Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

by John Brooks

“Perhaps we can move the rates down and get rid of some deductions,” he says, “but then we may find we need new deductions, in the interests of fairness. I suspect that a complex society requires a complex tax law. If we put in a simpler code, it would probably be complex again in a few years.”

“EVERY nation has the government it deserves,” the French writer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre declared in 1811.

The fact that about half of all the revenue derived from individual returns for 1960 came from adjusted gross incomes of $9,000 or less is not attributable entirely to provisions of the Code; in part, it results from the fact that low-income taxpayers cannot afford to be shown how to pay less.

One of the tenets of democracy that grow out of this central core of a belief that the individual comes first, that all men are the children of God and their personalities are therefore sacred,” Lilienthal said, among other things, “is a deep belief in civil liberties and their protection; and a repugnance to anyone who would steal from a human being that which is most precious to him, his good name, by imputing things to him, by innuendo, or by insinuation.”)

Those people are living on nostalgia; they look backward, and I try to look forward.