-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.14/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.14/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 14 </A> ----- The Laissez Faire City Times April 5, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 14 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ----- April Fools by Ace 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 d ependent 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 "spent 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. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 14, April 5, 1999 ----- Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved Disclaimer The Laissez Faire City Times is a private newspaper. Although it is published by a corporation domiciled within the sovereign domain of Laissez Faire City, it is not an "official organ" of the city or its founding trust. Just as the New York Times is unaffiliated with the city of New York, the City Times is only one of what may be several news publications located in, or domiciled at, Laissez Faire City proper. 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