AN ENTERTAINING SURVEY OF WHAT WE MOST LOVE TO HATE; `DIRTY ROTTEN TAXES' FOCUSES ON FIVE PERIODS OF ABUSE.

Byline: Brad Stetson Special to the Daily News

``Those Dirty Rotten Taxes: The Tax Revolts That Built America''

by Charles Adams

(256 pages, Free Press; $25)

Our rating: Three Stars

In a time of comprehensive pluralism, there is still one thing that unites virtually everyone in America - the hatred of taxes.

Indeed, as Charles Adams convincingly shows in his entertaining though sometimes shrill survey of the history of American taxation, ``Those Dirty Rotten Taxes: The Tax Revolts That Built America,'' we have always loathed taxes, and revolt against them is a basic feature of the American spirit.

Adams focuses on five general periods of governmental tax abuse. The first, in the decade preceding the nation's founding, describes the revenue hounds of England's King George, sniffing out every deposit of colonist wealth and prosperity - and claiming a painful part of it for the distant Crown. The Stamp Act of 1765, in particular, raised the ire of colonists, since it crippled commerce and the free flow of information, as the cost of using stamps became simply exorbitant.

After the rebellion from British rule was complete, the new nation of the 1790s, saddled with a sizable war debt and few means of raising revenue, turned to an excise tax on whiskey. Its advocates, reminiscent of the antismoking crusaders of today, justified the measure by constantly pointing out that whiskey was a luxury and unhealthy anyway, so those who used it should have to pay more for the privilege. But the rough and tumble frontier farmers of the young America - who used whiskey as money for trade since cash was very scarce - didn't share the government's morals and regularly tarred and feathered tax collectors who tried to enforce the whiskey ``sin tax.'' Eventually the law was repealed, but not before it led to the political annihilation of the Federalist Party, which had conceived the measure.

The third tax rebellion Adams surveys took root in the 30 years or so before the Civil War. Limited in its ability to assess income taxes, the federal government of the time turned to import tariffs both to raise cash and protect fledgling American industries from more advanced foreign competition. But this was to the clear benefit of the industrialized North, not the largely agrarian South. So, as Adams explains, high import fees ``forced the Southerners either to buy Northern goods at inflated prices, or to buy highly taxed imports that went to enrich Northern coffers. This, Southerners claimed, made the tax system unfair, and hence unconstitutional.'' So, it was tax policy, Adams argues, and not the controversy over slavery, that lit the fuse leading to the cataclysm of the Civil War.

Adams next chronicles the last third of the 19th century, when the victorious North foisted on the defeated South punitive taxes on land, imports and whiskey. This was a relatively uneventful period of tax controversy, leading primarily to deepened Southern resentment of the North and renegade moonshine mills hidden throughout the backwaters of the South.

But Adams' last section, concentrating on the ``tyranny of the income tax'' from 1913 to the present, is a rollicking if chilling account of IRS exploits and tax-dodger ingenuity. A particularly hapless victim of IRS zeal is Karl Hess, a former Barry Goldwater speechwriter who once called IRS agents ``hollow men and women'' and ``the cold cogs of federal bureaucracy.'' Enraged by the IRS audit that followed his unflattering remarks, Hess withdrew to the mountains of West Virginia, making a meager living as a welder. But the men in black found him there, and one day descended on his humble shop and confiscated his equipment. Hess is but one of the tax martyrs Adams discusses, victims, he says, of the awful truth that ``our government can steal from the people, and routinely does so.''

While Adams' study is historically illuminating and ample support for citizens' contempt for taxation, his narrative becomes repetitive and, at times, exaggerated, as when he equates an audit to an ``inquisition'' and declares ``the Gestapo is alive and well in Germany, housed in its tax administration.''

But still, he has rendered a substantial service by providing a historical context to the current debate over tax reform. As well, he reminds us of the very valuable fact that a legal tax and a moral tax are not necessarily one and the same.