Nearly everybody hates the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). What kind of service are they rendering you when they skim your earnings? We can’t help but feel that this process is just a feverish shakedown or outright theft. Have a look at how the tax collectors have been the butt of jokes over the years, especially in classic American sitcoms. An IRS agent is always grasping, sneaky, and desperate to prove Mr. and Mrs. America are not paying their fair share of taxes.
As novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand often noted, fair share is another way to paraphrase Karl Marx’s notorious declaration, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Rand argued that instead of income taxes, the federal government should hold an annual lottery to pay for its basic needs stemming from national defense, policing, and the justice system. If you sometimes hear some echoes of this vigorously common sense argument from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), it’s because he was named after the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
But although the IRS has inspired fear over the decades, it has also been brilliantly lampooned. I think of the gag from the fantastic Mel Brooks-created spoof of the spy genre, “Get Smart” (1965-1971), in which Maxwell Smart asks where SPECTRE-clone KAOS is getting its torture devices. “From the IRS,” is the deadpanned reply.
So it was with great joy that I recently read that the IRS is cutting its staff by 25 percent. President Donald Trump has scored another victory or at least fired the opening volley in what might be the ultimate termination of this parasitical army of bureaucrats.
Let it be the beginning of the end of an agency that is emblematic of government overreach. Since its start as the Commissioner of Public Revenue in 1862, the IRS has always sought to expand, not shrink, its “services.” In the beginning, income tax was seen as inimitably anti-American. The government had no right to garnish your salary. You worked hard for that; why should you share it with the state? The first income tax was levied to help pay for the cost of the Civil War, and it passed away soon after the end of that sanguinary conflict as the United States turned its back on massive spending and government interference in the economy and the golden era of laissez-faire capitalism began.
Interestingly, income tax and the formal creation of the IRS could not commence until the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, which gave the government the right to tax people’s income, or “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and regard to any census or enumeration.”
Income tax became law as the Progressive Era began to wane, and it was just before the beginning of the First World War. President Woodrow Wilson was a huge advocate of the measure, and that is what you might expect from a president who was an overt racist and supporter of segregation, who lied to the American people about his desire to force Americans into the most insane war of the twentieth century; who eviscerated freedom of speech and assembly after the Great War was over with out of control Attorney General Mitchell Palmer; and who then became the first globalist US president who wanted to subvert American sovereignty through membership in the League of Nations.
Income tax for the next 20 years was not as onerous as it would become and was essentially a flat tax. However, in 1935, to fund his New Deal programs, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration passed the Revenue Act and the Wealth Tax that introduced “progressive” taxation and hit the wealthiest Americans with a 75 percent levy. Again, in 1942, as – you guessed it – the United States entered the Second World War, Roosevelt added millions more Americans to the income tax rolls who were hitherto exempt because they were deemed too poor to pay income tax. Now, it wasn’t just the rich who had to pay; it was anyone making a basic living. With broader taxation parameters, the IRS was empowered to become increasingly authoritarian in its dealings with the American people. It escalated its ability to charge, prosecute, and jail Americans for not paying enough of their salaries to the federal government.
It’s been all downhill from there. The IRS has become a part of America’s police state, as I have argued in these pages some months ago. America has 18 intelligence agencies and a plethora of security agencies that can enter your home, arrest you, and cart you off to detention. The IRS has become another of these para-military, pseudo-police forces that seek to intimidate and cow American citizens. The Criminal Investigation (CI) branch of the organization is authorized to carry firearms in their duty. OK, think about this for a moment; in America, we have the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosive (ATF), and the IRS toting guns and making arrests. Oh, and the CIA and National Security Agency continue to spy on Americans, listen in on their phone calls, and assiduously produce blacklists of unreliable citizens. It is more reminiscent of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia than the untroubled Republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
The IRS has also targeted conservative groups. During the terror from 2010-2014 during the administration of President Barack Obama, the tax collectors deliberately barred groups associated with the Republican Tea Party movement from non-profit tax-exempt status. At least 41 groups were affected by political action. A financial settlement and apology were not forthcoming until Donald Trump became president for the first time in 2017. But if the IRS can play games like this with tax-exempt status, they can be equally mischievous regarding tax audits and who they deem deserving of a closer look.
The IRS is not just the face of government overreach; it is the very essence of the Deep State. Just as the Department of Justice continues to balk at orders and instructions from the Trump administration, the IRS remains a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy committed to attaining its objectives of ensuring Americans are overtaxed and very afraid to protest that condition.
Trump has discussed replacing the income tax with monies collected from tariffs by creating an “External Revenue Service.” He is fond of pointing out that in the pre-IRS days of the 1890s under President William McKinley, tariffs were sufficient to guarantee the ascendancy of American prosperity. Of course, there was no welfare state in those days, and the US treasury did not have to pay the era’s equivalent of a trillion dollars a year on national defense or the attendant wars and military assistance that accompanies today’s spending at the Department of Defense. So good luck with that.
But reducing the IRS to a barebones staff, bereft of the powers to seize and arrest, to garnish and threaten – that would be a fine start to not only reducing the authoritarian control of this bureaucracy but recognizing that income taxes are at best a necessary evil that shall be minimized at the very least and potentially eliminated if we can find an alternative that works, but only works well enough to furnish the needs of that government which is best – that government which governs least.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com