| You've heard it said that the only
sure things in life are death and taxes. And for most adults, it's a fact.
One of the greatest rites of youthful passage only occurs after 16 years
of school and a third of a lifetime of preparation. You've finally landed
a decent paying job and worked out just how you're going to spend the first
check. With excited hands you tear it open, only to suffer the shock of
finding more than a third of it "withheld."
Few people forget that shock. And few
things are more amusing than watching the expression on the face of someone
undergoing this memorable moment. After working to climb out of the well
of poverty, who isn't surprised and dismayed to find that the taxing authorities
now include you among the "rich?" Who isn't stunned when
realizing that for the first five months of any given year you belong to
them as virtual chattel? You can choose your yoke. You can choose your
labor and keep some of the reward, or choose not to labor and become a
poor but bound dependent of the state. You can even choose where you live
and make your effort. But you can't easily choose to earn and produce and
not to belong to your feudal masters, if only by the percentage. And if
you think these assertions are exaggerations, you are entitled to your
opinion. But even if you're educated and well informed, you might consider
the possibility that you have limited your perspective of reality. A husband
is often the last to know about a cheating wife.
So as April 15th approaches
most of us will pause from our family concerns, and from our interest in
Kosovo, Clinton, China, to pay attention to another demand. If we've put
forth any effort in the past year, if we've earned any money at all, most
of us must calculate the share demanded by the Internal Revenue Service.
And the battle between those who work, who produce, who earn, and those
socially situated both above and below them who would claim a percentage
of their efforts, is nothing new.
Ancient Money
and Taxation
While there's a postmodern movement to
portray ancient Egypt as an entirely voluntary society, it's probably more
accurate to envision the pharaohs of Egypt as an enormous and oppressive
bureaucracy based on direct taxation. Some scholars claim that there was
not even a word for freedom or liberty in the ancient Egyptian language.
"Man can live and satisfy
his wants only by ceaseless labor by the ceaseless application of his faculties
to natural resources. This process is the origin of property. But it is
also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming
the products of the labor of others. This process is the origin of plunder."
--- Frederic Bastiat, The
Law
On the other hand, Ancient Democratic Greece
and Republican Rome placed a very strong value on the concept of liberty.
At least during their formative years where such concepts were held in
high spiritual esteem. So did the ancient Israelites, whose escape from
Pharaonic domination in Exodus is still celebrated in households around
the world nearly three and a half millennia later. Precisely like America,
Rome coined gold and silver with the goddess of liberty as a principal
image. And precisely like America, classical Roman coinage was progressively
debased until the silver denarius -- equal to a day's pay for the Roman
foot soldier and a symbolic standard of the nation -- became nothing more
than a copper planchet coated with a thin silver plating. Emperors pilfered
off the silver, typically without notifying the public of the lowered standard.
That the denarius, or "denny," in its debased copper form is still
with us today as the "penny," should be a reminder that we are still subject
to the same human forces that plagued the ancient world. For those of you
who are old enough to remember the reference to our own pocket change as
"silver,"
you don't have to look any further than our own nickel-plated tokens to
get a picture of why the so-called "hidden tax of inflation" is
associated with currency debasement.
The resulting fiscal chaos caused Roman
rulers to become progressively oppressive in making up the difference to
the depreciating national currency through increased overt taxation. Classical
authors from the ancient Mediterranean remind us that the scourge and the
rack and were used against negligent taxpayers. Fathers were compelled
to prostitute their daughters. Children were sold into slavery. Roman citizens
began to flee the nation to avoid taxation and repression. Diocletian imposed
price controls and harsh punishment in attempt to preserve the faltering
standards of weights and measures, and thereby the interests of late Roman
Imperial rulers. The consequence for trying to escape currency debasement
finally became death. Penalties are presently increasing for trying the
same in modern America, as they did in National Socialist Germany and Communist
Russia. So believe it or not, Stalin, Hitler, and even Bill Clinton had
their role models.
Early American
Money and Taxation
But as many of the American Founders were
fluent in Greek, Latin, and a few even in Hebrew, they knew about this
history. Contrast George Washington with Diocletian. Washington donated
his family dinner silver to establish the beginning of a silver coinage
by the U.S. Treasury. After the Shay rebellion in 1786, which at least
in part occurred in protest to taxation, pressure grew that led to the
Constitutional Convention. And the issue of central power and taxation
was a primary controversy among those that attended. You no doubt all remember
the Federalist
Papers. In The Making
of an Agrarian Insurrection, David Szatmary contended that the
Shay uprising was a manifestation of a cultural split between those committed
to commercialism and individualism on the one side, and those which held
to the feudal traditions on the other. Henry Knox misled Washington when
he wrote that the two or three thousand Shays numbered fifteen thousand,
intending to march on Boston to loot the Bank of Massachusetts. Apparently
attracted to the American monarchy movement, Knox also wrote to Washington
that "three sevenths" of the population of Massachusetts favored a parliamentary
national government "analogous to the British Constitution." The battle
lines drawn during the revolutionary war were alive and well, and in spite
of the view of present day revisionists and their penchant for federal
domination, the Shays may have been the first post revolutionary American
"patriots." But the framers fought this out, and fortunately for most living
in America, those opposing monarchy and feudalism insisted on instituting
a federal government with practical limitations.
In Novus
Ordo Seclorum: the intellectual origins of the U.S. Constitution,
Forrest McDonald wrote that, "-the Framers brought a vast knowledge of
history-with them to Philadelphia in May of 1787, and that they departed
four months later having fashioned a frame of government that necessitated
a redefinition of most of the terms in which the theory and ideology of
civic humanism had been discussed. Into the bargain, they introduced an
entirely new concept to the discourse, that of federalism, and in the doing,
created a novus ordo seclorum: a new order of the ages."
But the schism between those that would
insist on individual liberty as the primary spiritual basis of the culture,
and those that would follow the ancient Pharaonic model, has not yet been
fully resolved. All you have to do is pull out a Federal Reserve one-dollar
note and check out the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States,
with its pyramid and all-seeing eye.
"How often, or on what
system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork....
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer.- A kilometer
away the Ministry of Truth - was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering
white concrete ... it was just possible to read ... on its white surface
...WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." -- George
Orwell, 1984
The form of taxation history reveals as
most burdensome, the form we live under today, is the "direct tax."
Direct taxes are imposed on personal property, including money and compensation
for labor. That clearly includes income tax. Indirect taxes, by
contrast, are excises, duties, and imports. All original U.S. taxes were
indirect taxes, mostly on distilled spirits. Remember the Whiskey Rebellion
of 1794 and the Revenuers? Those taxes were eventually expanded to include
tobacco, sugar, and federal legal instruments such as U.S. bonds. They
were repealed in 1802, and for a period of ten years there were no federal
taxes. From 1813 to 1817 indirect taxation was implemented again to pay
for the War of 1812. Then for the next 43 years there were no internal
federal taxes.
The Framers rejected direct taxation
unless they were apportioned to each state according to population. But
an income tax was levied during the Civil War and upheld by the Supreme
Court. In 1862 under the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Lincoln implemented
a graduated 3 percent to 10 percent tax on income for certain government
employees
earning over $800 per year. But it was discontinued shortly after the war.
When another attempt was made to impose taxes on income in 1893, the Supreme
Court ruled it unconstitutional. In 1895, the Court declared that it violated
Article I, section 9 of the Constitution.
The Sixteenth
Amendment
Finally, in 1909, the 16th Amendment
was proposed. And if you like, you can ask Red Beckman how he feels about
that one. The IRS bulldozed his house to the ground after they seized it
and he refused to surrender it to them. They may not have confiscated much
of a remaining asset, but, by God, in their eyes it was their asset
and they meant to have it. Of course, the fact that Beckman co-authored
a book detailing a duplicitous ratification of the 16th Amendment may not
have helped him much.
The 16th Amendment was passed on July
2, 1909, but official ratification didn't occur until 1913. According to
Beckman and author Bill Benson in their book, The Law That Never Was,
there is no official record of legitimate ratification in the National
Archives. They traveled to all the lower 48 states to follow up, and claim
that the state records are in conflict with the official federal position
on the 16th. Their contention has sparked a heated controversy
between those that claim to know the truth, and those that insist such
assertions can be nothing but absurd. Typically, the latter group has something
invested in preserving the federal status quo. Evidence is acknowledged
that the votes for and against from Kentucky, for example, were switched
by then Secretary of State Philander Knox. But whether the entire contention
of Beckman and Benson is true or not, recent events compel rational thinkers
to treat the assertions and actions of centralized power with suspicion.
"Corruption ... this
phenomenon is far more widespread and universal than previously thought.
Evidence of it is everywhere, in developing countries and, with growing
frequency, in industrial countries.... Prominent political figures, including
presidents of countries and ministers, have been accused of corruption....
In a way this represents a privatization of the state in which its power
is not shifted to the market, as privatization normally implies, but to
government officials and bureaucrats." -- Vito Tanzi, "Corruption: arm's
length relationships and markets"
Up until the Civil War, indirect taxes
were the only kind Congress was originally authorized to impose, and according
to some, the only kind they are still authorized to impose. Clearly
the position you take on that issue depends on where you stand. If you're
a federal judge, a bureaucrat, or a federal apologist, you're much more
likely to side with the interpretation that the federal government has
the authority to tax income. Your power, your position, your very livelihood
depends on it. By reason of logical interest, you are going to be inclined
to construe the Constitution according to what the Individual Human
Rights Constituency calls "Imperialistic Imaginative Interpretation."
It's understandable that you would act in what you believe to be your own
best interest. On the other hand, if you make your living by laboring or
producing in the private sector, you're much more likely to lean toward
the interpretation that the Constitution says what it means, and means
what it says. And that's also understandable.
"The 16th
Amendment does not extend the power of taxation to new or excepted subjects-
Neither can the tax be sustained on the person, measured by income. Such
a tax would be, by nature, a capitation rather than an excise." -- Peck
v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 165
Eventually the title, Bureau of Internal
Revenue, was finally euphemized to the Internal Revenue Service.
Skillfully manipulating terms to their advantage, it became a "service"
to us to allow the bureaucratic authorities and those they most plausibly
represent to forcibly extort a significant percentage of our earnings.
You may remember that Patrick Henry
opposed a strong federal government, expressed fear that an armed federal
government might one day physically swarm out from Washington to occupy
the States. But that course of action turned out to be unnecessary. Henry
failed to foresee the insidious and compelling ideology of centralization
that would induce individuals to quietly roll over and willfully surrender
power to a federal authority in exchange for apparent but actually illusory
collective aid and protection. (This is in fact the relationship between
lord and serf in medieval feudalism.) Patrick Henry failed to anticipate
federal income tax, and the concessions of authority the states would have
to endure in order to reclaim part of the funds confiscated from their
citizens. Even worse, he failed to envision the corporate state and federal
legal systems and the reduction of the rights protected by the Constitution
to mere political license.
"Among these unalienable
rights, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence is the right of
men to pursue their happiness, by which is meant, the right to pursue any
lawful business or vocation, in any manner not inconsistent with the equal
rights of others, which may increase their prosperity or develop their
faculties, so as to give them their highest enjoyment-It has been well
said that, the property which every man has is his own labor, as it is
the original foundation of all other property so it is the most sacred
and inviolable-to hinder his employing-in what manner he thinks proper,
without injury to his neighbor, is plain violation of the most sacred property."
-- Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent
City Co., 111 U.S. 746, at 756-757
While income tax advocates and apologists
like to point to the benefits of federal redistribution of funding ---
such as defense, infrastructure, education and other social programs ---
they refuse to consider the obvious ramifications of corruption of such
a system. If counties and states have little recourse but to bow to federal
authority in their attempt to reclaim property confiscated by the mechanism
of central taxation, there is a very real potential for political blackmail.
State ideologues become caught up with federally mandated egalitarianism
and blind to the obvious dangers of centralization. As a result, the heterogeneous
nature of creative and productive individuals is ritually cast on the political
chopping block in such blackmail bargaining. Even now our national scandals
regarding this issue grow more overt and more common.
Soaking the Rich
It's no secret that progressives derive
their notion of progressive income tax from the tenets of Marx.
The idea was to capture a portion of the gains imagined to be immorally
acquired by the "rich." The first American income taxes were only
1 percent on the first $20,000 of taxable income and 7 percent on incomes
above $500,000. (These levels of income correspond roughly to $300,000
and $7,500,000 today.) So, to most people in 1913, income tax was an easy
sell. Under those terms, it could probably be sold again today, even to
most of those who despise it. Even as late as 1939, only 5 percent of the
population were even required to file returns.
How did we all get forced into the higher
brackets? Well, that's where the double edge of the hidden tax of inflation
comes into play with progressive income tax. Not only did fiat money controllers
benefit from issuing and expanding currency in all its evolving forms,
they also benefited as the depreciating currency forced even common laborers
into the class originally designated as "rich." Early on, common
laborers were no doubt proud of the fact that they were finally earning
enough to be included in with the millionaires who had to pay a small percentage
of their income in taxes for such worthy causes as retirement for the elderly
and WWII. It simply didn't occur to them that the currency depreciation
would finally force them to yield as much as half of their income. Keynes
himself argued that a currency depreciating at 1 percent per year and requiring
an entire century to lose 63 percent of its value was a small price to
pay for full employment.[*]
And of course FDR created a method of
streamlining the collection process in 1943 with the implementation of
the system of withholding taxes from wages and salaries during WWII.
Some economists argue that the device of withholding taxes from wages was
the principle factor that shifted income tax from a tax on the wealthy
to a tax on the masses.
"The avoidance of taxes
is the only pursuit that still carries any reward."
-- Lord Keynes
And the truly wealthy co-opted the very
tax laws they helped to impose by forming charitable foundations. The statutes
exempted corporations operating for religious, charitable, educational,
or scientific purposes. The wealthy cleverly found a method to exert power
and influence over institutions of education, religion, even the media,
while completely avoiding the taxes the average wage earner or businessman
is compelled to pay.
It's also curious, but politically dangerous
to note even today, that the same names that were associated with the implementation
of the modern income tax are also connected to the notoriously secretive
formation of the hybrid private/government institution known as the Federal
Reserve. If only by default, income tax has become the de facto
instrument used to capture a percentage of the product of business and
labor in order to repay loans made to the Treasury by the FED. When federal
budget deficits become high enough, among the few recourses the Treasury
has to meet its obligations is either to increase taxes or to monetize
the debt. So taxes and money are all entwined in the federal government’s
game.
Please allow me to introduce
myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long,
long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his
fate
I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for
a change
Killed the Czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the Blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh
yeah
--The Rolling Stones,
Sympathy
for the Devil
And lately Bill Clinton has been claiming
credit for balancing the long expanding budget and actually producing a
surplus. But everyone in on the know realizes that this slight of hand
is just more fiscal "magic" on the part of bureaucrats. The surplus
largely consists of funds shifted from Social Security obligations to the
general budget. Good news for the bureaucrats up for reelection, but bad
news for any X-generation members who imagine that undebased Social Security
obligations will one day be met for them. But don't worry about it X-ers.
Instead, just pierce another ring through your ear: at the time of the
Exodus from Pharaonic domination, an earring was an indication that the
wearer was a bonded slave. You're about to experience bonded slavery again
within your lifetime.
Worse, the $6.56 trillion national debt
figure is probably largely understated, given the huge amounts the federal
government keeps "off the books." The National Taxpayer's
Union estimates the actual national debt at closer to $17 Trillion!
So if you're an American taxpayer, that puts your per-capita share at about
$63,000. Be sure to tack that on the minus side of your net worth spread
sheet.
Some even say that federal budgeting
procedure adopted during the progressive years would constitute a crime
if perpetrated in the private sector. In other words, if a corporate CEO
budgeted like the federal government, the CEO would be guilty of a felony
--- a further indicator of how much abuse the authorities practice as we
centrally empower them.
"Truth is whatever you
want it to be."
--D. Craig Livingstone, former
Director of security in the Clinton White House
In February of 1999, Republicans proposed
returning some of the fictitious budget surplus to taxpayers. But Richard
Gephardt opposed the Republican plan as a "massive GOP tax cut for the
wealthy." In spite of the fearful liberal rhetoric when they rant in
the hallowed halls, America already has far and away the most predatory,
soak-the-rich tax system of any country in the world. That is if you statistically
qualify the average earnings of middle class and upper middle class taxpayers
as "rich." According to James Dale Davidson, the top one percent
of income earners pay 27 percent of the U.S. income tax. Furthermore, 50
percent of lesser earning Americans pay only 6 percent of all income taxes,
and 32 percent somehow pay no income taxes at all! That leaves 17 percent
of the hardest working middle class to pay 67 percent of the income tax
burden. Seen another way, those earning the top 18 percent of America's
income already pay 94 percent of all taxes. The 17 percent of those who
constitute the shrinking "middle class" are the "rich" that liberals keep
whining about --- those that they want to tax even further in order to
subsidize the 82 percent who only pay 6 percent of the tax burden, but
receive at least four fifths of all the benefits.
"The tendency of the
tax laws Is to compute what they call profit as high as possible in order
to increase immediate public revenue." --Ludwig von Mises, Planning
For Freedom
Progressives promise to give us an egalitarian
society by sharing the wealth through mechanisms they insist are democratic,
but uniformly end up utilizing coercive means to monopolize it instead.
They control dissension by suckering millions into dependent political
poverty and lifetime servitude. The Internal Revenue Services insists on
euphemizing the federal withholding tax system as a program of "voluntary
compliance." And technically, at one time it was. Yet today everyone
knows if you don't volunteer you can expect any stripes you've earned to
be ripped away from your shirtsleeves, and you may well end up in the stockade.
Does the IRS really mean business? I
mean they don’t put people in jail do they? They do. In Kansas City, Trula
Walker and her husband got 30 years and 25 years respectively
for evading about $1 million in taxes. In Portland, Oregon a high school
coach got 25 years. Leona Helmsley, the "rich" woman every media
talking head loved to hate got 4 years for evading less than 1 percent
of her taxes. This is true even though she paid over $50 million for the
year in dispute.
And they are notorious about uncovering
"offenders." Under a pseudonym "Diogenes," an IRS agent wrote about
the espionage of the agency, that not even "Soviet Russia or Red China
can boast of agencies that beat the IRS on all these counts.- The Gestapo?
Not a contender either."
The tendency among popular apologists
is to follow the Marxian method of justifying the means because of the
ends. If the ends can be construed as socially worthy, then we should ignore
the means. We should pretend the means are voluntary, are democratic, when
we all know they're not. Still, even if you follow this thinking, the evidence
doesn't provide solid support for the ends.
The General Welfare
In his 1999 State of the Union address
Bill Clinton incurred yet another rational criticism when he insisted that
the federal government couldn't allow the return of any portion of the
presumed budget surplus to the taxpayer because the individual couldn't
be trusted to "spend it right." Of course, by implication, he parroted
the feudal Marxist party line that somehow a centralized bureaucratic elite
spends your money more wisely than you.
So how has all this tax money been spent
"right"
by the federal bureaucracy? Well, there have been two World Wars with the
Great Depression in between, the Korean War, and the Cold War, and then
the War on Poverty, and the Gulf War, and the War on Crime, and the War
on Drugs, and-. You get the picture. Often where the money goes is a complete
mystery. Some estimates claim that as little as 30 cents of every dollar
collected in taxes for welfare ends up in the hands of the welfare recipient.
Studies also reveal that in some parts of the country as little as 30 cents
of every education dollar collected actually winds up in the classroom.
The Clinton Administration spent $470
million on the Americorps program, which uses taxpayer money to pay "volunteer"
workers nearly $27,000 each year. The General Accounting Office recently
exposed an Americorps program in Baltimore that had a cost per "volunteer"
of $50,000. In 1994, Americorps paid a public relations firm $1.7 million
simply to publicize the creation of the program.
The Global Learning and Observation
to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program spent $8 million for children
in foreign countries to collect rainwater. Two million was spent for the
Ounce of Prevention Council, which was created in 1994 to coordinate crime-fighting
efforts, but by 1996 had yet to administer a single grant. The council
produced instead a glossy magazine at a cost of $1.5 million to the taxpayer,
and employed the wife of Clinton's chief of staff, Leon Panetta, for $300
per day, thus earning the council a reputation as the "Clinton Staff Family
Full Employment Program." Yet these are all merely a diminutive fraction
of the useless programs government spends our money on. (The Clinton administration
had another 481 new programs in the works at the time.)
The Clinton administration's own job-training
program, the one they so often cited and bragged about, produced less than
a 10 percent effective return. In other words, only about one in ten actually
go through the program and end up on a job somewhere as a result. The average
cost per student was more than $200,000, and the average job achieved paid
only about $20,000 per year! One Congressman commented that he couldn't
understand why they don't just give the individuals the $200,000 outright!
Former California Speaker of the House
and mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, recently proposed giving credit
card readers (swipers) to city panhandlers. I'm not kidding! Presumably
the city would carry the cost of the credit card merchant accounts for
professional sidewalk panhandlers, so they could run up to you in traffic
and offer to run your credit card. Can't you just see a guy in an old flannel
shirt, with a crayon-inscribed cardboard sign hung around his neck on a
bit of twine, reading, "Will swipe your credit card for food!" He hands
you your customer-copy receipt. "Have a nice day!" he says. "And
oh, by the way, next April 15th, you'll get the bill for my
card swiper and my merchant account!" This laughable proposal from the
left
coast really indicates just how entrenched and absurd the progressive
mentality actually is in America.
Since the mid-1960's welfare programs
have spent more than 5.4 trillion dollars. Black economist and nationally
syndicated columnist Walter Williams reports that the federal money spent
on poverty programs, "Could have bought the entire assets of the Fortune
500 companies and virtually all the U.S. farm land!" And yet in the
middle of all these failed policies, the engineered poverty rate continues
to climb. Is it possible that those who benefit from a dependent constituency
really don't want a free and prosperous public?
Redistribution is not limited to individual
welfare, study grants, or education. There are those in the corporate world
who used the collectivist system to arrange welfare handouts for their
favorite subsidy programs. The Cato Foundation estimates that the federal
government was spending $75 billion per year on corporate welfare in 1996.
And while it's very difficult to believe that we can live without a national
defense, there is still a profound trap here awaiting the Hawks. If industry
benefits from either welfare or warfare --- or even fear
of warfare, or "cold" warfare --- there's a logical tendency to urge spending
and taxation for a military buildup.
What? Milosevic is practicing ethnic
cleansing? American soldiers are being captured on the ground in the
Balkans? Stealth F-117's are shot down? The U.S. Air Force only has 100
cruise missiles left in their entire inventory? And they've publicly
stated so? And there's no more coming on line? Isn't that a military security
violation? They must be desperate! And you mean the Russians are mobilizing
warships into the Persian Gulf? I heard it on CNN! And Primakov says he'll
use nukes if Russia is threatened? Quick, we better tool up for
more missiles! We've got Cold-War-Two on our hands!
I mean the FED can whip up a batch of
fresh fiat money and lend it to the Treasury. The Treasury can authorize
the Pentagon to purchase new cruise missiles, smart-bombs, satellites.
Industry can borrow more based on new defense orders. We can even lend
to the Russians or the Chinese. If they start to fall behind in the game,
we can let new technology fall into their hands. They won't be able to
resist deploying it. And they've got an almost completely captive labor
force to milk in order to repay! Love that Marxism! (Shhh! Don't
mention Vince Foster or Ron Brown. They almost let the cat out of the bag!
Wet contractors had to take care of them and several more around ‘em.)
But even if the Russians or Chinese don't repay, the IRS can just take
a little more from the American public to make up the difference. The basic
policies of Lend-Lease are still in effect. If anybody around the globe
objects, we have all this military hardware to back up our position! We
can all go down to a Pratt House meeting and pat each other on the back.
Even a patriot like Patrick Henry couldn't object. Everybody's happy, right?
Well, except for a few hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees, and
a few tens of thousands dead. But for banking, military contractors, and
labor-a world monopoly -- uh, a world government -- is right around
the corner! And there's always the chance for a Swiss-Account kickback
of our very own! Right? Right? Nah! Just fooling.
Smaller Government.
We Promise.
By the 1980's, the government directly
employed more than 21 percent of the American work force. Some estimates
place the percentage of those who are dependent on government confiscation
of labor and resources at more than 50 percent of the population. Including
local, county, state, military, and federal employees, and those receiving
welfare, social security, business and personal subsidies, and those working
for subsidized organizations or receiving government pensions, welfare,
and unemployment, almost one out of every two Americans rely on government
payments for most of their income. And still liberals on Capital Hill wring
their hands and cry out for more compassion for the dependent class, more
taxes, more regulation. All this while they skim off the top 70 percent
of welfare payments to line their own political pockets and pad their own
jobs. Talk about nerve.
Has anyone stopped to really think where
the funding will come from if the trend reaches its logical conclusion,
and most individuals abandon themselves into the care of the state? Will
the statists simply endorse the nationalization and confiscation of all
property which remains in the hands of non-corporate private owners? Before
you smugly dismiss this remark as an exaggeration, remind yourself that
there are still Marxists among us who ideologically propose exactly that.
"It is obvious that all
the "reformers" of the last one hundred years were dedicated to the execution
of the scheme drafted by the authors of the Communist Manifesto in 1848.
In this sense Bismarck's Sozialpolitik as well as Roosevelt's New Deal
have a fair claim to the epithet Marxian." -- Ludwig von Mises, Planning
For Freedom
And if you plan to escape taxes by fleeing
your country, consider the demands they're putting on the future. They'd
like to track you to the end of the earth. The UN Development Program has
called for "World Government" with a global tax to raise an initial
$1.5
trillion to pay for it. Industrialized First World nations have agreed
in principle, that they should set aside 0.7 percent of their GNP for foreign
aid. Among the most frequently discussed proposals is the "Tobin tax,"
an envisioned UN levy on foreign exchange transactions, collected by individual
governments and pooled into a fund controlled by the International Monetary
Fund or the World Bank. While 0.7 percent may seem insignificant, remember
that U.S. income tax was initially targeted to affect only the top earners
and at a rate of just 1 percent. It would be interesting to somehow live
to see what kind of global taxing authority will be milking the world's
population at the end of the 21st century.
Some of the most respected thinkers
of the Enlightenment opposed making tax evasion a crime. William Blackstone,
Adam Smith, and Montesquieu all condemned severe tax laws. Montesquieu
wrote that it "was contrary to the spirit of moderate government." "Severe
punishments for tax offenses," wrote Blackstone, "destroys all proportion
of punishment, and puts murderers upon equal footing with such as are really
guilty of no natural, but merely a positive offense." But you might find
it difficult to agree even with such profound and influential thinkers.
If you're firmly established in the
system, you might tend to side with the view that any opposition to the
validity of modern income tax laws is tantamount to anarchy. You might
find it impossible to overcome the knee jerk tendency to shy away from
any challenge, even by intellectual reference, to the power of the entrenched
institutions. But another way to view it, and not without merit, is to
consider that direct taxation of income is actually little more than "Fractional
Slavery." So we've coined a new term and you can use it as you please.
Where overt slavery is unacceptable, fractional slavery is currently popular.
Whether that fraction might be as low as 1 percent -- although I wouldn't
venture to guess where in the world that might be -- or as high as 100
percent as in the former Soviet Union, it's still slavery by percentage.
To confirm this notion, just consider
how it actually is. Not how it's interpreted by the pundits and apologists
of the system -- those who would ridicule the very suggestion that income
tax is a form of slavery -- but how it actually is. And rise above the
argument about necessity or general welfare. Just reduce the facts to a
syllogism. A group of people create fiat currency and lend it through state
institutions to fund public programs from welfare to warfare. They compel
the public to "volunteer" a percentage of their lifetime at wage-labor
or business to pay back what was never owed in the first place, and with
interest. If anyone opts not to "volunteer," they are stripped of as much
as 100 percent of their assets, or imprisoned where 100 percent of their
time belongs to the state. Now this is arguably a form of slavery, however
covert or clever. Denying it is like claiming that the ultimate distillation
of alcohol isn't really alcohol simply because you dilute it again as a
percentage of some mixed barroom cocktail concoction with an exotic patented
name. The argument is reasonable even if a percentage of the revenue is
redistributed through state institutional programs. If it's not truly voluntary,
it's coercive. And if people are coerced into surrendering their labor
and their property, they are by default under duress --- under a form of
tyranny. They are therefore only less than full slaves by a relative percentage
and by relative choice. You can stay in the system and yield 20-90 percent
of your life and labor, or you can drop out and panhandle on the street
corner, or you can go to prison. It seems that an exceedingly clever power
elite in America has realized for some time now that the "best slave
is the one who thinks he's free."
"Boys, the secret of
trailing cattle [to the market and the slaughterhouse] is never to let
your herd know that they are under restraint. Let everything that is done
be done voluntarily by the cattle." --Jim Flood, Trail Boss, in The
Chisholm Trail by Dan Worcester
One unnerving aspect of the cattle analogy
--- where elites empower their collectivist social engineers to herd us
like their cattle or chattel --- is the method trail bosses used to deal
with any individual animal following its own mind. If it caused the others
to stray and threaten the goals of the cattle owners, then without hesitation
the trail boss shot it on the spot. If this doesn't remind you of the cute
little practice of the Communist Chinese and the Soviet Socialists in regard
to any perceived political threat to the system, you haven't been paying
attention. You've been spending too much of your time watching sitcoms,
entertainment award ceremonies, or ball games and too little considering
the reality around you. The Marxists shot the individual in the back of
the head with a single bullet, and sent the empty shell casing along with
a bill for its cost to the surviving family members. You can bet the survivors
paid those few pennies for the bullet, and you can bet they learned to
sit up and take notice. You can bet they learned to keep their mouths positively
shut. When queried if they had free speech and free elections protected
by their constitution, citizens would uniformly smile and reply, "Oh, absolutely-absolutely."
Those that dared to challenge the charade were gone overnight. The popular
adage was "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." Even
in America, all but the most ignorant and uninformed comprehend the political
meaning of the word "Siberia." And if you wear athletic shoes, you
should also know by now the meaning of the term, "Laogai."
"We need
to start talking about what is really going to make a difference in restoring
the liberties of our people and of this nation. We should make clear at
every opportunity that the income tax is a slave tax - inherently incompatible
with freedom. Abolishing it is therefore not just economically feasible,
it is a moral imperative if we are to meet our obligation to bequeath liberty
to future generations."
-- Alan Keyes,
writing in HUMAN EVENTS: The National Conservative Weekly,
April 17, 1998
On the reality television show, LAPD, a
Los Angeles police officer used this phrase to define an armed robber:
"-a guy who points a gun at people and demands their property." As April
15th approaches, how many secretly think of the behemoth we
call the federal government in similar terms? The IRS has recently begun
to issue firearms to its employees. Its fellow agency FinCEN is trying
to implement the "know your customer" spying regulations in banking. The
IRS has strategically removed signs and marking from its buildings to render
them less conspicuous. It can withhold the issuance of a passport if it
calculates that you owe it money. It has been credibly accused of illegally
auditing political opponents of the federal executive office. And it has
begun to imprison individuals with sentences comparable to those Stalin
imposed. Could we blame a person for at least instinctively making the
association with an armed robber, before forever banishing the thought
from his mind in an attempt at self-preservation? Oh, yeah. I love
the king's new suit of clothes. I really love it.
One thing's for sure. As we reach into
our depreciating savings to fork over the percentage demanded by the boys
and girls from the central protection agency, we know who the April Fools
really are, and it ain't Uncle Sam's elite or those who pull his chain.
Footnote
* A dollar becomes 99 cents
the first year, and then 99 percent of 99 cents the second year, etc. So
raising .99 to the 100th power yields .37. That means that 37
cents is left of the original dollar, representing a loss of 63 percent
of the dollar’s value.
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