swore that it would never be greater than a few percentage points and it would never be levied against anyone except the very wealthy. Of course, as everyone knows, this was a blatant lie to sell the plan to the states and to the general public. Once the ability to tax was in place, it was only a matter of a few years before it expanded and grew to several times the original level. Adams talks at length about the deceptions used by politicians to get this and other taxes enacted.

Adams spends most of the book talking about the income tax and possible alternatives to the tax. One part of the book is titled "The tyranny of the income tax, 1913 to 199?". This book was published in 1998. Adams was being very optimistic if he thought the income tax would be a thing of the past only 1 year after he published his book. The use of the question mark shows his optimism that the income tax will be replaced with a different system of taxation at some point in the near future.

This book is a fairly quick read. The print is larger than normal and many of the pages include illustrations, with political cartoons and photos from the past, mocking the government's position on taxation. The cartoons are mostly humorous in nature, and they depict different political figures and other people talking cynically about different taxes and their affects on the people.

Overall, this is a good book about the issue of taxation and rebellion. It's obviously biased against taxes, but author Charles Adams maintains a level of respect throughout, stating some of the facts about taxes and offering up alternatives to the present system. He doesn't resort to name- calling, like some other authors. You can tell that Adams is no friend of taxation, but he basically lets you, the reader, decide for yourself about this difficult issue and how it has affected Americans from the early days of the republic.

This book is for general reading and should not be confused with a scholarly history of taxation. It is a series of chapters that are brief retellings of various historical incidents involving citizens resisting taxation in various ways or citizens being made to suffer through taxation programs. These tellings do have a point of view and historians may find some of them rather blunt and ignoring certain subtleties that might mitigate some of the author's point of view. However, in total the book does make its point that it is up to the citizens to hold the government responsible for its spending and the taxation it levies to pay for that spending.

While I abhor taxation beyond what is absolutely necessary, I think all the arguments about taxes actually function to distract us from the real thing we should be debating and that is government spending. The problem is that the modern state has so many of us on the receiving end of this or that program that we will resist any program that decreases the increase in our program's spending (let alone any actual cuts). So, when someone proposes ANY cut in spending, those being cut raise a loud resistance effort to defeat it. This is why we try and starve the government by cutting taxes - the hope being that the starved beast will not be able to increase the handouts without limit.

Anyway, this can be an entertaining read. There is a list for further reading and an index. Just don't take everything in here as gospel.

This book lay on my shelf some time before I finally got to it. Probably the word "taxes" sounds of bordom and generally negative overtones, but as I finish this book tonight I have found that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I highly recommend it to the history buff and tax-hater in all of us, excepting democrats [socialist], of course. The chapters dealing with the War for Southern Independence are especially interesting: Lincoln and the so-called moral North get a good ol woodshed whooping. One they deserve--for we all know that money and not morals has always been their priority. A great great book.

The author presents Adam Smith and Thomas Paine as perhaps the book's two greatest heroes and cites them extensively. Yet, in apparent zeal for the rights of the wealthy, the author throughout the book disdains progressive taxation, tax exemptions for the poor, and estate and inheritance taxes, arguing that "All wealth, labor included, should pay its share of the cost of maintaining the common government. Even in ancient Rome, widows and orphans paid their small mite, and their contributions were set aside to provide uniforms for the cavalry." The author conveniently ignores what Smith and Paine had to say on these subjects.

Smith thought that taxing the wages of labor and/or consumption taxes on the "necessaries of life" (construed broadly to include what was necessary not just for bare subsistence but for "decency") was inequitable, inefficient, and "absurd." He also wrote in Book V of the Wealth of Nations:

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

Thomas Paine in later life extended his critique in Common Sense of inherited political power to a critique of inherited economic power. In his pamphlet Agrarian Justice, Paine argued for the adoption of an inheritance tax to balance out the unfair distribution of "landed property." For Paine, it was common sense that God gave "the Earth as an inheritance" to all of God's children. Paine proposed that the inheritance tax be used to create a national fund that would give a specified sum to everyone turning 21 years old as compensation for the loss of their natural birthright to joint proprietorship in the Earth.

I was very disappointed with this book after hearing positive reveiws from many others. It is hard to take a book seriously that makes controversial historical claims, and then fails to footnote the sources. I found the writing to be dull and many historical facts to be in error. If you are looking for a good book on the history of taxation, do not look here.