Minor Thoughts from me to you

While I was growing up, my dad frequently mentioned a set of tapes he had once heard. The speaker on the tapes proclaimed that no American truly owed income taxes. He proclaimed that the entire tax code was a fraud foisted upon the American public and that you were free to earn income without paying taxes. The idea sounded kooky, but my dad (and I) was intrigued and, as I get older, asked me to help him investigate the idea.

Well, Papa, I've got your answers in. Reason magazine published a May 2004 article: "It's So Simple, It's Ridiculous": Taxing times for 16th Amendment rebels.

The partisans of the tax honesty movement go beyond complaining that the income tax is too high, or that out-of-control IRS agents enforce it in thuggish ways. They claim, for a dizzyingly complicated variety of reasons, that there is no legal obligation to pay it. The continued life -- and even flourishing -- of that notion, in the face of obloquy, fines, and jail sentences, says something fascinating about a peculiarly American spirit of defiance. It may even say something encouraging about what it means to live in a nation of laws, not of men.

Never has any court anywhere -- much less the IRS -- accepted as valid any of the many arguments the movement offers for how and why there is no legal obligation for individuals to pay federal income tax. In fact, courts will fine you up to $25,000 for even raising them, insisting such arguments have been rejected so often by so many courts at so many levels that they are patently frivolous and time-wasting.