IRS: Corrupt to the Core

In 1913, the 16th Amendment became part of the Constitution for these United States, allowing the federal government to tax “income.”

Since then, this seemingly harmless change in funding methodology has ballooned into something the drafters of the amendment couldn’t have imagined. Surely they didn’t expect the agency charged with collections to adopt rules and regulations effectively repealing the Fifth Amendment when dealing with it? Certainly they did not plan to create thousands of pages of regulations that no average citizen could be expected to understand, costing tens of billions of dollars in compliance costs every year. They couldn’t have anticipated that the total spending of the U.S. Government would balloon to the point that it now consumes between four and eight times what it did pre-income tax (relative to GDP). Surely they did not expect these things, or maybe they did, but by-God, we got them.

One thing is clear to me after observing federal politics over these last couple of decades…the resignation of a few key officials will not fix what ails the IRS.

Just like Obama is not the only problem in D.C., these IRS officials aren’t the problem with the IRS. The truth be told Obama is ‘only’ expanding on what Bush, Clinton, Bush, and even Reagan did before him. The problem is systemic…just like the IRS problem.

The IRS is merely being the IRS. Even if every tin-pot, dictator-wannabe in the agency gets fired, and an entire new regime is installed tomorrow, the IRS will still be bound by the corrupt rules ignoring and violating the Constitution each and every day.

The rules that the IRS drafts are viewed as ‘constitutional’ because  the agency was actually created pursuant to an act of Congress to raise revenue for the treasury during the Civil War, long before the 16th Amendment was even passed. The rules it operates under were simply adopted by the IRS itself, and deemed to be constitutional because the the agency itself is a creation of the Treasury Department! Nonetheless, they pass regulations that contradict the Constitution all the time. Not to mention, anybody who does a little research knows that following the “constitutional path” to pass a law does automatically magically endow an act constitutional.

For example, try to square the Fifth Amendment’s bar on mandated self-incrimination with the requirement that we file our taxes every year -under penalty of perjury- using a tax code that is literally thousands of pages in length (void for vagueness in any sense of the phrase). These returns have been ruled “testimony” by all of the courts, so they can be used against you. Yet if I exercise my Fifth Amendment right and refuse to testify (file a return) because I have not read the entire tax code, and thus cannot ensure the compliance of my return, they will put me in jail. They call it “voluntary” to get around this argument, but if you refuse to file (as say… Irwin Schiff did) they will throw you in jail. Not exactly how I define voluntary!

My point isn’t really to rip on the IRS agents, even though those folks deserve it. In truth, the  individuals working for the IRS are not really the problem – the IRS is. The entire organization is rotten to the core.

Truth is,  the job actually attracts the corrupt, and the rules encourage corruption by its employees! The very job of tax collector would only attract somebody who is at peace with the concept of living off the work of others. The tax code they attempt to enforce is so long, confusing and byzantine, that no non-professional accountant could ever hope to understand it, and thus we all live our lives with the constant threat and intimidation of a body of law that meets the very definition of arbitrary!

Here’s another issue. As long as nobody knows for certain that they have complied with every nuance of the law, and are thus safe from prosecution, very few people are willing to speak out against it.Talk about self-insulating!

Not to mention that in America, less than 50 percent of individuals pay income taxes. In essence, we have a government agency bribing those who consume services they pay nothing for. In this way, the IRS is not just a leech sucking the essence of America, but it is a vampire creating even more vampires living off of society.

Now we find the IRS in the headlines because of accusations that they are playing favorites.

I’m sure they are.

But this is not new! And it should not distract from the fact that the agency itself is corrupt. This is not about a few bad apples doing bad things in an otherwise upstanding agency. Don’t let the convenient resignation or termination of a few leeches on your neck turn your eyes away from the  staking Dracula. I will repeat; the IRS is rotten to the core! And as soon as you fire all of the leeches working there, it will be re-staffed with more leeches, or leeches-in-training.

Eliminate the IRS, and/or repeal the tax code, and replace it with something less corrupt. This is the only way to restore integrity to federal revenue collection.

Don’t audit.

Don’t reform.

Don’t bring it “in line.”

Don’t fire and re-staff.

Eliminate this abomination, and wake America from its’ 100-year nightmare!

Tags: 16th Amendment, 1916, Corruption, IRS, IRS Vs Tea Party, leeches, vampires