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Charles Adams is a rare tax historian who leads us back to Greeks and Romans and the history of liberty. The Battle of Marathon was critical for Greek civilization to seize control of Western Civilization. The Greeks had no direct taxation, just indirect. This is what fostered liberty.   Romans destroyed liberty just in order to make their tax

Charles Adams, the tax writer, tells young people to get a liberal education and go with the flow. He took tax law and he taught history. He saw that there was a tax story behind every event. Taxes, not slavery, caused the Civil War. Taxes began in Sumer. “Taxes are the fuel that make civilizations run,” but how we tax and spend determines to a

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. They had a citizens’ war-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

Adams speaks of how sad he is for law to have turned from a profession into a simple craft with advertising and politics. He also opposes the medical system. It killed several family members. Lady Godiva’s naked ride on her horse was a protest over taxes.   Ship money for war ships was collected in Britain even though there was then no war. Spain

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. Among ten principles of the Enlightenment is Paine’s observation that government is at best a necessary evil. America was

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. The Writ of Assistance is important in American history because the threat of its use caused the founding fathers to place the Fourth Amendment in the

A tariff set the stage for the American Civil War. The quarrel between the North and the South was a fiscal quarrel, not a war over slavery. The tariff of 1828 was called the tariff of abomination. Nullification was a strong argument to void unconstitutional federal laws. The South paid the vast majority of the taxes. Fort Sumter was essentially a

The Laffer Curve from the 1920s reflects the truism that a 77 percent tax rate produces the same amount of revenue as a 7 percent tax rate. Once the tax rate exceeds twenty-five percent, less will be collected. The first progressive rates took place before the income tax. The British invented the income tax, promising to give it up when the war

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