If you're like millions of Americans, you're sweating to meet the April 15 tax deadline.
But as today's guest writer, Jeffrey Tucker, reveals, that Washington takes a portion of your income from you is the least of your problems.
That's because the income tax allows an outrageous level of intrusion into your private life... including the news that the IRS now considers it completely legal to demand access to your email archive.
To find out exactly what powers the IRS has over your private communication... and how you can minimize the amount of money you hand over to Uncle Sam... read on.
By Jeffrey Tucker, Executive Editor, Laissez Faire Books
The least of the problems with income tax is that it takes your money. The really big problem is that the income tax takes your life. It gives the government direct access to the things you own and sets up the political-bureaucratic sector to be the final arbiter of what you can and cannot consider to be yours.
Illustrating this point is the bitter news that the IRS has considered it completely legal to demand access to your email archive whenever it wants. This news came about because of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The filing unearthed a 2009 memo that stated outright: "The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications."
Forget search warrants and legal processes. In the interest of getting its share, the government can have it all on demand. This assertion was made again in 2010 by the IRS's chief counsel: The "Fourth Amendment does not protect emails stored on a server" and there is "no privacy expectation" on email.
This assertion openly contradicts a 2010 legal decision from the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals. United States v. Warshak said that the government must obtain a probable cause warrant before forcing people and providers to cough up email archives. Granted, even that's not much protection. Government always has its "probable cause."
Good for the ACLU for making an issue of this. There will continue to be legal wrangling over this issue, which is obviously important to absolutely everyone. But at some level, it's all beside the point. The problem isn't the legal process that allows the government to do what it wants; the problem is that government has a hook into personal income that allows powerful people to have their way with the whole of your life.
As we look back at the history, we can see that the income tax enabled a century of intrusions into our lives. It's been 100 years of a form of imposition that no American in most of the 19th century could have ever imagined or tolerated.
The income tax is what enabled Prohibition, for example. Without the ability to monitor and adjudicate how people made money, the power of enforcement would not have been there at all. (Remember that Al Capone was not convicted for bootlegging, but for tax evasion.)
It is what made possible the central planning of the New Deal. The government's presumption that it owns the first fruits of labor gave rise to wage controls and mandatory participation in the Social Security system. It allowed the central planners to push aside young workers and tell them that they aren't allowed to be part of the workforce. It allowed the introduction of the minimum wage that continues to shut out whole sectors of society.
And look what happened during World War II. The price controls on wages and salaries – made possible only because the income tax gave government a fiduciary interest – inspired companies to start offering health-care benefits as part of the compensation package.
That practice was intensified over the decades until it became mandatory. That practice is a major source of the health care problems we have today. So there we have it: There is a direct link from Obamacare today back to the income tax of 100 years ago.
Just the other day, with the IRS still on the march, the elaborate lunches provided in highflying companies such as Google entered onto the radar screen. Shouldn't these wonderful buffets be considered as compensation subject to tax? There is just something unseemly about an agency that can't let people even enjoy a lunch without demanding a cut.
Frank Chodorov, author of the masterpiece The Rise and Fall of Society, was right to call the income tax the "root of all evil." We look back to history and are in awe that anyone ever had the full right to earn whatever money he or she wanted to and to never have to tell the government about it. But that was the way it was for the dominant part of American history.
That's the system once called freedom.
It's striking when you realize just how completely unnecessary the income tax is for the funding of government. Last year, the income tax generated roughly $1.2 trillion in revenue for the government. What if we cut back government spending by exactly that amount so that we replace the income tax with absolutely nothing? That would take us back in time to 2004.
As Ron Paul would ask, was the government really too small back then? Would society really collapse if we went back to a government we had just ten years ago?
So let's face it. Yes, the government likes our money and always wants more of it. But more crucially, the government uses the income tax as a primary means of controlling not just our money, but the whole of our lives. That's the real purpose of the income tax and why the government will fight for its preservation to the end.
Right now, many Americans are sweating it out to get their taxes done in time for the filing deadline of April 15. It would be immeasurably hard without the brilliant companies that have put together software programs – updated constantly! – that make what would otherwise seem impossible rather easy. This is the type of thing that free enterprise and the private sector do. They help us to have better lives.
But government? What does it do? It takes. It snoops. And it controls.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Tucker
Editor's Note: Think back to what you did this week. Did you drive to work (gas tax)? Did you go out and buy a cup of coffee (sales tax)? How many times did you use the bathroom (a water tax for each flush)? Fly anywhere for work (airport tax)? Call your husband or wife or kids to see how they were doing (telephone tax)?
See what I'm getting at? Try as you might, there are few things in life where the government doesn't get their share. Even when you die, it will still try to pin one last death tax on you. This is why Jeff's research team has spent the better part of the last three months coming up with a plan. A plan that will help you cut down what you send to the government on April 15, and legally "disappear" from the IRS.
Check out what they've discovered and see what secrets you can take advantage of before you send in that check to the IRS.
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