Josh First's Blog

Why is today Tax Day?

Today is “Tax Day,” if such a thing could or should be celebrated or even noted among civilized peoples.

It is like marking “Oppressive and Scary Invasive Big Government Day” on your calendar.

Historically, tax collection involved brute force, some raping and pillaging to convey a sense of inevitability. A ‘heavy hand’ at best, done by the most powerful at the expense of the least powerful.

Historically, poor peasants hid what they could from tax collectors, who treated the poor working people and small landholders as a host body on which to parasitize, slowly sucking out the life force. Like a  vampire, concentrating vast wealth collected from a large number of people into the hands of a very small number of people.

Historically the extracted wealth was concentrated in the hands of nobles, monarchs, empires.

In more modern times Socialists stole private wealth by revolution or through bureaucratic means, and repurposed it in the name of “income redistribution.” But somehow socialism always involves keeping the Socialists in complete power, too. Over the peasants, once again. Cuba, Soviet Russia, China, and now Venezuela…all totalitarian, authoritarian, unfair, failed. And Socialist.

By its very nature, humans in centralized authority always crave more money, because money translates into soldiers with weapons and thus, more power, more control over other people.

Centralized government always craves more money, even in a democracy or republic, because money translates into more bureaucratic and enforcement power. People in centralized government get to make decisions for everyone else. It’s an ego trip. Rarely does all that bureaucracy actually become tangible services to the actual taxpayers at the ground level, where people live their daily lives.

Consider America.

America was originally created as a confederation of autonomous states, obligated to one another through the concept of ‘full faith and credit’, where the licenses and official bureaucracies of each state would be accepted by all the others. As equals, though different from one another, slightly unified through a weak central government. If you didn’t like the way one state ran things, you could move to another state. Rarely did you, the citizen, encounter the central government.

When the issue of slave states and free states arose in 1794, the states nearly went to war against one another, and finally did so in 1860.

Today a lot of urban Americans are unabashedly rethinking a great deal of what it means to live in America. Even things that have been settled since the nation’s founding, like basic freedoms. In much of their thinking, states are no longer autonomous, but are rather vassals to or withered appendages of the  central government in Washington, DC. Citizens are no longer free to make their own decisions, and smarter, better-educated technocrats with the best of intentions will make those decisions for them.

Some of this urban rethinking of what it means to be an American is pretty radical stuff, and all of it involves a much stronger centralized government. The kind of centralized government that can quickly and authoritatively reach deep into the personal lives of all citizens, and threaten them with severe punishment for not following the new rules which the urbanites envision.

For example, these largely urban Americans now openly want to criminalize the otherwise peaceful ownership of basic firearms (AR15s, and semiauto shotguns and rifles), and clamp very tight controls on the ownership of all the other firearms they would allow (bolt, pump, lever actions, even single shots). They look at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and simply scoff. They themselves do not want to own or use these damned guns, so why would anyone else?

Turn them in, or else!

Another largely urban idea is the notion of human-caused global climate change (begun as the former global cooling, then global warming, now global climate change). It is premised on the otherwise very real fact that humans have previously and continue even now to seriously degrade the natural environment that sustains us.

But a bunch of urbanites and false academics want to criminalize and severely punish the non-belief in human-caused climate change, a well-deserved rejection of heavily politicized climate change “science.” Despite the fact that these urbanites have a greater and less sustainable impact on the natural environment than rural landowners.

That all these crushing new rules and laws are not directly connected to crime reduction or pollution reduction is an indication of how radical these ideas are, how radical the urbanites have become. There is no direct link between one thing and the other, no cause-and-effect result, but they want it nonetheless.

These proposed laws and rules are about bureaucratic control, that is all. No pretenses are made at amending the Constitution to achieve these changes.

Rather, these changes to constitutional rights would simply be done by legislative power grab or even worse, by executive fiat, which the Obama administration began experimenting with.

Their best argument is that “times change and we all need to change with it,” i.e. certain guns do not fit these modern times and therefore must go away.  But the time-honored established process for legitimately implementing that change is not suggested by the advocates of change.

Historically, huge swings in American law and custom were mostly associated with major improvements in lifestyle. For example, the 13th (ratified 1865), 14th (1868), and 15th (1870) Amendments were all about freeing and then protecting the African slaves.

After the 15th Amendment, for another 43 years America did not ratify another constitutional amendment, probably because the changes in rights and then law resulting from those three big amendments took a long time to digest politically and culturally.

Four long decades later, in 1913, the 16th Amendment was ratified, giving the US Congress the “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes…” This was a huge change in American politics and culture, as it concentrated tremendous authority, power, and wealth in the hands of a relative few in the nation’s capital.

Today this is known as the Income Tax, and it concentrates tremendous power into the hands of the few, funding everything the central government does, and much more, including returning to some states and foreign allies parts of that collected money. Or funding heavily politicized “research” into “gun crime” and “climate change.”

So here we are 105 years later after the 16th Amendment was ratified, and after such a long time Americans can really legitimately now ask themselves if this way of funding the central government is effective, fair, or consistent with a constitutional republic that puts the freedom, liberty, and happiness of its We The People citizens first and foremost.

In the context of prior constitutional change, 105 years between amendments is a long time, and one could easily argue that America is now overdue for a revisitation to the income tax. Or at least a hearty debate about it.

A flat rate tax is the fairest, most efficient. Why don’t we do it that way?

Plenty of evidence now that the 16th Amendment’s income tax is inefficient and unfair, and worse, that it results in an invasive, un-American GOTCHA! government culture where unaccountable bureaucrats are back to terrorizing the peasants with all kinds of sudden searches, house tossing, life-and-liberty-threatening activity with the power of official coercive force behind them. The IRS was turned into a weapon against conservative groups with which the Obama administration disagreed.

We are back to Medieval times with this kind of official behavior, and it is really not the kind of government that America was founded on or meant to be. Quite the opposite.

You could argue pretty effectively that the Income Tax has not been good for American citizens, and that the 16th Amendment (or the IRS) concentrated too much power in the hands of too few unaccountable central government employees.

The complete failure of the 18th Amendment (ratified 1919, repealed 1933), known as “Prohibition,” which was a complete ban on alcohol, reminds us that America went through a previous round of control-freak exploration around the same time as the 16th Amendment. Very similar to what is being proposed now by today’s modern Prohibitionists, this time against guns and personal freedom. Their “war on drugs,” “war on poverty,” and a zillion other do-gooder laws haven’t worked to eliminate or even reduce crime, so why not go back to holding up the old law-abiding people for better results?

After all, people control is the real goal, as it always has been since time immemorial.

It stands to reason that American citizens would now revisit Tax Day and the 16th Amendment altogether. Consider them for abolishment or replacement, because on the other hand we have a pile of urban Americans demanding that about fifty million fellow citizens be turned into criminals overnight by virtue of simply exercising their Constitutional rights with firearms or freedom of conscience.

I mean, if something so basic and fundamental as personal freedom is being questioned and slated for abolishment, then heck, let’s really open up the process to include subjects and government activity long, long overdue for review, like tax collection. One should naturally follow the other.