Income Tax Day spurred me to dip back into Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martin’s, 1994) and pluck out a few lines from the “Taxing and Tyrannizing” chapter that sought to capture the essence of the IRS and contemporary taxation:
*The federal tax system turns individuals into sharecroppers of their own lives.
*Current tax law effectively gives the IRS the legal pretexts to send millions of Americans to prison.
*Federal tax policy is now little more than oppression in the name of revenue maximization.
*Tax rates measure the nation’s most costly entitlement – how much of people’s income politicians are entitled to seize.
*Income taxes have created a moral inversion in the relationship between the citizen and the State.
*The Internal Revenue Service is the authoritarian means to pseudo-paternalist ends.
*With payroll tax withholding, the citizen exists to provide financial grist for the State’s mill.
*The more of a person’s paycheck govt. seizes, the more of his life politicians control.
*Taxes are a debt to the State that politicians can increase at any time on any pretext.
*At what point does taxation become a form of political slavery?
We’re toast.