Today, Dr. Vanessa S. Williamson dismantles some myths about taxes—and reveals how they’ve been weaponized throughout U.S. history.
In The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History, Dr. Williamson takes us from the Boston Tea Party (which wasn’t about high taxes) through Reconstruction (where tax rhetoric masked racial terror) to today’s anti-government movements. Her argument? That the familiar story—Americans hate taxes, taxation equals tyranny—is not only wrong, but dangerous. And the real history reveals something far more interesting: democracies are good at raising taxes because citizens consent to them, while authoritarians struggle precisely because they can’t govern by consent. And when politicians declare all taxation illegitimate, they’re not defending liberty—they’re laying the groundwork for authoritarianism.
Dr. Williamson is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, and more.
