Taxation is theft. It’s that simple and that ugly. It may be a necessary evil but, for the moral health of the nation, it should be no more evil than necessary. The use of intimidation to compel citizens to part with their earnings is something a wise government would employ sparingly. Unfortunately, we do not enjoy wise government.
At this time the average American taxpayer relinquishes more of his earnings to taxing authorities than he spends on food, shelter and clothing combined , which is a clear signal that the taxing bureaucracies believe themselves to be more necessary than the necessities of life. The average taxpayer is forced to part with every nickel he has earned from January to May, year after year. Only half of the population pays any income tax; the other half of the population has grown comfortable nourishing itself parasitically on the fruits of its neighbors’ labors.
Things were not always so wrong-headed. From 1791 to 1802 the government got along just fine on internal taxes on tobacco, distilled spirits, carriages, refined sugar, corporate bonds and slaves. To pay for the War of 1812, Congress expanded taxation to include sales of gold, jewelry, watches and silverware. In 1817 Congress abolished all internal taxation and relied instead on tariffs on imported goods.
The first income tax was enacted in 1862 to fund the Civil War. During that war a person who earned from $600 to $10,000 a year was taxed at a rate of 3%, which was not too onerous considering the fact that the federal government was financing an enormous active military effort. People who earned more than ten thousand dollars paid a higher rate of taxation. Sales taxes were increased and the first “inheritance” tax was imposed. The Act of 1862 created the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The Commissioner was given the power to enforce the tax laws by prosecution and by the seizure of earnings and private property. The income tax was abolished in 1872, but was briefly revived in 1894-95. In 1895 the Supreme Court declared the income tax to be a violation of the United States Constitution and therefore illegal.
In 1913, The Club of Rascals we call Congress squashed all legal objections to a tax on personal earnings by passing the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which made the income tax a permanent tool of the taxing authorities. Within five years internal revenue collection reached the billion dollar mark. Within the next five years collections more than quintupled. The withholding tax on wages was introduced in 1943. This device increased the number of tax slaves to sixty million and tax collections to 43 billion dollars by 1945.
Today America has an enormous, complex and deliberately bewildering tax code which, in its ponderous printed bulk, makes all of the world’s written moral codes (the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, etc.) seem puny by comparison. The message is clear: the citizens exist to serve the government.
This realization is a face full of cold water to those traditionalists who still cling to the quaint notion that governments can only justify their existence by creating the conditions that will allow motivated citizens to realize their full potential. It is not the proper function of government to pick the pockets of the industrious and line the pockets of the lazy and the stupid. Because the government is the only party in any dispute which can legally use force against the other parties, its powers must be tightly controlled.
So what has America’s bloated bloodsucking taxation bureaucracy been up to lately? Well. . .a recent examination of Internal Revenue Service employees by the Treasury Department’s inspector general has determined that these taxpayer-supported parasites spend more than half of their on-line time at work visiting chat rooms, gambling, making stock trades and drooling over video pornography.
Deputy inspector general for tax affairs, Pamela Gardiner, put 16,000 I.R.S. employees under the microscope and discovered that most of their time at work was spent attending to personal business. Almost a quarter of the I.R.S. staff hung out in chat rooms. A fifth of them spent their time researching personal financial information. Seven percent spent their time shopping. Many of them frequented gambling and pornography services. So, to hell with you Mister and Ms Taxpayer.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) says he is not happy about the crappy state of affairs at the I.R.S. He noted that during this year’s tax season 37% of taxpayers calling the I.R.S. for tax information didn’t get their calls answered at all. The sorry tax slaves who did manage to get a response were given wrong answers almost half of the time (47%). Grassley wondered aloud whether I.R.S. employees were ignoring taxpayer inquiries because they were engrossed in personal activities online.
In a separate investigation, the I.R.S. inspector general monitored 82,000 incoming e-mails at the I.R.S. and discovered that almost half of them (47% again) involved non-business matters such as daily jokes, high school reunion news and news blurbs from pop-culture websites.
A wise government would never abuse its citizens this way. A dignified people would never tolerate such abuse. In a democratic republic (America?) the citizens could actually abolish a tyrannical and wasteful taxing authority. They could secure their private property. They could send the parasites packing. They could repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. It would only require determination.
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2001