Sorry guys, Sally is trying to train me. In moving things around to attribute proper authorship, I lost the comments that were made to the article below.
Rand: Thanks for forwarding the article. The quote from Goldwater was used with good effect by democrats to smear him as a nut-case warmonger in his run for president in 1964. The famous daisy wiped out by the mushroom cloud commercial finished the job.
You’re right that the income tax is a Robin Hood tax, justifying theft from those who work in order to reward those who vote. But lots of people have come to think stealing from rich people represents the height of ethical fairness. Consumption taxes on non-essentials are in every way fairer, but don’t reward the political class with a reliable enough stream of loot, nor do they feature an easy target for the envy driven politics that are so useful in democracies.
Mr. Marshall: Yes, Mr. Brown is married to a dentist, not a dentist himself. Sorry for the mistake. I hope it doesn’t reflect less favorably on his sanity.
And Dan: I think interpreting the filing of a tax return as some sort of a census is a stretch. A census is simply a count of the people in the country. The Constitution calls for one every ten years. The sole purpose of it is to have the numbers available to properly apportion direct taxes. If the filing of a return were the means of taking a census, it would necessarily count only those who had to file, leaving out a major portion of the population.
The Constitutional census was never intended to be the the vast data mining project it has become today. Direct taxes were occasionally used by Congress in the 19th century. But they are unwieldy, as the founders intended that they should be. Congress has to have a fixed amount in mind for a fixed purpose. Then the states are responsible for collecting the tax and sending it in. It could never produce the constant stream of do-whatever-you-want-with-it wealth that today’s fraudulently enforced income tax produces.
The income tax today is an indirect tax on certain privileged occupations and businesses, as it has always been. It is only through misapplication and deception that it has taken on a general applicability. And it is all done perfectly legally. I will have more on that soon.
I recommend this website www.losthorizons.com and the book that is for sale there "Cracking the Code." The author’s writing style is not easy, nor is the material, but the effort is worth it to those with an interest in the rule of law, or what remains of it, in the U.S.
The writing I do here is first published in Key West the Newspaper, an obscure weekly in which I am limited to about 1000 words at a time and committed to at least the effort to stimulate, inform or amuse the paper’s readers. My success at that is uneven at best. My tendency to procrastinate often allows typos and less-than-engaging prose to escape notice in the swirling haze of deadline. For that I apologize.
Hi, It’s the second time i’m posting you without a reply. I found your site using Yaehoo, does your site support firefox?
Hi, It’s the second time i’m posting you without a reply. I found your site using Yaehoo, does your site support firefox?
I can’t quite get comfortable with the idea that the founders had any definition other than “a count of the population” in mind for the word census. The purpose of the count had to do with taxes, but they still wanted to count everybody, whether they had property to tax or not. The census and apportionment were include to make collecting such taxes harder, not easier.
The founders never intended that there should be a regular, ongoing, direct tax on the labor of Americans. They made direct taxes difficult to impose because they wanted them to be small and rare.
We shouldn’t forget that the guys who wrote the constitution were ready to risk hanging because they though a 2% tax on tea was unjustified. When I try to picture how guys like Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, or “give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death” Patrick Henry might react to having to provide a detailed annual report of their private finances to a tax collector so they could hand over nearly half their earnings, all that comes to mind is guys in satin pedal pushers reaching for muskets.
Well, at first glance, I’d agree Hal, but, the word census has two definitions – the first is a count of population along with demographic information, the second, however, is “a count of the citizens and an evaluation of their property for taxation purposes” – in fact, that’s the original definition of the word from Latin and the Roman Empire. Now, as I said in my lost comment, this comes from a class I took years ago… many years ago… but I do remember that this was exactly the justification that was presented for the mandatory filing of tax forms – as a way of counting (one is required to enumerate the number of people the tax form represents) and obviously an evaluation of those people’s property. It’s really not that much of a stretch. As I’d noted in my comment, the part that has become a problem (beyond the convolution of the code) is that because the code has been expanded to allow all sorts of loopholes and privileges, it’s no longer an apportioned tax based on the data collected in the “census”; whereas the founders appear to have had a pretty much flat tax in mind based on that data.