 |   Author : Edmund Wilson Number of Pages : 118 Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux List Price: Our Price: $7.95 You Save: $4.05 (34%) Used Price : $3.30 |
Product Description
The truth is that the people of the United States are at the present time dominated and driven by two kinds of officially propagated fear: fear of the Soviet Union and fear of the income tax. These two terrors have been adjusted so as to complement one another and thus to keep the citizen of our free society under the strain of a double pressure from which he finds himself unable to escape -- like the man in the old Western story, who, chased into a narrow ravine by a buffalo, is confronted with a grizzly bear. If we fail to accept the tax, the Russian buffalo will butt and trample us, and if we try to defy the tax, the federal bear will crush us.The 60,000 officials who are appointed to check on us taxpayers are checked on, themselves, it seems, by another group of agents set to watch them. And supplementing these officials -- since private citizens are paid by the Internal Revenue Service to report on other people's delinquencies, and their names of course are never revealed -- there is a whole host of amateur investigators. . . Does this kind of spying and delation differ much in its incitement to treachery from that which is encouraged in the Soviet Union?
Customer reviews
Wilson was not a political crackpot after all by .. Patrick Taffe (El Cerrito, CA United States)
I read this book in 1974 for one of my last college undergraduate examinations: I was stunned. Wilson's story is that, after living in Europe for almost ten years, he returned to the United States in the late 50's, filed his taxes, and wound up in a heap of unanticipated trouble. His iconoclastic analysis of the relationship between the Cold War, the 1948 changes to U.S. income tax laws, and the consequent creeping abridgment of American civil liberties shattered my callow idealism. In spite of the publicity attending the political turmoil of the 60's and early 70's, before I read Wilson's book, I didn't realize the individual freedoms that had already been lost in America to the military-industrial complex even before the civil rights movement and subsequent counterculture revolt began to receive significant media attention. There has been so much more violence done to individual constitutional rights since 9/11 that Edmund Wilson's cri de coeur (and wallet!) might sound quaint, or even naive, today; but as a reference point for the post-WWII impact of the expansion of the powers of the federal government (on behalf of corporate America) over its ever more hapless citizenry, I have to believe that this book is, at the least, an invaluable historical resource from a terrific writer. I'm flabbergasted that it is currently out of print.