You never hear people badmouth the income tax anymore. Not even this week, when each of our three hundred thousand Fairfield County households will on average fork over twenty thousand dollars, hundreds of pieces of private and personal information, dozens of otherwise enjoyable hours, and all of our self-respect.

Maybe it's the Stockholm Syndrome in action, where, as hostages, we begin to sympathize with our captors who punish and rape us. Whatever the reason, it's nearly impossible to say the income tax is evil. You're either labeled a nut, an insurgent, or a greedy bastard. But is it really crazy to observe that an income tax penalizes effort? Is it really unpatriotic to want your country to be free? Is it greedy to want to keep what's yours?

There are so many things wrong with the income tax—inefficiency, unfairness, counter productivity—that it is hard to know how best to argue against it. But one local author has figured it out.

His name is Zak and he has written a fiction book called Publicani. You've probably heard him on various radio shows over the past week or so, both in English and in Russian. Not everybody can get an interview with him. It helps if you're his son.

Zak Maymin immigrated from the Soviet Union to America with his family, yours truly included, in 1980, and, despite knowing barely any English, earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT that first year. He says he feels he has "come back from the future.” He can see which direction our country is going and he knows the end result: “I came from a country that had free health care, free education, complete job security, total political participation of all the people. Most of the people were happy and smiling. Good family values. All of these, that are discussed as goals for America, were implemented in the country I came from and which was an evil empire, as Reagan said. And I don't want America to become an evil empire and that's the major reason why I wrote this book.”

Publicani is a family vs. government thriller. “Something that belongs to an individual, nobody can take it from him forcefully.” my dad explained. “And if it is taking, the individual has the right to defend himself.”

The income tax is never mentioned in the book, but on some level, every word on every page is about it. The original “publicani” were Roman tax farmers during the time of Jesus. “There are, by the way, several chapters in the book where I discuss some religious history and how this principle of individual freedom was traced in other religions and how it is related to Jesus Christ — and where was he, by the way, before he showed up at 30 years old and started doing al these miracles?” Publicani answers this question.

But why the income tax? Of all the bad things that could motivate a work of fiction, why this?

“To kill a vampire, you cannot shoot him. You cannot cut his arms and legs. You have to drive a wooden stake through his heart, and it should be wooden and not a silver stick or an iron stick. You have to find one target that is the worst and that is the root of all this evil that is happening in this country, and in my opinion, that's the income tax.”

“Okay,” I asked him, “but why is the income tax the root?”

“It is immoral. It takes by force from others what belongs to them. And it's the clearest example of stealing that the government does.”

“The problem with the federal income tax is not the government but the fact that people support it. People actually like it. Five percent of the population pays about half the taxes. Other people don't really care. The same people who were not peasants in Russia and who were not Jews in Germany, they didn't think too much about those things. That's who is the real target of this book. Not the government, but the people who think this way and I hope that maybe I'll be able to change some people in this thinking.”

Now you can badmouth the income tax all you want. You are no longer alone.

This review first appeared in Fairfield Weekly on April 17, 2008. It is reprinted with permission from the author.