Category Archives: Taxation

Killer Justice

Guess the official. “He helped 11 people win contracts and promotions in return for bribes … totalling over $10m over 25 years,” and now, following a trial, he’s being given a very stiff sentence. “The indictment reportedly said that” our anonymous minister’s “malpractice” led to “huge losses of public assets and damage to the interests of the state and people.”

This sounds like a standard description of a state official anywhere, really, but this one is different. The man was stopped and sentenced.

If you’ve been following the news and still hold hope for the US, you might have thought that I was speaking of Gregory Roseman, former IRS deputy director for enterprise networks and tier support systems.

But then you’d have scratched your head and wondered aloud about the paltry sum for which the stiff sentence was meted. The Roseman scumbag, on the other hand, “pushed for contract awards worth up to $500 million to a company owned by a friend,” and has “pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify at a House hearing Wednesday.”

Perhaps I am referring to Roseman’s pal, so-called war hero Braulio Castillo, the owner of a “small disadvantaged business,” whatever that means, who grew his hobbling business thanks to “contract steering”—contracts to the tune of the $500 million aforementioned taxpayer funds, funneled to him by the thugs at the den of iniquity and vice that is the Internal Revenue Service.

(Castillo’s war injuries, for which Veteran’s Affairs awarded him compensation, were sustained after a prep school injury. I suppose America’s government schools are a war theatre of sorts.)

No. The official who was given “a suspended death sentence for bribery and abuse of power” is Chinese Railways Minister Liu Zhijun.

Greg Roseman, Braulio Castillo and the rest of the American gang at IRS will be allowed to plead the Fifth, will net a book deal from some big American publisher, and will go on to officiate as experts on network or cable TV.

UPDATED: Independence And The Declaration of Secession

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, libertarianism, Natural Law, Taxation

“Independence And The Declaration of Secession” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Tea party,” “patriot,” “Constitution,” and “Bill of Rights”: these keywords are the very stuff of the American Revolution, which took place during the last half of the 18th century. They are also some of the words that cued the “Infernal Revenue Service” (IRS) to target the philosophical descendants of the Revolutionaries, in 21st century America.

Had they been aware that in 2012 not all Americans are created equal, the targeted not-for-profit organizations, aiming to fly beneath the IRS radar, would have also avoided any references to “The Declaration of Independence,” whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate as Independence Day.

Ordinary Americans of a certain age are already in compliance with the anti-American program carried out by their government, Democratic or Republican. Having been conditioned by our country’s many Orwellian Ministries of Truth, they celebrate July 4th firecrackers, fire-sale prices and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. As this column once remarked, contemporary Americans are less likely to read The Declaration of Independence now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. As historian David Hackett Fischer recounted in “Liberty and Freedom,” printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet.” And John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, urged that the “people be universally informed.”

And so the people were.

“From the beginning,” wrote James McClellan, “American Constitution-makers had the general support of their countrymen. The principles of government they espoused during the Revolution and implemented after the British surrender at Yorktown were widely shared in every town and village. It was on the basis of this remarkable consensus, this serene moment of creation, this fertile ground of American political experience, that the new Constitution was established.” (Page 59) …

The complete column is “Independence And The Declaration of Secession.” Read it on WND.

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Happy Independence Day.

UPDATE (7/5): LETTERS I LIKE.

The great historian of the South, Dr. Clyde Wilson:

From: Clyde Wilson
Sent: Friday, July 05, 2013 4:37 AM
To: Ilana Mercer
Subject:

Dear Lady, in re your Declaration of Independence column. In my last years of teaching I found that students not only had never read the Declaration (or the Constitution) but that they could not begin to understand them. They could only give canned responses. Sad but true.
Best wishes, Clyde Wilson

WND reader Steve Tanton:

• 5 hours ago @ WND Comments:

“Other than the short the article on July 1 in the Washington Times by Allen West, this is the most significant article on the true meaning of Independence Day that I have come across this year.”

UPDATE II: The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector

Constitution, Crime, Debt, Democracy, Government, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“By now, Americans with a modicum of cerebral alacrity have a sense of the attitude among Washington State Democrats toward the immutable right of the people to keep their earnings. You all witnessed the despicable Jim McDermott’s intimidating verbal assaults, leveled at conservative property owners, during the House committee hearing on the den of iniquity and vice that is the Internal Revenue Service. For what is the seeking of ‘tax-exempt status’ if not a plea, directed at our overlords who art in D.C., to keep more of what is rightfully ours?

What Edmund Burke said about the House of Commons in his day applies in spades to a House packed with the likes of Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash. ‘Designed as a control for the people,’ the House has become a control ‘upon the people.’

And the trend extends to local governments, gone from which are the old-fashioned county governors, once devoted to low taxes and careful spending.

Here goes.

While trying to be neighborly, I made the mistake of being less than reverential about my property taxes in ‘The Evergreen State,’ and in particular, the 51.4 percent appropriated for ‘State and Local Schools.’

I was informed in high decibels that my husband and I, hardworking both, ought to thank our lucky stars for this valuable index—thousands paid per year toward ‘State and Local Schools’—for without it we’d be clueless about … the value of our home. (If anything, taxes distort market prices. But more about the curious fallacy of the benevolent property tax, as a price signal in the housing market, in a follow-up column.)

Yes, siree. The bad tempered diatribe then swerved to the plight of local law enforcement, who, my interlocutor alleged, were powerless to police a squatter camp in the North Bend vicinity, for lack of resources. Some believe that twice did a man from this homeless encampment invade a homestead in the community.

We fork over thousands in property taxes per annum, yet, as was being asserted, the police were without the necessary funds to fulfill the State’s only constitutional duty: protecting the people. Naturally, where the State fails to carry out its sacred duty, as is almost always the case, The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution instantiates the individual’s natural right to do exactly what the heroic homeowners did to safeguard life and property: hastened the intruder’s descent into hell.

Commensurate with the value this Washington-State locality places on limited authority and republican virtues—none at all—law enforcement is not even itemized in the property-tax bill issued.

The truth is that the lion’s share of our property taxes goes toward …

Read the complete column. “The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: The “wasteful monstrosity” discussed above was celebrated by the local newspaper’s intrepid reporters. It too is local in name only—for most “local newspapers” are corporately owned. In our case, the pabulum published weekly is by permission of The Seattle Times Co. When our local rag is not reporting on a theatre that will close, a cinema that is hiring, or a pizza place that’ll host “Raise the Dough for Seattle Children’s”—the newspaper simply parrots the partyline on everything. I know, because I line my parrot’s cage with its pages.

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UPDATE II (7/24): For more of an idea of the all-pervasive profligacy of the oink sector in my state, check out the “Seattle Parasite-To-Resident Ratio.”

Demolish The Den Of Iniquity And Vice

Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Private Property, Republicans, Taxation, The State

After recounting the “scale of depravity [in the IRS] hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States,” neoconservative Mark Steyn concludes predictably and in error, that the IRS “should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.”

Suppose that disbanding and rebuilding this den of iniquity and vice, the Internal Revenue Service, were the solution here—which it most certainly is not—how does Steyn propose to get it right this time around? We live in an age unparalleled for moral relativism, plain immorality, lack of religiosity, debauchery, corruption and general decadence—all parading as normalcy. One thing we know for sure: As bad as they might have been, IRS bureaucrats at the agency’s inception would have been more virtuous than the degenerates that run it now and in the future.

Jack Kerwick follows the natural law and nails it: “The IRS … is inimical to liberty. Its very existence is a scandal to a liberty-loving people.” In other words, “The IRS Is the Scandal”:

The money a person legally earns is his. There is no morally conceivable justification, none whatsoever, for anyone else to touch one cent of his earnings without his consent. And there is certainly no justification for allotting anyone, like the IRS, the authority and power, to confiscate a person’s wages before he sees one dime of them.
There is no liberty unless property is dispersed wide and far. And it is only under a set of arrangements in which individuals are permitted to acquire as much property as their talents and good fortune enable that this situation can be secured.
In short, liberty presupposes the old Lockean notion of “self-ownership.”
But the income tax, to a far greater extent than any other kind of tax—for that matter, to a far greater extent than anything else the government does—undermines both the concept and practice of self-ownership. It undermines liberty. Indeed, matters can’t be otherwise, for as Walter E. Williams once said, the only thing that “fundamentally distinguishes” a free man from a slave is that the latter labors under coercion so that the fruits of his labor can be used to gratify someone else’s desires.
Whether the slave labors to satisfy the needs of one master or those of 300 million, and whether he lives on his master’s estate or thousands of miles away from it do nothing to change the fact that as long as portions of his property are confiscated to subsidize the desires of others, he remains a slave.
This isn’t hyperbole. When a person’s material assets are forcefully taken from him, it isn’t just his material assets that he loses. Taken from him as well are his resources in time and labor. Put another way, man does not live by bread alone. Work is as much of a psychological, and even spiritual, necessity as it is an economic and physical one. When a person is deprived of his bread, his sense of wholeness, his integrity, is assaulted as well. …

MORE.

Or, as yours truly put it in “SIXTEEN, THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST,” “However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an ‘organized society’ that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.”