SCHOLAR ISLAND

"A quarter of a penny tax per U.S. dollar on 'close of the day' positions in the international currency markets would yield $200 to $300 billion"

"Neither will it be that a people overlaid with taxes should ever become valiant and martial."

-Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Essays XXIX of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates

"Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new compositions; any bungler can add to the old."

-Edmund Burke (1729-97)

Speech in the House of Commons, 11 Feb 1780

Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's

Matt,Ch 22 v.21

"From 1931 through 2004 the federal government will have spent roughly $56 trillion in constant 1992 dollars-and that's not even counting more than $12.8 trillion just since 1968 in indirect spending through so-called tax expenditures , the tax concessions to individuals and corporations that deplete federal tax revenues."

Bruce S. Janssen

"Throughout man’s five thousand years of civilized life, civilization has been on the one hand uplifting, on the other cruel, inhuman, enslaving, and despotic. The ancient Greeks concluded, after looking over the civilizations of their era, that civilization and liberty were incompatible, since all civilizations operated upon despotism, And later, when Rome’s civilization was in decline, one Roman remarked to his friends, "Let us flee to the land of the barbarians where we may live as free men." The trick of a successful civilization is to avoid crushing the creative wellsprings of liberty. Aside from authoritarian police states, the next most crushing mode of ‘civilized’ oppression is taxation."

Charles Adams

Those Dirty Rotten Taxes ….The Tax Revolts that Built America….

"Simplification of the income and profits taxes has become an immediate necessity."

Woodrow Wilson (1919)

"The United States has a system of taxation by confession."

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black

   "To protect the interests of the less wealthy, the Constitution required that all revenue measures originate in the House of Representatives, elected by the people, rather than the Senate, whose members were to be elected by state legislators who were, in turn, overwhelmingly men from the top of society. But to protect those men of wealth, it required that "no Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census. " At the Constitutional Convention, Rufus King of Massachusetts wanted to know the precise definition of direct taxation. James Madison reported in his notes that "no one answered." It was a silence that would have no small consequences 100 years later. Indeed, that silence echoes loudly to this day in the American Tax system."

John Steele Gordon

Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of our National Debt

"To lay with one hand the power of the government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it on favored individuals ....is none the less robbery because it is done under the forms of law and is called taxation."

United States Supreme Court

Loan Association v. Topeka (1874)

"Money taken from the citizen, not to pay the costs of guarding from injury his person, property, and liberty, but to pay the costs of other actions to which he has given no assent, inflicts injury instead of preventing it. Names and customs veil so much the facts, that we do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom; and yet it clearly is one. The money taken represents so much labor gone through, and the product of that labor being taken away, either leaves the individual to go without such benefit as was achieved by it or else to go through more labor. In feudal days, when the subject classes had, under the name of corvees, to render services to their lords, specified in time or work, the partial slavery was manifest enough; and when the services were commuted for money, the relation remained the same in substance though changed in form. So is it now. Taxpayers are subject to a state corvee, which is none the less decided because, instead of giving their special kinds of work, they give equivalent sums; and if the corvee, which is none the less decided because, instead of giving their special kinds of work, they give equivalent sums; and if the corvee in its original undisguised form was deprivation of freedom, so is it in its modern disguised form. "Thus much of your work shall be devoted, not to your own purposes, but our purposes," say the authorities to the citizens; and to whatever extent this is carried, to that extent the citizen become slaves of the government."

Herbert Spencer (1897)

The Principles of Ethics

"Once again, U.S. taxpayers are struggling to complete their income-tax returns. They will pay accountants and attorneys some $140 billion this year to generate paperwork to accompany their checks to the IRS. The 46,900-page U.S. Tax Code governs the whole process, with enough loopholes to lasso a light breeze.

   Too bad this isn't Russia.

   Since Jan. 1,2001, Russians have enjoyed a 13% flat tax. That's right. The once-communist superpower now stands to the right of publisher Steve Forbes on taxes. The former GOP presidential contender staunchly advocates a 17% flat tax.

"Sometimes philosophical seeds fall on interesting ground," Forbes says. "After Marxism, which was the philosophical equivalent of the IRS code, something understandable has obvious appeal."

Deroy Murdock   Insight Mag April 1-8 2002

   "Since the IRS doesn't feel bound by court decisions from the Supreme Court on down, how can citizens figure out their own taxes according to the law? They can't . Besides, IRS agents can't accurately figure out anybody's income taxes, even using their own interpretations..."

Irwin Schiff

"Taxation is one thing, but what we now have in America is the illegal confiscation of wealth in the guise of lawful taxation."

Irwin Schiff

TAXATION

(This poem was recorded in Congressional Records of the seventy second Congress, first session, April 14, 1932)

Tax the people, tax with care,

To help the multimillionaire.

Tax the farmer, tax his foul,

Tax the dog, and tax his howl.

Tax the hen and tax her egg,

And let the bloomin’ mudsill* beg.

Tax the pig and tax his squeal,

Tax his boots, run down at heel;

Tax his horse, tax his lands,

Tax the blisters on his hands.

Tax his plow and tax his clothes.

Tax the rag that wipes his nose;

Tax his house and tax his bed,

Tax the bald spot on his head.

Tax the ox and tax the ass,

Tax the "henry"*, tax the gas;

Tax the road that he must pass,

And make his travel o’er the grass.

Tax his cow and tax his calf,

Tax him if he dares to laugh;

He is just a common man,

So tax the cuss just all you can.

Tax the laborer-be discreet—

Tax him walking on the street.

Tax his bread and tax his meat;

Tax his shoes clear off his feet.

Tax the payroll, tax the sale,

Tax his hard earned paper kale;

Tax his pipe and tax his smoke—

Teach him government is no joke.

Tax their coffins—tax their shrouds,

Tax their souls beyond the clouds.

Tax the farmer, tax their flocks.

Tax the servants, tax their socks

Tax the living, tax the dead;

Tax the unborn, ere they’re fed.

Tax the water, tax the air—

Tax the sunlight if you dare.

Tax them all, and tax them well.

Tax them to the gates of hell,

But close your eyes so you can’t see

The coupon-clipper go tax free.’

*--lowest sill of structure

· Henry---Henry Ford’s Model "T"

 

"We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements…our people ….must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give our earnings of fifteen of these to the government….have no time to think, no means of calling our mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain sustenance by hiring ourselves out to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers….And this is the tendency of all human governments….till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery….And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

Thomas Jefferson (a letter to Sam Kercheval 1816)

….WE’re currently laboring under a heavier tax burden than any other generation of Americans. Tax Freedom Day, as computed by the Washington, D.C. –based Tax Foundation, is defined as the day on which you stop working to pay taxes and start working f9or yourself. In 1929, Tax Freedom Day landed on Feb 9, in 1994 and 1995, our tax burdens weren’t paid off until May 6…..

The Tax foundation estimates the present generation of Americans spends two hours and 46 minutes of every eight-hour working day paying taxes, compared to only 52 minutes in 1929. Personal income taxes represented 34.9% of the average American’s income in 1992. In all, Americans spend more to pay off their tax burden than they do for food, shelter, and clothing combined.

The Myth of Progress,Humanist by William I. Lengeman III

It is a sobering thought that the federal government now could operate-even at its current level of spending-without levying any taxes whatsoever. All it has to do is create the required money through the Federal Reserve System by monetizing its own bonds. In fact, most of the money it now spends is obtained that way.

G. Edward Griffin

The Creature from Jekyll Island…a second look at the federal reserve

…In a 1945 speech to the American Bar Association, Beardsley Ruml, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, noted "The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government."…..from a speech called Taxes are Obsolete

Book: "The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and what to do about it" by Amity Shlaes

"It’s tacitly assumed that a government has the right to tax as much as it chooses. Only pragmatic discretion limits government rapacity. The taxpayer’s sole defense is an exceedingly feeble one: the vote. And that is offset by the fact that people who live off the taxpayer can vote too. Limitless taxation is the natural consequences of limitless government.

Joseph Sobran

"Oliver Wendell Holmes is often quoted: "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization." Then why don’t higher taxes produce a higher civilization? At one time most people assumed that chattel slavery was necessary to civilization too, and would have thought it foolhardy and utopian to abolish the institution. Others thought the military draft was necessary to national survival. Given a chance, experience proved otherwise.

Maybe someday Americans will wake up and realize that taxes are not only excessive, but wrong in principle. And unnecessary-except for that part of the population that expects to be supported by others."

Joseph Sobran

"Of course, Bismarck did not promote social reform out of love for the German workers....His object was to make the workers less discontented or, to use a harsher phrase, more subservient. He said in 1881: "Whosoever has a pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect...." Social security has certainly made the masses less independent everywhere..."

(A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman)

"We build up our institutions professing the utmost confidence in the intelligence and integrity of the people: but our very first act betrays distrust both of their sagacity and virtue. We fear they have neither sense enough to see that the expenses of government must be defrayed, nor honesty enough to pay them if directly applied to for that purpose: and hence we set about, by various modes of indirection, to filch the money from their pockets, that they may neither know how much they contribute, nor the precise purpose to which it is applied. Could a system be devised better calculated to encourage lavish expenditure, and introduce variety of corruption."

William Leggett 1836 The Plaindealer

"As I have gone through the literature, I have been shocked at the level of the arguments that have been used to sell Social Security, not only by politicians or special interest groups, but more especially by self-righteous academics. Men who would not lie to their children, their friends, or their colleagues, whom you and I would trust implicitly in personal dealings, have propagated a false view of Social Security-and their intelligence and exposure to contrary views make it hard to believe that they have done so intentionally and innocently. The very name-old age and survivor's insurance-is a blatant attempt to mislead the public into identifying a compulsory tax and benefit system with private, voluntary, and individual purchase of individually assured benefits."

Milton Friedman

Wanted: New Director for IRS

"Our firm has been awarded the assignment by the Department of the Treasury through Secretary O'Neill and a Presidential Oversight board to identify possible candidates to become the Commissioner of Internal Revenue Service(IRS). From this list the Secretary will recommend to the President individuals in his nomination to the US Senate for confirmation....The individual is preferably NOT a tax attorney and does not need to have any in depth exposure to the tax system or code. Prior government experience would be a plus either directly or indirectly. As an appointment of the President he/she is expected to fully support the President's positions and His Administration."

"The fundamental objective of taxation is to raise enough revenue to fund the essential functions of government. It should not be used as a tool for social engineering or to manipulate the marketplace. Unfortunately, in recent years, the tax code has been used for both, and in doing so, has become the biggest, most burdensome intrusion of the federal government in people’s daily lives."

Senator Richard C. Shelby

"Now it is the pleasure and pride of every American to ask, What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a tax gatherer on the United States?"

Thomas Jefferson (Second inaugural address_

   "Through the federal income tax on individuals, the government probes, monitors, and channels most private economic activities-what we earn and how we earn it, what we save and how we save it, what we spend and how we spend it. Privacy is shattered; the economy is throttled; taxpayers are impoverished. To what end?

Charlotte A. Twight

Dependent on D.C.

"The tax code has become near incomprehensible except to specialists."

Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihal

Chairman , Senate Finance Committee, Aug 11,1994

"I would repeal the entire Internal Revenue Code and start over"

Shirley Peterson

Former Commissioner, IRS,Aug 3,1994

"I want to pull the income tax out by its roots and throw it away so that it will never grow back. In its place, I favor a Tax on the consumption of goods and services."

Rep. Bill Archer of Texas

"We have so complicated the system, we’ve driven people crazy….Thousands of pages of pet rocks that have nothing to do with the national interest."

Senator San Nunn

"Tax laws are so complex that mechanical rules have caused some lawyers to lose sight of the fact that their stock-in-trade as lawyers should be sound judgment, not an ability to recall an obscure paragraph and manipulate its language to derive unintended tax benefits."

Margaret Milner Richardson

Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service, Aug 10,1994

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed"?"

James Madison (1788)

Nobody knows exactly what it costs to comply with the current income-tax system, but estimates range from about $75 billion to more than $300 billion a year.

"The current tax system is broken beyond repair. It is overly complicated and grossly unfair for many taxpayers."

Senator Bob Dole

In 1913, the entire federal tax law, plus explanations and other related material, fit into a single 400 page volume-as of late 1995 CCH’s flagship publications totaled 40,500 pages in 22 volumes.

"I would repeal the entire Internal Revenue Code and start over."

(former IRS Commissioner Shirley Peterson 1994)

A Walt Disney film entitled "The New Spirit", commissioned and promoted by the Treasury Department, in which Donald Duck is informed that it is "your privilege, not just your duty, but your privilege to help your government by paying your tax and paying it promptly.."

"The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to offer his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted on attorneys, accountants, tax shelters, and other costs. The tax penalizes savings and drags down the entire economy. Today’s income tax is incompatible with a free and prosperous society."

Harry Browne

"There is probably no tax in the past two hundred years that has been more debated, discussed, cussed, ridiculed, praised, and in the end, evaded, that the income tax…."

Charles Adams

"Informers are not used in the modern world except in the United States. Like the informers in the ancient world, U.S. informers receive a percentage of the tax recovered. It is ironic that the United States pursues a policy of promoting informers, when the American Revolution was sparked by a similar practice instituted by British revenue authorities in the 1760’s and 1770s.

Charles Adams

"Pausing in our tour, for the moment, we should note that the IRS sends about eight billion pages of forms and instructions a year to more than one hundred million taxpayers. Placed end to end, these pages would stretch to more than one hundred million taxpayers. Placed end to end, these pages would stretch 694,000 miles, or about twenty-eight times around the earth. The IRS despoils the environment, chopping down about 293,760 trees to print all of this paper. A postcard-sized tax form would go a long way toward saving America's forests."

Robert E. Hall & Alvin Rabushka

The Flat Tax; Second Edition

   The federal income tax imposes two huge costs on the American people, direct compliance costs (record keeping, learning about ax requirements, preparing, copying, and sending forms, commercial tax preparation fees, preparing, copying, and sending forms, commercial tax preparation fees, audits and correspondence, penalties, errors in processing, litigation, tax court cases, enforcement and collection) and indirect economic losses from disincentives-economists call these "deadweight losses," "excess burdens" or "welfare costs"-due to the reduction in output incurred by the complicated, high-rate federal income tax (reduction in labor supply, reduction in capital formation, reduction in new corporate formations, reduction in new business formation, failure to expand existing businesses, investments designed to reduce taxes rather than produce income, commonly known as tax avoidance, and tax evasion, just plain cheating)

ibid

"Payment for informing on your fellow taxpayer is part of the Internal Revenue Code, and there are special training sessions to show agents how to enlist people to inform on their friends, neighbors, employers-even family members…..

Charles Adams

"The greatest scourge of mankind, the detestable race of informers, must be stopped. We must stifle it in its first efforts and tear out the pernicious tongue of envy. Let not the judges receive….information of the informer; let them be given up to punishment as soon as any of them appear."

Emperor Constantine (313 A.D.)

   "At the same time, income tax laws arbitrarily determine how much of our lawfully earned income each of us is allowed to keep. From the government's perspective, it is simply not our money: occasional tax reductions allowing us to keep more of it are now called "subsidies"! Transfer programs too diverse to enumerate offer inducements to poor and non-poor alike, with rewards usually tied to alterations in private behavior desired by government officials. Social Security law hinders our ability to save and invest, undercutting our capacity to provide for our old age and would lift their children out of poverty. Taxes on capital gains further impede efficient investment, particularly when inflation disguises real losses and allows them to be taxed as gains. Double taxation of savings, scarcely known in the industrialized world outside the United States, reduces our ability to provide for our families while eroding a key source of investment capital. Many readers will readily identify, from their own knowledge and experience, additional examples of the countless powers now exercised by our omnipresent federal government."

Charlotte A. Twight

Dependent on D.C.

   "There is much talk these days about our income tax as a socialist redistribution scheme. That is indeed what it has become. But the scheme is not to take from the rich and give to the poor, deserving or not, as the courtesans of wealth in Washington would have us believe when they pontificate on the Sunday morning talk shows.

   Rather, as Orwell taught us, our is like all systems in which some animals are more equal than others-it is the pigs who grow economically fat off the tax system.

   We have systematically taken away the ability of most Americans to save by taxing them too heavily, and we have expanded the capacity of those with the most to save even more by lowering their taxes.

   The tax system today is not promoting prosperity based on individual enterprise and thriftiness. It is instead working, as all socialist redistribution schemes do, to enrich and benefit those who have access to the levers of power. In America that is the political donor class."

David Cay Johnston

Perfectly Legal

"Interaction between governmental entities that alters the cost to individuals of revising the scope of government authority. In this case, retaliation by one governmental entity may occur in response to citizens' provocation of another. For example, activism directed against a federal agency might trigger hostile scrutiny by the IRS, thereby raising the transaction costs to individuals of political dissent. In one case, the IRS responding to pressure from the Nixon White House, created in 1969 a long-secret internal group called the Special Services Staff (SSS), which acted with the cooperation of the FBI to investigate organizations that it deemed to be potentially subversive. As IRS historian Shelley Davis put it, FBI files on "activist organizations and individuals....began flowing freely into the IRS." The Clinton administration allegedly used the IRS to similar effect, targeting critics such as the Western Journalism Center, as John F. Kennedy did with other groups during his presidency through the "Ideological Organizations Audit Project." Another example surfaced in 1980 , when it was learned that U.S. military satellites had been used in support of surveillance of private businesses by the Environmental Protection Agency. Analogously, cooperating governmental bodies may use a strategy of selectively withholding benefits that otherwise would be granted routinely, as when magazines whose perspective offends government officials claim to have been threatened with removal of their non-profit status and denial of associated tax and postal benefits."

Charlotte A. Twight

Dependent On D.C.

 

"Bob , please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats....All right. Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?"....Here  the IRS is going after Billy Graham tooth and nail. Are they going after Eugene Carson Blake (President of the National Council of Churches, a liberal group)? I asked-you know, what I mean is, God-damn. I don't believe-I just don't know whether we are being as rough about it. That's all."

Richard Nixon (Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes..by Stanley I. Kutler)

*********************************

Book: "Tax Waste, Not Work" by M. Jeff Hammond

Book: "The Flat Tax: Second Edition" by Robert E. Hall & Alvin Rabushka

Book: "Hands Off: Why the Government Is a Menace to Economic Health" by Susan Lee

Book: "The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice" by L. Murphy & T. Nagel

Book: "For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization" by Charles Adams

Book: "A Popular History of Taxation: From Ancient to Modern Times" by James Coffeld

Book: "The Great Tax Wars" by Steven R. Weisman

Book: "The Power to Destroy: How the IRS Became America's Most Powerful Agency: How Congress Is Taking Control; And What You Can Do To Protect Yourself Under the New Law" by Roth and William H. Nixon

Book: "Perfectly Legal: The covert Campaign to Rig our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich, And Cheat Everybody Else" by David Cay Johnston

Book: "Federal Taxation in America: A Short History" by W. Elliot Brownlee