15A019 Is It Tax Time Soon? by Jim Davies, 3/14/2015    

Some call the 15th of that month "April Fools' Day" because of the common habit of surrendering thousands of dollars of hard-earned money to the FedGov, by means of a duly signed 1040 Form - which, they say, is a voluntary action. Are they right? - yes. And, no.

One way to fathom that is to consider the Schiff trial summary; Irwin Schiff and friends were convicted in 2005 and he was caged for 13 years. That page shows his unanswerable - and unanswered - arguments that no law obliges anyone to have any truck with the IRS, and how Judge Kent Dawson malevolently brushed them aside, to deceive the jury.

But another way to answer it is to pose a more penetrating question: suppose there really were a law compelling payment of a tax on earnings. What difference would that make?

Lexland has clear laws taxing income, while the government of neighboring Malvolia confiscates precisely the same amount of money but doesn't write its policy down - it uses just a set of black-robed villains who enforce it on the fly. Workers in each country are equally robbed. What matters is the theft, not the manner of the thieving.

Most taxes are supported by clearly written laws – permits the thieves write to grant themselves a right to steal. Does that turn those acts of theft into something morally good? - no way. Tax is theft, no matter how it's administered. Governments write laws just to confuse their victims, to convey the impression that the confiscations are civilized; and if they slip up and fail to write one properly (as in the Income Tax case) it makes no difference at day's end. The reason the money will be extracted is that brute force will be used, or at least threatened. The problem is not law or the lack of it, the problem is government and its force.

Consequently, the only way April 15th (or some other day) will cease to be Tax Day is to terminate government, the great confiscator. If you have government, you will have tax, for government is by nature incapable of being an actor in the market; that is, of engaging in voluntary exchanges. By nature, it is an entity based on force. It governs.

That being so, might not tax resistance be a good way to bring about that termination? - and might not the income tax be a good place to start, given that it's unprotected by a veneer of law? Some years ago I did hold that view, but I've changed my mind. A large-scale tax strike would certainly help, but I no longer think it can do the job. Here's why.

1. Vast though it is, the Federal Income Tax confiscates only about a trillion dollars a year, while the total grabbed by all levels of government is around seven trillion. (It's true that the i-tax facilitates collection of SS and state income taxes, but those could be collected without it, given time for laws to be fabricated.) So even a total victory over the i-tax would cut government revenues only by 15%. No termination there.

2. Again assuming a total victory, the FedGov will not sit idly by as its favorite revenue stream dries up; it will enact a sales or value added tax to yield as much or more. Even harder to avoid. Rates of VAT in Europe typically range from 15% to 25%. They will steal it going, instead of coming; but steal it they still will. Stealing is what they do.

3. 1,000 or so resolute resisters to the i-tax, as well-prepared as Irwin Schiff, might indeed bring the government's "justice" system to its knees, especially if a few of them actually won acquittal. Widespread disorder might follow. But how exactly would such a meltdown cause government to go out of existence? - more likely, alas, that some even more brutal replacement would arise, perhaps complete with swastika armbands.

My struggle - yours too, I hope - is not so much against non-legislated tax, but against government and everything it does, including taxation whether legalized or not. My interest is therefore in what will cause it to expire; and my perception is that it will expire only when nobody will work for it. To terminate government, therefore, means motivating everyone to decline to work for it, withdrawing the support of their labor.

In turn, that motivation will prevail only when everyone - the whole population - understands what government really is, and what freedom is about. They need to grasp and embrace the elements of the libertarian philosophy. That means education, and particularly a method of delivering and distributing that education; and I know of only one way to distribute on that scale in an acceptably short time period, and it's one-to-one replication. Friend, regularly introducing friends one at a time to a school for liberty, and with graduates doing the same.

Such a school is already in place, here.