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Fight, Flight, Fraud: The Story of Taxation
Fight Flight Fraud The Story of Taxation Author:Charles Adams, James Graves "There are more angry taxpayers in the world than the Press and most governments realize. Taxpayers are restless. Western man seems to have reached the end of his tolerance for more taxation." — These are the views of an expert in the business, tax lawyer Charles Adams, and he bases his opinion on long professional experience as well as more than... more » ten years of studying taxation through the ages. Rebellious stirrings among taxpayers are nothing new, as he shows many times in his fascinating illustrated history - the first attempt to tell the story of taxation from ancient times to the present.
More than 3,000 years before Christ, the Egyptians had an all-pervading taxation system with massive surveillance, espionage and controls such as audits - just like we have today. The methods may have varied over the centuries, but the pattern has remained much the same, so that there is difference only in degree between today's revenue agent and the scribes who dominated the lives of Egyptians nearly 5,000 years ago.
Taxation, says Mr. Adams, has been the catalyst of history, the powerful influence if not the direct cause of many of the famous events which have marched across the world's stage as empires collided and battled for the right to tax the loser. The fall of the Roman and Spanish empires, the triumph of Cortez over the Aztecs of Mexico, the eclipse of Napoleon, the emergence of the Soviet state in Russia, the American Civil War - in all these taxation was a major factor.« less