Gerald Scorse

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Taxes, for instance, have been changing and staying the same ever since Ronald Reagan and the 1980s: They’ve been heaven for corporations and the rich, purgatory or worse for everybody else. Now comes a groundbreaking book that looks back not just decades but centuries. It’s Vanessa A. Williamson’s “The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History.” The surprises never stop coming.

Billionaires, beware: Thousands of your countrymen are focusing hard on reining in your riches. All of them, including large numbers of millionaires, want you to pay higher taxes. They want a 21st century America with less income inequality and more tax fairness. Something like the America of decades ago, before the laws started leaning toward high-income taxpayers.