Podcast: Restoring the Constitution-Tax Season’s Here, Don’t Forget to Pay the Government’s Ransom Note
Tax season is coming to end. Normally, tax day is April 15. This year, it’s actually tomorrow, Tuesday, April 18. That’s because April 15 fell on a weekend, and today is Emancipation Day which is federally recognized.
Regardless of when we pay the government’s ransom, just remember that tax day serves as a reminder that we’re all slaves of the state. Pay your taxes, but do it under duress.
That’s the essence of my discussion with Federico Lines, of States Rights Radio, this week for “Restoring the Constitution.” The podcast (link here) can be found here:
And I’ll leave you with a section from a piece I wrote in December about 1913, the year the Constitutional Republic died with the creation of the 16th Amendment, 17th Amendment and the Federal Reserve.
The 16th Amendment
“The power to tax is the power to destroy.”—John Marshall
The first death blow to America was the 16th Amendment, known as the income tax amendment. It was ratified on Feb. 3, 1913. It states:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
It is true that the income tax had been tried by a few presidents in the past, but they were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
But with the 16th Amendment, it suddenly became “legal” for the government to seize a portion of our income every year.
The sad things is, the American people bought the lies of their government…. Americans were told the income tax would never be more than 2%. But the American people never got that in writing. Instead, we get an amendment that allows the government the “right” to take 100% of our income, if it so chooses to do so.
Paul Harvey noted this in his 1965 broadcast “Freedom to Chains.”
Harvey said:
“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.”
Harvey added:
“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 be taxed. 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.