Well, um, happy tax day, I guess. It probably should be have a miserable tax day.
It is, of course, April 15 today. It’s time to pay your pound of flesh to the criminal racket known as the U.S. Federal Government.
With it being tax day, Federico Lines of States Rights Radio and I discussed the income tax and the 16th Amendment, which allows this travesty, for our podcast this week.
The podcast (link here) can be found:
We’ve discussed it before and I’ve written about it many times. But it’s always a good time to remind people that we remain slaves to the state as long as we allow this to continue.
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/america-a-weekend-at-bernies-nation
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/podcast-restoring-the-constitution-597
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/the-irs-criminal-racket
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/podcast-restoring-the-constitution-45e
But as long as the American people remain dependent on the government, this robbery of the people will continue. Jeff Thomas wrote:
“Dependency upon government is a disease. Once it has been caught, it becomes chronic and does not reverse itself in a population until the system collapses under its own weight.”
Included in my discussion with Lines was his latest book The Road to Liberty: Bringing an End to the 16th and 17th Unprincipled Amendments.
One of the Supreme Court cases Lines wrote about in his book was Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. of 1895.
The Supreme Court struck down the income tax as it had before. The Tax Foundation described the law that was struck down:
“The tax – 2 percent on all income over $4,000 (roughly $90,000 today) – was America’s first peacetime national income tax. It was promptly challenged on the grounds that the Constitution requires direct taxes to be levied in proportion to each state’s population. The federal government had levied indirect taxes (such as on carriages, whiskey, and other specific products), but Pollock raised the question of whether the income tax was a direct tax or an indirect tax. Charles Pollock, a stockholder in Farmers Loan Trust, sued the company to stop it from paying the income tax (and notifying the government about who it paid income to).”
The income tax has always been in opposition to what the Founding Fathers envisioned. Yet, we have it today because of the 16th Amendment.
Paul Harvey summed it up beautifully in his 1965 broadcast “Freedom to Chains.”
“At Runnymede the Magna Carta was handed to King John on the end of a sword denying to royalty the right of unlimited taxation. Yet, you know it was for us, the American People, to become the first in recorded history ever voluntarily to surrender our rights to private property? Oh, yes we did. With an innocent sounding Constitutional Amendment, the Sixteenth, which says that ‘Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived’ and we forgot to put any limit to the extent to which we could tax ourselves. Conceivably we could be taxed out of all private property. We could be taxed not 70%, 80%, 90% but at 100%. We could be awakened one morning and find the government owns the farm, and the house, and the car, and has a mortgage on the church, legally. Historically, when any nation has taxed its people more than 25% of their national income, initiative was destroyed and that nation was headed for economic eclipse. Presently (1965) the American People are being taxed 33% of their total income….
At first there appears to be nothing wrong asking government to perform some extra service for you, but if you ask government for extra services government, in order to perform its increasing function, has to get bigger, right? And as government gets bigger, in order to support its increasing size it has to, what? Tax the individual more, so the individual gets littler. And to collect the increased taxes requires more tax collectors so the government gets bigger and in order to pay the additional tax collectors, it has to tax the individual more so the government gets bigger and the individual get littler and the government gets bigger and the individual gets littler, until the government is all powerful and the individual is hardly anything at all. The government is all powerful and the people are cattle.”
Of course, nobody likes to pay taxes. But the 16th Amendment was even more insidious than taxation. It was the first time the Constitution recognized a “right” of government.
Governments do not have rights. Governments have obligations and authorities. In America, those obligations were to protect our individual liberty, and the authorities were very minimal. The government had authority to setup courts, write a few laws (not the gargantuan legal code we have today), etc.
Instead, the 16th Amendment gave the government the ultimate authority to take the income of its people. It ultimately laid waste to what the U.S. Constitution was about by taking away rights from the people and giving it to government. It turned the people into slaves.
Do a little thought experiment. What if you sent in a tax return and instead of providing all the data the IRS tells you that you have to provide, you just responded, “I plead the Fifth”?
Of course, we all know what would happen. You’d be locked in a cage.
It doesn’t matter that the IRS tells us it’s “voluntary compliance,” as Aaron Russo exposed when he interviewed a former IRS commissioner for his 2006 documentary “America: Freedom to Fascism.”
In April of 2022, I wrote about Irwin Schiff for The Liberty Loft. Schiff, who died in 2015 at the age of 87, was arrested and given 14 years for basically writing a book making the argument that the IRS and the income tax is unconstitutional. He had several run-ins with the government regarding taxes and was ordered by a court in 2004 that he could not speak about nor sell his book The Federal Mafia. Others could sell his book, but not him. He was asked at a speaking event about the book, and he answered. That was his “crime.”
Irwin’s son, Peter Schiff, described how his father died, chained to a hospital bed like a dog. The government refused compassionate release requests for Irwin Schiff’s final days.
We need to understand how wicked and wrong the American tax system is today. And our focus should be on repealing the 16th Amendment. And part of that also comes by people demanding government spending being slashed. It all plays together. Every dollar spent by government is a tax as it has to be paid through direct taxation, debt or price inflation.
And we need to understand that the income tax is about control.
During the covid scam, the political puppets said they could print (or digitize) as much currency as they want to. So, why then are we taxed?
Of course, that printing press comes with serious consequences that we haven’t truly felt the pain from yet. We will. But that is beside the point that the political class, the bureaucrats and the bankers act as if they can print whatever they want without consequence. So, again, why are we taxed at all?
And also remember, our money is not theirs to give. So, why do we let them?
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/not-yours-to-give
With that said, I’ll just finish with a few headlines that show how criminal our government is and why the answer is us taking responsibility for our own lives and stop looking for change to come to Washington, D.C. Change starts locally.
Why They Are Creating $1 Trillion of Debt Every 100 Days
Fed Admits Losing $114 Billion
Hubris Runs Rampant at the Fed
Federal Reserve Responsibility for Consumer and Government Debt Crises
IRS Commissioner Says Wealthy Hide $150 Billion In Unpaid Taxes – As They Bully The Poor
New Report Exposes Massive Government Surveillance of Americans' Financial Data
The American Tax Racket: Involuntary extortion on a grand scale