Unfamiliarity, disinterest, and fear create today’s perfect income taxation storm. Unfamiliarity - who can make sense of an undecipherable tax code? Disinterest - income taxation is a bore. Fear – accountability to a Byzantine process long on presumption, short on fact, devoid of understanding.
Lawyers say they understand. They do not. Tax attorneys say they understand. Few do. Employers say they care. They don’t. Human Resource bots say they know. Clueless they are. Judges say they know. Jurists who, a century later, cannot say if the tax is direct, indirect, or neither, even in courts across the street from one another. IRS says they know. The agency only proposes solutions, and refuse accountability for answers it offers. Meanwhile, you are required to understand the income tax perfectly.
All of these people hold themselves out as taxation authorities. Each pursues interests not your own. Income allegors accuse you, under penalty of perjury without facts or witnesses, yet with no fear of prosecution. Attorneys want billable hours. Employers want IRS peace at any cost, no matter what law says. Human Resources exhibit reasoning fatal if exercised throughout the enterprise. Judges protect government revenues, parse tax law stacked in favor of government, and ignore limits of jurisdiction and jurisprudence. Revenuers chase anything that earns a bonus. They refuse to sign anything under penalty of perjury, but demand that you do.
And, you will. In the process, you confirm presumptions that authorize IRS to empty your bank account. You call IRS thieves for acting on what your employer did without authority, but which you approved anyway. Thereafter, people who question are steamrolled, ruined or imprisoned. Ir-rational risk is required to access Star chamber administrative proceedings, a process IRS admits is stacked hopelessly in their favor. Facts are dismissed as argument; and a terrified American public is silenced. If you fear April 15th more than you celebrate July 4th, it may be time to re-think fundamentals.
How the nation arrived at oppressive income taxation is not the particular focus of the Discourse. How you unwind from it is. ‘Unwinding’ that does not include confronting the tax bureaucracy, arguing pliable tax law in their courts, or engaging administrative sophistry they know and you don’t. Play their game, you lose.
There is a better way. You do not have to be a lawyer, CPA or taxation wonk to stand for yourself properly. But you do have to exercise choices fundamental to all free people. Prerogatives within reach of all Americans, and safer than how people are conditioned to file.
In 2008 a small group of people from across the nation gathered. They investigated what the income tax behemoth had become, exhaustively. The how’s, the why’s, and what to do about them. For years they examined how people with correct tax positions became imprisoned, and why countless other lives were altered or ruined. The group examined sound tax fundamentals. They examined popular tax theories bogus, imaginative, fraudulent, or un-provable. They learned where government was correct and it is provably wrong. And, they examined the action of a small number of people who had quietly rebuffed the income tax for decades.
The results shifted priorities. No longer did it appear necessary to memorialize ever-higher mountains of evidence that exposed the income tax fraud. Rather, focus properly turned to crafting effective remedy.
The group developed blueprints. They cleared overgrowth atop forgotten fundamentals no longer taught is government schools. They examined statutes and regulations, standing judicial opinions, and IRS policy and procedure. A sound foundation of critical scrutiny emerged, one scrutinized brick at a time. Answers developed that did not require endless shelves of legal books; answers safer to use than 1040s. And in the end, answers hidden in plain sight for a nation no longer educated in Constitution contours or how to animate them.
Meanwhile, despots moved with urgent speed to frame their unbridled power as the norm. “Custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude,” De la Boetie said, noting that people act “like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings.”
“Similarly, men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.”
A century of conditioning has created generations who only know income tax fear. Since government schools no longer teach American foundations, 21st century Americans endure tax bludgeoning entirely of their own making. The genius of the construct is that it requires individuals to indict themselves before government can do anything.
“It is true that in the beginning men consent under constraint and force. But those who come after them obey without regret, and perform willingly what their predecessors did because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke, then nourished and reared in slavery, are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance. Unaware of any other state or right, and considering quite natural the state into which they were born.”
Meanwhile, the Constitutional blueprint to stand against despotic rule gathers dust. Washington chuckles in public, belly-laughs in private. But smoke and mirrors, bluster and fear, does not change the nature of the income tax that requires individual decisions and individual performance.