Washington, D.C. -- "April is the cruelest month," begins T.S. Eliot's most famous poem, and it is ironic that, as an expatriot, he never had to suffer the agony of the Internal Revenue Service and April 15 in America. The Waste Land indeed.

Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut's quip about modern art--that it is a conspiracy between artists and their patrons to make ordinary people feel stupid--fits the income tax better than Eliot. Today's income tax forms are an especially vivid work of abstract expressionism, designed deliberately to make you feel stupid (especially the new Schedule D), and therefore a little guilty, so that you subconsciously suppose that you must owe more taxes. Even Albert Einstein once remarked that " The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax."

Resentment of taxes is as old as the first levy, which was probably an excise tax on apples in the Garden of Eden. The second chapter of the Gospel of Luke tells us, " It came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed." (Maybe this is what inspired our lawmakers to write a tax code longer than the Bible.) The shape of things to come in the modern world was prefigured in the 18th century, when Lady Cataret remarked to Jonathan Swift about the quality of the air in Ireland. " For God's sake Madam," Swift replied, " do not say that in England, for if you do, they will surely tax it." Lo and behold, two centuries later we have tradable emissions permits--a thinly disguised tax on dirty air.

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that taxes are the price of living in a civilized society. It is not unreasonable to argue that taxes are necessary to provide for aspects of our common life as citizens of a great republic. This derives simply from the doctrine of the social contract, on which all modern liberal regimes are based. But the income tax in its present form goes far beyond the mere provision of a modest revenue for government to provide necessary services.

By establishing a direct and permanent claim to the income of citizens, the income tax became the cornerstone and the engine for the growth of government in the 20th century. We need, the Progressives told us, a much bigger and more energetic government to manage the complexities of modern commerce. Only an income tax could provide the government with the resources to fund the administrative state.

It is ironic to reflect on the Congressional debates over the income tax (which required a constitutional amendment to enact) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Alarmists worried that the income tax might reach the stratospheric level of . . . 10 percent!!! . . . on the very highest incomes. Unaware of the slippery slope concept, income-tax proponents summarily dismissed those sounding the alarm.

This is why " tax reform" never works, and why Steve Forbes is right in saying that the only sensible thing to do with the tax code is drive a stake through its heart, bury it, and hope it never rises again.

--Steven Hayward