American Tax Resisters by Romain D. Huret

Abstract

American Tax Resisters, by Romain D. Huret. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. 384 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). When conservatives frame tax debates in the United States, as they have since the 1980s, the key issue often seems to be quantitative: a matter of rate cuts. When liberals frame tax debates, as they did through much of the twentieth century, the issue is fairness: how burdens are distributed to the rich, middle class, and poor. What Romain Huret demonstrates in his new history of American tax resistance is that the conservatives have actually agreed with the liberals about the disputed terrain. They too have cared mainly about fairness, though they define fair very differently. Liberals defend progressive taxes using a logic of equal sacrifice, in which richer people should pay taxes at higher rates because of the declining marginal utility of income. The point here is that low rates can impose the same on the poor that high rates impose on the rich because the poor need much more of their income for necessities (food and housing). Conservatives, meanwhile, reject the logic of sacrifice and the wider social solidarity it implies. For them, fairness forbids governments from altering the distributions of income and wealth produced by the market (and such legal corollaries as inheritance). From his broad and deep primary research in the archives of tax resisters, anti-tax groups, and the public authorities they bombarded with petitions, letters, and testimony, Huret concludes that the anti-tax activists have not hated taxes in general, but progressive taxes in particular. Hence, and despite their occasional claims to the contrary, American tax resistance movements have had very little to do with the Stamp Act, Boston Tea Party, or Shays' Rebellion of the eighteenth century--and everything to do with the income and estate taxes of the twentieth century (and briefly also the Civil War income tax, which ended in 1873). Most of all, the anti-tax activists have objected to the welfare state: the income redistribution that results when taxes on the rich finance social policies for the poor. The history of American tax resistance, therefore, should be understood as an origin story for modern conservatism rather than as a tradition woven into the national DNA. Huret builds these arguments by introducing readers to a large cast of individual tax resisters, many of them women and all of them identifiable as conservative on a range of issues. Harriet Frothingham, for example, opposed women's suffrage and liberal social policy. With many other conservatives, she loathed the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, which offered federal aid for clinics serving pregnant women, mothers, and children. …