The Cold War and the Income Tax legal fees. His troubles lead him to investigate the history of the income tax in the United States, and to write extensively on how the assumptions the IRS makes about how and when people earn income map poorly to the actual way a literary man like Wilson makes a living. He dives into the tax code and discovers that "[t]he question of what ought to be taxed and how much and which deductions ought to be allowed has reached a point of fine-spun complexity that — working in terms of a different set of values — recalls the far-fetched distinctions
The Cold War and the Income Tax it his business to study the state in theory and in practice. The person who is in the weakest position to attack the state is he who has largely ignored its potential for evil while strongly backing its expansion on humanitarian grounds and is only stirred to protest when he falls foul of it through his own negligence. That exactly describes Wilson's position. In his book he tried to evade his own inconsistencies by arguing that most of his income tax went on defence spending induced by Cold War paranoia. But then he had not paid his state income taxes