For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization.

• Author: Moore, Stephen

At a recent hearing before the Joint economic Committee, Laura D' Andrea Tyson, head of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, told a stunned panel of congressmen that the United States is "an undertaxed nation." When challenged to prove the point, Tyson noted that taxes represent a smaller share of output in the United States than in most other industrialized nations. If only the United States collected as much in taxes as Europe does, she maintained, the federal government "could raise an additional $400 to $500 billion in government revenue and miraculously cure our deficit." This is a sample of the fresh new thinking that Bill Clinton has brought to the White House.

But wait a minute. Wouldn't a $500-billion annual tax increase--the equivalent of a $4,500 additional levy per household--injure the economy and hinder American competitiveness? Not at all, according to Tyson. There is "no relationship" between a nation's tax burden and its rate of economic growth. And in any case, even with Clinton's world-record $300-billion tax increase, the United States will still be a less taxing nation than Sweden, Denmark, and France. Whew!

Given this thinking among the "putting people first" crowd in Bill Clinton's Washington, it's highly doubtful that Charles Adams's new book, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization, is selling many copies inside the Beltway. Adams's politically incorrect thesis is not only that taxes matter in terms of how nations prosper but that they matter a whole hell of a lot. "Taxes are the fuel that makes civilization run," writes Adams. "How we tax and spend determines to a large extent whether we are prosperous or poor, free or enslaved, and most importantly, good or evil."

For Good and Evil is a semi-scholarly history of taxation from the ancient Mayan civilization (which expired "when the citizens simply disappeared into the jungle instead of paying taxes") through the supply-side tax cuts of the Reagan administration. Make no mistake about it: This is no Tom Clancy spine-tingling page turner. Getting through this 530-page tract is a lot of hard work, but it's worth the effort.

Adams demonstrates in painstaking fashion how the rise and decline of the great ancient and contemporary empires--those of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, Russia's Peter the Great, and France's Napoleon--were tied directly to the level and types of taxation imposed. The book's first 300 pages can be...