Podcast: Restoring the Constitution-The 16th Amendment, Sanctioned Robbery
“We have entered an age of excessive taxation policies that benefit no American citizen. The only entity that benefits is the actual politician and the corporations’ seeking relief. The federal government has no authority to tax your income through direct taxation – from the beginning of this republic to this day.
The politicians in power and the political candidates seeking power in today’s republic have been an abomination. They have been self-absorbed, try to please their ego and gain favor with citizens by stating support for a decrease in taxation. They should be trying to eliminate the taxation burden onto the citizens. There would be no burden if taxation were not embedded into the Constitution.”—Federico Lines, The Road to Liberty: Bringing an End to the 16th and 17th Unprincipled Amendments
The above quote is from Lines’ latest book, and this week we talked about the 16th Amendment and the income tax in general on our podcast (link here), which can be found:
https://www.spreaker.com/user/16611197/tonight-s-episode-a-discussion-on-the-sa
Our discussion stemmed from a case, Moore v. United States, that the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing on Dec. 5. The mainstream media is stating puts the definition of “income” at question.
The case is from Charles and Kathleen Moore, of Redmond, Washington, who received a $15,000 bill from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) based on an investment in an Indian company which they have yet to receive any dividends from.
According to Reuters, the contention is “that ‘income’ means only those gains that are realized through payment to the taxpayer, not a mere increase in the value of property.”
“The U.S. federal income tax code has a problem with timing: sometimes it assesses taxes too early, in a way that creates a measurable bias against saving or investment. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Moore v. United States, a case all about timing. The plaintiffs, Charles and Kathleen Moore, argue that a component of the 2017 tax reform taxed their income from an international business venture too early, before it was ‘realized.’”
Ultimately, this case is just a prime example of the onerous and criminal nature of government after the creation of the 16th Amendment which 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.”
That was 1913, the death knell year to the American Constitutional Republic.
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/america-a-weekend-at-bernies-nation
Paul Harvey noted in his 1965 broadcast “Freedom to Chains”:
“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.”
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.
I’m going to finish with some of my previous writings on the issue of sanctioned theft known as taxation.
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.
“His crusade to force the government to obey the law earned him three prison sentences, the final one being a fourteen-year sentence that he began serving ten years ago, at the age of 77. That sentence turned into a life sentence, as my father failed to survive until his planned 2017 release date. However, in actuality the life sentence amounted to a death sentence. My father died from skin cancer that went undiagnosed and untreated while he was in federal custody. The skin cancer then led to a virulent outbreak of lung cancer that took his life just more than two months after his initial diagnosis.”
The unnecessarily cruel twist in his final years occurred seven years ago when he reached his 80th birthday. At that point the government moved him from an extremely low security federal prison camp in New York State where he was within easy driving distance from family and friends, to a federal correctional institute, first in Indiana and then in Texas. This was done specially to give him access to better medical care. The tradeoff was that my father was forced to live isolated from those who loved him. Given that visiting him required long flights, car rentals, and hotel stays, his visits were few and far between. Yet while at these supposed superior medical facilities, my father received virtually no medical care at all, not even for the cataracts that left him legally blind, until the skin cancer on his head had spread to just about every organ in his body.”
This year on tax day, I wrote about how our tax system makes us slaves to the state. We’ve flipped things upside down. Prior to the 16th Amendment, the government served the people. Today, the people serve the government.
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/the-irs-criminal-racket
Included was a clip from a 2006 documentary, “America: Freedom to Fascism,” by Aaron Russo.
Russo spoke to a former IRS commissioner, Sheldon Cohen, and it is eye opening.
There is no law requiring us to file income tax forms, and the IRS code states its “voluntary compliance.” Russo asks what that means to which Cohen replied:
“That’s a euphemism we use. We use voluntary compliance when we talk about traffic signals.”
Russo notes in his commentary:
“Traffic law states that it is mandatory to stop at a red light. The IRS code says that it’s voluntary comply. Mandatory and voluntary are the complete opposite of each other, yet he wants us to believe that they mean the same thing.”
Russo asked if an American can be prosecuted criminally for information disclosed on their income tax form, which Cohen said they could. So, isn’t that a violation of the Fifth Amendment?
Cohen responds:
“No…. It doesn’t incriminate you to put your income down.”
Russo states that income is not defined in the IRS code, but Cohen says:
“The law says that the government has the right to tax income from any source derived.”
Russo states that income is not defined, which Cohen says “that correct.”
Well, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1920 case Eisner v. Macomber that income is gains or profit from corporate activity, not wages from labor, and it ruled in the 1918 case of Peck v. Lowe that those who were not taxable before the 16th amendment were not taxable after.
To Cohen, it doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court said. Literally, he said that. He said that Supreme Court decisions are “inapplicable” as he cut off the interview saying “this is a waste of time because whatever I say, you’re not going to believe.”
Yes, Cohen demands that we just believe the IRS. They tell us we have to pay, we have to pay. Russo states:
“The IRS thrives on intimidation and fear, not by law. It’s no different than a criminal protection racket using force to extract your money from you.”
I’ll conclude here with a few resources on Presidents Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge, who Lines and I both discussed as a few of the presidents who actually worked to preserve liberty instead of destroying it.