Author : Edmund Wilson
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374600023
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (746 download)
Book Synopsis Cold War and The Income Tax by : Edmund Wilson
Download or read book Cold War and The Income Tax written by Edmund Wilson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?