Walter Froehlich, Book Review: Taxation and the American Economy, an Economic, Legal and Administrative Analysis (1954)

Published in the Marquette Law Review, Walter Froehlich’s review evaluates William H. Anderson’s 1951 textbook against its ambition to serve students, citizens, teachers, tax professionals, and administrators. Froehlich finds useful factual coverage but insufficient explanation of the principles that would enable readers to reason independently about taxation. His central judgment is concise:

In sum, the work is long on fine description but short on thorough analysis.

The review moves from audience and organization to economic analysis, legal reasoning, and a qualified recommendation. Anderson’s eight parts cover foundations, property, income, gift and inheritance, business, consumption, other taxes and revenues, and taxation’s relation to the economic system. Froehlich recognizes this as the conventional terrain of public-finance instruction. His objection concerns less the breadth of coverage than the failure to connect information with analytical frameworks.

Analysis and discussion of controversial issues is not extended enough to permit the reader to cope with problems for himself.

This pedagogical standard organizes the specific criticisms. On corporate tax shifting, Froehlich argues that reporting opinion surveys cannot replace distinguishing accounting or taxable income from pure economic profit: the distinction matters to explaining whether a tax can be shifted. He likewise faults the treatment of personal income taxes for relying on older theoretical formulations and objects to identifying the short run with the market period. These are consequential conceptual weaknesses because they obscure the mechanisms readers need to understand tax incidence.

The same concern extends to fiscal policy. References to the Employment Act of 1946 and lists of policy factors do little, in Froehlich’s account, to explain how taxation might balance consumption and investment. Throughout, he demands relationships among concepts rather than inventories of topics.

His legal criticism parallels the economic critique. Anderson’s discussion of the general-welfare limitation juxtaposes decisions without adequately reconciling them, while pertinent cases discussed elsewhere are not brought to bear on the issue.

In a book of this kind a little more ought to be done than to contrast cases under headings of "Nonfiscal purposes upheld" (p. 28) and "Nonfiscal purposes held invalid" (p. 30) as the reader of this book is not supposed to study the full cases to form his own judgment.

For Froehlich, accessible exposition therefore requires more synthesis, not less: readers without specialist training particularly need an explanation of how authorities fit together. Yet he credits Anderson’s detailed, diagram-assisted treatment of estate-tax avoidance through life-estate remainders, showing that technical precision and accessibility can coexist.

The closing recommendation limits the book’s strongest use to an introductory factual survey for lawyers unfamiliar with economics or public finance and a reference for interested citizens. Froehlich also objects to the publisher’s distracting visual embellishments and cartoons, separating those marketing choices from the author’s achievement:

This is most unfair to our author as his is a useful and sincere book.

The review’s relevance lies in its clear standard for interdisciplinary tax education: comprehensive description is valuable, but economic distinctions and integrated legal reasoning are necessary if a survey is to cultivate judgment rather than merely supply information.