Taxation: The People's Business by Andrew Mellon

I recently read a reference to Andrew Mellon’s plan for tax reform of 1924, published as a book titled Taxation:  The People’s Business. 

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business.

If you’d like to buy a copy, I found one for sale on Amazon.com for $400.  Wow!

$400 sounds like a collector's price for a museum quality edition...Would you prefer to get it for free?  If so, go to Barnes and Noble and download their Nook ebook reading application for whatever device you own.  Then, use the application to Shop for the book, and you'll find that it is FREE to download.

The ebook is obviously scanned (poorly) from a hardcopy that used fonts the OCR software was not properly correcting for.  Sometimes you need to read a sentence over a few times to determine what one or two words are supposed to be.  Also, the included charts and tables are so poorly formatted, they are useless.

That said, the text is fantastic, and should be required reading by every person involved in tax policy.  As you can see from the quote above, Mellon latched onto the key concept behind the Laffer Curve almost 60 years before Arthur Laffer published that concept.

I will post some interesting quotes from the book over the next few days, but wanted to have this post available for anyone who wanted to get the book to read or reference.