Tax idiocy

Via War Liberal, we get this silly post from Dale Amon of Samizdata. Dale cites a "public hearing" by a group called We the People which claims to prove that the income tax laws are unconstitutional.

Here's a blurb from their web site which discusses the "startling, compelling, disturbing and irrefutable" proof of their thesis:

The record of the hearing proves conclusively for history:

• The Internal Revenue Code does not make most Americans liable to file a tax return and pay an income tax.


• People have a right to the fruits of their labor; the income tax is a slave tax, and is prohibited by the 13th Amendment.


• Congress lacks the authority to legislate an income tax on the people except in the District of Columbia, the U.S. Territories and in those geographic areas within any of the 50 states where the States have specifically approved it, in writing. No legislative jurisdiction means no taxing authority.


• There is no income tax exception to the 5th Amendment's guarantee of the Peoples' unalienable right not to be compelled to be a witness against themselves; individuals do, in fact, waive their 5th Amendment (Miranda) right not to be a witness against themselves when they sign and file a Form 1040 tax return.


• Personal income taxes polarize and divide an otherwise united nation and promote class warfare and mistrust of our government.


• The IRS, the courts and even the NY Times cite the 16th Amendment as government's authority to impose a tax directly on the People's labor. However, the 16th Amendment did not come close to being lawfully ratified by ¾ of the states as constitutionally required, and was fraudulently declared to have been ratified in 1913 by Philander Knox, the Secretary of State. The 16th Amendment is null and void.


• The IRS routinely violates the 4th Amendment due process and privacy protections of Americans by seizing assets without lawful authority or a court order and by denying citizens their right to statutorily-prescribed, administrative remedies.


• The IRS willfully and illegally manipulates taxpayers' Individual Master Files for the purpose of creating time-barred assessments, creating and providing fraudulent certificates of official records to the court to support illegal assessments, manipulating master files to short-pay taxpayers' legal interest owed by the government, collecting social security from taxpayers via levy in direct violation of the law, willful and intentional creation of fraudulent penalty and interest against taxpayers, and willful and intentional violation of taxpayers rights to due process.


• The IRS, without legal authority, routinely and illegally prepares "dummy returns" with inflated assessments for taxpayers who legitimately do not file a tax return as a means of punishing those who stand on their legal rights in choosing not to file.

There's a word that we have in the States for people who believe this kind of stuff, Dale. We call them "fruitcakes". There's another word which applies to their arguments, one which is given to them by the courts: "frivolous". You need to understand just what this means. When judges call your argument "frivolous", they're not merely saying that you're wrong and you're wasting all of our time. They're saying that your argument is so totally misguided or has been so frequently and completely refuted that it has no place in the courtroom. In some cases, judges will hold people in contempt for using "frivolous" legal arguments.

Had Dale Amon taken a few moments to do some research, he would have discovered what kind of arguments, legal and otherwise, that We the People use against the income tax. Setting aside the parts of their attack which are merely personal opinion (i.e., the tax "polarizing" an otherwise united nation), a few more minutes of research would have led to the inevitable dicsovery that all of these arguments have been shot down in court multiple times, with many of them attaining "frivolous" status. Go take a look at the Casebook for Dealing with Extremist Legal Arguments. See how often the arguments that the income tax only applies to Washington, DC, or that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified, have been tried and thoroughly rejected.

You want to argue that the IRS does and has done Bad Things to ordinary taxpayers, I'm there with you. It's a million miles from there to the notion that the 16th Amendment is illegal and has been for nearly 100 years, and the journey you have to take to get there goes straight through Crackpotville and Kookytown. People who advocate these arguments are either criminally obtuse or just plain criminals. People who cite these advocates favorably are dupes. Shame on you, Dale.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 08, 2002 to Skepticism