Book Reviews

Payne in his Costly Returns: The Bur den of the U.S. Tax System (265 pages, $14.95)that the IRS is not really out to get anybody, there is no way to dodge worry about the tax collector. The Institute for Contemporary Studies, Payne's publisher, may say that the Constitution has its guar antees against the seizure of bank accounts, salaries, houses, and cars without due pro cess of law, but the guarantees are mean ingless if you can't survive an audit. Good intentions won't save you from sudden changes in the tax code. Nor will they counter stupidity. The IRS happens to be recruited from the lowest third of our law school graduates, which would seem to guarantee stupidity. The recruits are certainly not error proof. Congressman Christopher Shays, a Repub lican from Connecticut, upon listening to details about the error rate at a GAO hear ing, said, "I am not used to hearings where I learn that 47 percent of all written response to taxpayers is incorrect, or that I learn that 36 percent of the non-computer kinds of responses, the personal contacts over the phone are incorrect. It just raises some questions in my mind that I haven't been able to sort out yet . . . if we can make such a colossal number of mistakes, how does that translate in the other things we haven't looked at? Here we are saying it is close to 50 percent . . . half of what we do are errors."

Payne estimates that Americans spend more than five billion hours annually on tax compliance. It is theoretically voluntary, but if you take anybody's word for that you are crazy. If you choose freely not to pay taxes, jail awaits. Voluntary compliance automatically means less money for invest ment. The disincentive effect of a tax de stroys jobs. Payne has a suggested cure: Let the government pay an audited person for the time he spends being investigated. When, in a rough analogy, the government seizes land to build highways, it forces policy makers to recognize the true cost of highways and therefore discourages them from buildingas many as they otherwise would. This sug gests that there wouldn't be so many audits if the tax collector's money were used to finance them. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said he didn't mind paying taxes, for "they bought him civilization." Payne turns Holmes around. "Taxation," says Payne, "may have been a minor nuisance in Oliver Wen dell Holmes' day, in 1904, long before the adoption of the graduated income tax. Now, grapplingwith a full-blownwelfare state tax system we are left pondering the converse of Holmes'dictum."

Actually, Holmes was dead wrong. Taxes are the price we pay for being uncivilized. There is a violation of conscience involved in most tax payments. Taxes are no longer seen as funds needed for comprehensive rational purposes but as part of a system of rip-offs needed to pay for special interests. "What is a tax?" Herbert Stein asked in The Wall Street Journal. "A tax is a finan326 cial burden levied by some citizens or res idents of the country to provide benefits to others." We have a "culture of taxes" that mili tates against tax repeals. At a Congressional Tax Administration hearing of a House Ways and Means Subcommittee, 17 officials for the IRS showed up to have their say, but there was only one representative from the American Bar Association. D Visions Upon the Land: Man and Nature on the Western Range by Karl Hess, Jr. Washington: Island Press, 1992 • 278 pages $22.00 Reviewed by Jonathan H. Adler D ayton Hyde wanted nothing more than to improve the quality of his land. A ranch owner in southwestern Oregon, Hyde believed that through careful stewardship he could promote wildlife conservation on his lands, as well as the adjacent lands owned by the federal government, while still ben efiting from the grazing of cattle. Toward this end, he created Operation Stronghold, an association of private landowners dedi cated to encouraging wildlife conservation.

Part of Hyde's plan was to use his grazing permits on nearby public lands for deer and elk, rather than for his cattle. Unfortu nately, the federal government had a differ ent idea. While Hyde was entitled to pur chase grazing fees on public lands for cows, the Forest Service would not allow those permits to be used for other species. Hyde could graze cattle, or forfeit the right to those permits. That the land would be main tained and the Forest Service would receive the same revenue in either instance was immaterial. Hyde's idea was simply not part of the Forest Service's vision for its land. Dayton Hyde's dilemma is a microcosm of the major problem facing public lands today: a massive, technocratic public lands bureaucracy that has little interest in en327 couraging either private stewardship or eco nomic development. As public lands form the backbone of the Western range-span ning a half-billion acres-the effects of mis guided federal policies reverberate through out the western United States. Until this fundamental fact is changed, the situation is unlikely to improve. This is the message of Karl Hess, Jr.'s provocative Visions Upon the Land: Man and Nature on the Western Range, a book which attempts to reframe the entire debate surrounding public lands and provide for a definitive, if somewhat controversial, solution.

Those urging reform of public land man agement have traditionally fallen into one of two camps: those who believe the problem is with individual land users compelled by short-sighted self-interest to ignore ecolog ical concerns, and those who believe the problem is one of bureaucratic institutions. While Hess acknowledges that both camps provide valuable insights, he feels both are slightly offthe mark. For Hess, the problem, as well as its solution, is to be found in recognizing the role of "landscape vi sions"-"the perceptions and beliefs held by people of how the western range should look and be" -in shaping land policy. One must understand what landscape vision gave rise to the public lands bureaucracy, and the nature of the visions that have dominated it since. For Hess, there have been three primary landscape visions over the course of Amer ican history. The first of these is the agrarian vision of Jeffersonian democracy. While Jefferson is rightfully regarded as the pri mary architect of America's liberal political order, he is also the father of America's public lands and held a landscape vision that, in the words of Henry Nash Smith, "government should be dedicated to the interests of the freehold farmer." This pol icy was pursued through the management of the western range-dividing it into home stead plots too small for grazing or subsis tence farming in the arid west, which re sulted in a western dependence upon lands still owned by the state. As Hess points out, "for all practical purposes, the making of 328 THE FREEMAN • AUGUST 1993 the tragedy of the commons was the official policy of the United States government."

The ecological failures wrought by the Jeffersonian vision gave rise to its replace ment, the progressive landscape vision. This was "a vision of men and women assuming conscious and purposeful control over nature and directing its uses to the exclusive benefit of humankind. " By these lights, scientific experts could mold the public lands and allow for their optimal utilization by mankind. Yet, as with all such visions of scientific management and social control, this vision similarlyfailed to protect the western range. Due to its inherent shortcomings, the progressive vision was overtaken by that of environmentalism. This vision, committed to protecting the western lands as "hal lowed ground," would become the least tolerant and most destructive of all, not only to human needs, but to the environment it sought to serve as well. Lands were no longer to be scientifically managed for man's benefit. Now they would be managed for the environment's sake alone.

The common thread underlying the his tory of public lands is the problem with a central landscape vision that is coercively imposed upon all lands and those who dwell within them. Notes Hess: "Visions of en gineered landscapes and sacred places have deluded progressive and environmental thinkers into believing that nature can be mastered and set on a straight and narrow course as dictated by the will of the state." Although economic central planning has been a dismal failure, the far more difficult task of centrally planning an ecology is somehow believed to be possible. In the end, "government has elevated its role to that of the visionary state-a sovereign entity empowered to make particular vi sions the official creed of government." Whereas America was founded on the ideal of allowing for a multiplicity of personal visions that compete in an open market, in the western range there would only be room for one, and it would be dictated from Washington, D.C.

Hess' solution is, as one might surmise, to remove public lands from the control of government, and return them to the Amer ican people. He calls it "democratization," though it is simply privatization under an other name. By divesting the state of the responsibility of managingthese lands, Hess seeks to establish "a market of landscape visions." Such a system will endow individ uals with' 'the ability to seek landscapes that are intensely personal and that only nature can rule as being ecologically fit or not." Some may choose to ravage their own lands, but others, such as Dayton Hyde, will be free to engage in responsible stewardship as they see fit. Whether Hess' plan for privatization the distribution of shares to all American citizens that can be used for the purchase of public lands-is the best plan of action is certainly a matter for debate. Any attempts to privatize federal lands are sure to meet with strong political opposition. None theless, the direction that must be taken remains clear: Government control of a half-billion acres of land cannot be allowed to continue. On this point, Hess demon strates, both ecologist and classical liberal should agree. The next step is making it happen. [] Jonathan H. Adler is an environmental policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.