“Referring to the fantastic depletion allowance, conservative Senator Frank Lausche of Ohio, no extremist or reformer of any kind, said: “It is a fraud, it is a swindle, and it ought to be stopped”. One is, therefore, in fairly sedate baby-kissing company of one says (perhaps overcautiously) that the tax structure is a pullulating excrescence negating common sense, a parody of the gruesomely ludicrous, a surrealist zigzag pagoda of pestilent greed, a perverse thing that makes the prerevolutionary French system seem entirely rational. One takes it that Congressman Mills had something like this in mind with his “House of Horrors”. Representative Mills in further explication of his “House of Horrors” characterization said the tax laws are “a mess and a gyp”, with some taxpayers treated as coddled “pets” and other as “patsies”. But the tax laws would have been no surprise or cause for consternation to someone like Karl Marx with his doctrine is that government is inherently the executive committee of a ruling class. Indeed, they document that dictum – if not to the hilt . then a good distance up the blade. One can apply to the present American system the exact words of French Finance Minister Calonne in 1787 on the soon-to-be-destroyed French system: “One cannot take a step in this vast kingdom without coming upon different laws, contradictory customs, privileges, exemptions immunities from taxation, and every variety of rights and claims; and this general lack of harmony complicates administration, disturbs its course, impedes its machinery, and increases expense and disorganization on all sides” (Mathiez). To refer to this system, then, as another but bigger Banana Republic is not merely a bit of misplaced literary hyperbole. The American tax system is the consequence of diligent labors by diversified parties of mayor property interest working down through the years to gain their ends” [Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich. A Study in the Power of Money Today, 1969]