Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax

Argues that the income tax should be abolished because it is an invasion of privacy that gives the government more money and power than the authors of the Constitution intended, and cannot be effectively reformed.

"Your Money or Your Life sounds like a threat from a highwayman, but it is not; it is the perennial threat offered, through its Internal Revenue Service agents, by the United States Congress. Sheldon Richman does a yeoman's job in showing that. He shepherds the reader through the twisted history of lies and deceit that preceded and followed the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment and hence the implementation of direct taxation that the Framers of the Constitution feared so much. Most tax critics focus their criticism of our tax code on its wastefulness, complexity, and social engineering, and on the size of the government take. While their criticism has unquestionable merit, Richman rightly and adroitly focuses on the more important moral issues the income tax raises and how it stands the Constitution's Framers' vision of a just society on its head." - Walter E. Williams, John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, George Mason University, syndicated columnist, and popular substitute host for Rush Limbaugh

"In the centuries to come, when scholars want to know how America evolved from a free society to a totalitarian state, Sheldon Richman's book will provide them with the answer. Throughout history, free societies that degenerated into despotisms did so through the taxman. An old sad story. This book is a must read for every person who loves liberty." -Charles Adams, author of For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on Civilization and Those Dirty Rotten Taxes