David Cay Johnston has reviewed The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy (2025), by Ray Madoff (Boston College) in the Washington Monthly. Here are the first few paragraphs of the review (“How America’s Tax Code Built an Aristocracy“):

Taxes make civilization possible. When the ancient Greeks introduced democracy roughly 2,500 years ago, they implemented a progressive taxation prototype so that those who benefited most bore the heaviest burden of maintaining the civilized society that enabled and protected their wealth. Athenians also honored the rich for paying their taxes. The U.S. Constitution itself was born of a tax crisis—a story hardly anyone knows. In 1787 we scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which had reduced the United States to begging for alms from 13 parsimonious states, and created a new republic that could tax its citizens. As I have long told my law students, a government is its taxes.

Every American schoolchild is taught, in the official version of the reasons we declared independence from the mad tyrant in London, that taxes can oppress and even destroy. But they can also enrich the politically connected and their enterprises. In a democracy, the design of tax systems is central, and America today suffers a monstrosity that burdens most workers more than billionaires.

Enter Ray D. Madoff’s Second Estate, a book about the role of federal taxes in worsening inequality. Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, argues that income and wealth have become dangerously disconnected, that the rich can live tax-free by borrowing against assets, and that charitable vehicles like private foundations and so-called donor-advised funds worsen inequality rather than serve the public. Her title evokes the French nobility whom the crown exempted from taxes, a favor that helped sustain their lavish lifestyles while impoverishing everyone else.