Death and Taxes
So I started watching the film America: Freedom to Fascism. From the title I thought that it would be about declining civil liberties. Unfortunately it is about how some tax protesters don’t like the income tax. I was curious about this and decided to spend a little bit of time researching the issue. The whole movie becomes a bit comedic when it is watched with the following wikipedia page open at the same time: “Tax protester Constitutional arguments“. The people interviewed in the movie cite most of the court cases and arguments from that wikipedia page. Unfortunately the movie does not present the fact that almost every single court case against paying an income tax has been thrown out or rejected in some form or another.
The director of the movie interviews a tax expert and then proceeds to ask him about the court cases and constitutional law questions instead of questions about the tax code. Since the tax expert is not a constitutional lawyer and is not charged with litigating the legality of the 16th amendment he doesn’t have the answers that the director wants. The director then uses this as his big gotcha moment where the lying stealing government is caught with its pants down. I didn’t watch too much past this since the director was obviously not being even handed. I know that Ron Paul is interviewed later on and that since Ron Paul wants to abolish the income tax I’ll go ahead and assume it is a glowing interview. It’s interesting to peer into the mind of libertarians and their hatred of taxes. It turns out that it is a bit frightening.
I might watch the rest of it but probably not. Instead I’ll probably watch this video about Monsanto. (the video got pulled since I posted it)
Update: It looks like the tax protester people got to Wesley Snipes. He decided to not pay taxes for 3 years and got 3 years in Jail.
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It was Wesley Snipes who was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for willfully failing to file income tax returns for three years (the maximum possible sentence) and not Denzel Washington.
For other information about “famous” tax protesters, see http://tpgurus.wikidot.com
Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
Interesting. Did it cover any of the folks who refuse to pay the portion of their taxes used for military spending?
Nope. These tax protesters don’t think that taxing income is lawful. People that withhold their taxes for reasons such as war withhold their taxes because they disagree with how it is spent. I think that the difference is between tax protesters and tax resistance:
protesters: Don’t like taxes, specifically ones like income tax.
resistors: Refuse to pay taxes to fund the military or a war.
They took down the Monsanto video! Apparently the Film Board of Canada asked them to take it down. Figures.
Here’s my favorite anti income tax argument (which may or may not appear in the above-mentioned film). It depends on three facts which are more or less undisputed.
Item the 1st:
Ohio’s statehood was never formally established by the same process as all other states. This seems to be due to a simple oversight; congress forgot to induce Ohio into the union and simply started calling it the state of Ohio. Ohio was granted retroactive statehood in 1953.
Details: http://www2.uakron.edu/OAH/newsletter/newsletter/Autumn2002/features.html
Item the 2nd:
The 16th amendment was proposed under William Howard Taft in 1909. Before the end of his presidency, all but 2 of the required 36 states had ratified the amendment. The 16th amendment explicitly allows the federal government to collect income taxes.
Item the 3rd:
William Howard Taft was born in Ohio.
Argument:
Because Taft was born in Ohio, which at the time had not been formally admitted to the union, Taft was not born in the United States, and was therefore ineligible to be the president. Because Taft’s presidency was illegitimate, everything the government did under his leadership is illegitimate. Hence, the federal government does not have the authority to collect income tax.
Q.E.D.