Libertarian Institute My Tenth Depraved Presidential Election by James Bovard, October 9, 2024 Presidential season is a time for Americans to restore their faith in democracy. How can folks not be filled with gratitude for being permitted a perfunctory choice of who will seize their paychecks and tyrannize them in the following four years? Actually, […]
One Hundred Years of IRS Political Targeting by James Bovard, April 15, 2024 One hundred years ago, Senator James Couzens, a Michigan Republican, took to the Senate floor to denounce the Bureau of Internal Revenue for abusing its power and trampling innocent taxpayers. Couzens launched a sweeping Senate investigation of federal tax collectors. One year […]
New York Post, March 29, 2023 Is Biden, like past presidents, unleashing the IRS on his enemies? By James Bovard Journalist Matt Taibbi testified March 9 before a congressional committee on the vast federally funded “censorship-industrial complex” the Twitter Files exposed. That same day, an IRS agent swooped down on his New Jersey home. Maybe […]
Google notified that my article from 20 years ago was recently reposted so I will run it up the flagpole here as well. That piece was partially spun off from my 1999 book, Freedom in Chains (St. Martin’s Press. Here is a paragraph from that book that did not make it into the article below: […]
The latest hubbub over whether slavery was the sole cause of the Civil War reminded me of this article on how modern governments have connived to seize unlimited power over citizens. The Declaration of Independence was clear that Americans rights pre-existed the creation of government. But today’s Statists see government as the fount of all rights. What […]
UPDATE: Here are some perhaps improved versions of a few lines in the following essay (thanks to Twitter space limits): Government worship tautology: because government has almost boundless power, it is presumably the source of all rights. *A good definition of liberty must provide a barricade that 10,000 federal agents cannot breach. *Tax burdens are […]
Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013 A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting One survey found that 75% of IRS respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie to Congress. By JAMES BOVARD Many Republicans are enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits […]
