Jennifer Schuessler gives a nod to the anti-tax views of the celebrated leftish literary critic Edmund Wilson in an essay on DFW’s obsession with the IRS. After recounting the extraordinary debt Wilson owed the IRS after almost a decade of refusing to file his taxes, Schuessler writes:

Wilson’s friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would later blame the mess on a “drunken lawyer.” But in “The Cold War and the Income Tax,” a blistering polemic published in 1963, Wilson saw more sinister forces at work. His own ordeal, he argued, was just one example of the “high tide of taxation” that was engulfing ordinary citizens and feeding our “frantic” nuclear rivalry with the Soviet Union. He was particularly irate about I.R.S. rules on deductions, which he deemed insensitive to writers. “It is difficult, at my time of life, to think of anything that I do or anywhere that I go which could not be called a business expense,” he wrote, sounding less like a lifelong man of the left than like Ron Paul. “It is an insufferable impertinence of the federal government to ask why I have entertained my guests or why I have chosen to travel — to say nothing of how many times I have been married, whom I have voted for and whether or not I buy my dog a bed.”

One wonders what Wilson would have made of the tanning tax. My guess is that he’d have embraced it, alas.