World History

Does liberty sow the seeds of its own destruction? Yes, by consenting to excessive taxes. Government will not want to give up the power. Taxes were to be only for common defense, not offensive wars.

Adams begins this session with facts about taxation being the basis of the Civil War, not slavery. If the British had not taxed the colonies, the colonies would have remained with Britain and slavery would have been ended when Britain ended it. The thousand year history of the Romans covered everything about taxes.

King Solomon, king of Israel from 970 to 931 BC, lusted after women as he grew older. He had a thousand wives and concubines. Solomon spent tax moneys for luxurious palaces and his harem. His treasury was soon empty, so he found new ways to drain money from his people.

Adams suggests nine reform items to tame the tax monster: 1) tear down the spy system, 2) establish a crime for tax extortion as well as a civil action for damages, 3) establish a civil action for damages for tortious tax administration including: malicious tax investigations, extortions, leaked information and grand jury abuse, 4) have all federal tax districts coincide with congressional districts and provide for the recall of district directors, 5) adjudicate tax disputes like any other debt, 6) decriminalize the tax law, 7) make congressional representatives and federal judges immune from the IRS, 8) make our federal tax system indirect as much as possible, and 9) another reform measure that may take the forefront in tax reform is a national consumption tax, like a sales tax.

Adams begins with a few tidbits: taxation problems caused the end of Egypt and the taxes that the Greeks put on the Jews were an excessive one-third. Sulla of Rome created special tax agents, essentially IRS agents, to collect taxes. Cicero felt that the era of chaos made a military dictatorship inevitable, saying that, “And so in Rome only the walls of her houses remain standing… our Republic we have lost forever.”

In this lecture Adams talks about the Enlightenment which was the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It was the high water mark of man’s thinking on taxes. They were wise; we’re not. These thinkers used the past as a guide.

Ralph Raico covers classical liberalism’s growth, development and possible future. Liberalism arose in Europe entwined with Christianity. Why Europe? The East lacked the idea of freedom from the state and never established the legal system that could protect wealth. Europe had multiple, decentralized competing powers, not a universal empire.

Germany surrendered conditionally in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Everybody opposed the treaty, but it was forcibly implemented. Revisionism is necessary to combat state propaganda, e.g. the lie in WWII that FDR was surprised by Pearl Harbor.

Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat.

Utopian socialism was a term created by Marx and Lenin to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin. Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideology of the industrial class, opposed to the idling class, inspired and influenced utopian socialism.