The Income Tax: A Study Of The History, Theory And Practice Of Income Taxation At Home And Abroad, by Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, Professor of public finance at Columbia University, is a 700+-page tract designed to campaign for adoption of the income-tax as a fair form of taxation. He wrote it in the 19-ots, before ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, and it was a very influential, arguably the most influential spur to ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment of all. Happily, it's still available and in print. Would that the federal government and its courts recognized Seligman's tract as the foundation-stone of the income-tax that it should be, but none of them do.rnThe fair social contract that Seligman proposed was that the income-tax would affect only the rich and exempt the middle class. The tax-free allowance would be about $4,000, the usual annual middle-class income of his day. Even Founding Father Alexander Hamilton recognized and endorsed the idea that fair taxation should affect those most able to pay more than those less able to pay. Since then, consistent with the tyrannical nature of central government, the tax-free allowance, in real terms, has shrunk nearly to nothing and it affects not only the middle class but also the working poor. To the progressive income-tax has been added the regressive social-security tax and the regressive medicare-tax, which plunder loot from the pockets of the middle and lower classes disproportionately.rnSeligman's original social contract, under which The People accepted and ratified the Sixteenth Amendment, on the assumption that the income-tax would be fair, is now void for tyranny and the income-tax, in concert with its unconstitutional concomitants, is egregiously unfair. The withholding tax, for example, has nothing to do with the income-tax or the Sixteenth Amendment, though accountants will tell you it has. It has its own section in the internal revenue code and is wholly separate, legally, from the income-tax, but it lies concealed, under false color of being part and parcel of the income-tax, ratified under the Sixteenth Amendment. It is nothing of the kind. None of the several states ever ratified the withholding tax. It is, therefore, unconstitutional, but it is the chief engine that imposes taxation upon the middle and working classes. The same goes for the social-security tax and the medicare-tax. None of the states ever ratified any of those taxes and they stand in clear violation of the constitutional proscription of direct taxation not imposed according to the rule of apportionment. Then the mealy-mouthed SOBs of the central government sanctimoniously claim that this is a nation of laws, under the rule of law. Rubbish. Fair, Schmair.