Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 14:57:24 -0700
From: apfanning@psn.net ("Alan Fanning")
Subject: [lpaz-repost] Some Encouraging Words on the Income Tax
To: lpaz-repost@onelist.com ("lpaz-repost")
To view this item online, visit:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_bock/20000414_xcabo_the_licens.shtml
Friday, April 14, 2000
The license to pry
by Alan W. Bock
It shouldn't be difficult around this time of the year -- the IRS having
made the Ides of April a more piquant source of dread than the Ides of
March that carried cultural eight back when schoolchildren read
Shakespeare -- to build on resentment of the Internal Revenue Service
and the income tax. The question is what kind of reform might be most
appropriate to reduce the most socially damaging aspects of the income
tax.
The first is that meeting the demands of "voluntary compliance" makes a
slave -- in the sense of somebody forced against one's will to undertake
chores he or she would rather not do -- of everybody. I don't know about
you, but my mama didn't raise me to be an accountant. But to comply with
IRS demands, I am forced to spend at least part of my life doing
accounting work, even if I pay somebody else actually to fill out the
form. Whether it's time spent in unpleasant activity or money spent
getting somebody else to do it, it amounts to forced labor.
But that is far from the most socially damaging aspect of the income
tax. How do we count the ways a tax on income sets person against person
and wreaks havoc on the social fabric?
By definition, a tax on income must be enormously intrusive. Since the
definition of "income" is not immediately obvious (in philosophy or in
the tax code), a tax on income, whatever it is, must give bureaucrats
and tax collectors license to poke around in the most private aspects of
your life. Things about your life that you would not share with your
closest friends or perhaps even your spouse -- not because of any shame
but because human beings seem to need at least some small sphere of
privacy -- are routinely demanded of you by the IRS.
Was the $100 you won at a neighborhood poker game "income" or not? It
shouldn't be any of the government's business whether you played in a
poker game, let alone whether you won or lost. But if you're taxing
income, no area of life is too private to be probed, because almost
every interaction with another human being can involve the exchange of
money or of something that could e valuated in monetary terms. So just
in the process of determining the amount of income on which you will be
taxed the government comes to believe it can ask you any questions about
anything you have done -- and forget any presumption of privacy, let
alone a presumption of innocence.
To probe all those private areas of our lives, the income tax has led to
the creation of what is probably the most powerful and unaccountable
bureaucracy in the world, with extraordinary license (I have my doubts
about genuine authority even under U.S. law) to impose punishment
through civil actions, where procedural guarantees given to
run-of-the-mill criminals do not apply. It is hardly surprising that
this power is sometimes abused. The miracle would be if it were never
abused.
The license to pry into the most private areas of people's lives and the
necessary intrusiveness of a tax on income are the main reasons the
income tax really should be repealed -- eliminated, flushed down
history's memory hole. And while I have sympthy for those who believe
it could be replaced by a national sales tax, which would be less
complicated and less intrusive to collect, I continue to believe the
bottom-line position for anyone who is even mildly fond of liberty is
that the income tax should be repealed and replaced with nothing.
Typically, the income tax supplies about a third of the money the
national government collects over the course of a year. I haven't run
the numbers lately, but in 1992, you would have had to go back only to
1986 to pinpoint the year when the federal budget was one-third less.
Can anybody begin to make a case that the federal budget was not bloated
and excessive six years ago? Especially when the government is running
nominal surpluses, it shouldn't be that hard to make the case that the
national government could get by with 67 percent of what it is spending
now. I might even give them a five-year transition period to get used to
the idea.
While the case for lower spending to "pay for" (as the statists always
put it when somebody talk about spending less than the max imaginable
on some program) eliminating the income tax is strong enough
intellectually and economically, however, it hasn't been made often
enough or forcefully enough to be politically viable -- yet. Thus the
impulse to replace the money the evil income tax brings in with a
relatively benign sales tax.
There are also those who argue that when the government talks about
"voluntary compliance" that's what the law actually means and those who
claim it's required are blowing smoke and conducting one of the more
successful campaigns of deception and intimidation in human history.
Irwin Schiff is out of jail and conducting seminars on how to put the
"voluntary" back into voluntary compliance.
I suspect Mr. Schiff is right, from the standpoint of legal analysis and
the Constitution. But my observation over the years is that the
government will tolerate people demanding that it follow its own laws
itself only up to a point, and then it will commence conspicuous
unishment to scare others away from asking inconvenient questions or
asserting uncomfortable (to bureaucrats) rights.
Irwin Schiff was almost certainly put in jail illegally some 10 years
ago, as I argued at the time, and the government has not put his legal
theories to the test by charging him with failing to comply with federal
tax laws. But it did find a way to get him into jail. When tax
resistance groups (especially those that rely on legal analysis or the
constitution) get big enough to be a nuisance, the government finds ways
to slap them down. That's one reason my own preference would be for the
almost universal hatred of the income tax to work its way through the
political process leading to open and outright repeal of the income tax
and preferably of the constitutional amendment that authorized it as
well.
In his book "The Federal Mafia," Schiff also discusses a reform less
drastic than repealing the income tax. Section 6331 of the IRS code,
enacted when a temporary income tax was imposed during the Civil War and
never repealed, even when the tax itself went away. It's pretty awesome
in scope:
"If any person liable to pay any tax neglects or refuses to pay the same
within 10 days after notice and demand, it shall be lawful for the
Secretary (of the Treasury) to collect such tax (and such further sum as
shall be sufficient to cover the expenses of the levy) by levy upon all
property and rights to property (except such property as is exempt under
section 6334) belonging to any such person. ... The term 'levy' as used
in this title includes the power of distraint and seizure by any means."
There you have it. The government can seize any or all of your property
by any means necessary if you disagree about how much tax you "owe."
There must be a better way in a country that was founded on the idea
that citizens have certain rights that government must respect at all
times.
The power to seize by any means necessary means, both in theory and in
practice, that the IRS does not need a warrant, a court order or any
other procedural safeguard of the rights of the taxpayer being
assaulted -- which means in fact that a taxpayer accused of reneging on
his enforced "debt" has no rights at all. How unreasonable is it to
suggest that taxes be collected in ways that respect the rights of
taxpayers at least to the extent that the rights of people accused of
having committed a crime are respected? If Section 6331 were repealed,
the IRS and Congress might have to come up with constitutional ways to
collect taxes. That in turn would be a spur to genuine internal reforms
in the IRS.
We might not be quite ready to repeal the income tax, even to replace it
with a sales or consumption tax. But unless I misread, even in this time
of prosperity, when people are less inclined to be politically
discontent, there's enough restiveness that the income tax's days are
numbered. We had mainstream candidates in major parties calling for its
elimination this year. I can remember when only those willing to be
labeled hopeless kooks said such things.
As we get closer to success, resistance is likely to stiffen. So those
offended by the assaults on human liberties and American traditions that
the income tax invites should be prepared for a long and difficult
struggle.