Dealing With Willful "Ignorance"

An honest but mistaken man, once shown the truth, either ceases to be mistaken, or ceases to be honest

I WANT THE RESTORATION OF THE RULE OF LAW IN MY LIFETIME!! In fact, I WANT IT TOMORROW!!

I don't actually expect restoration to happen on all fronts quite that fast. But I sure don't see why it shouldn't happen that fast on the "income tax" issue, since the liberating truth on that subject has been out there for ten years now, fully proven to begin with and more so every day. And I'm dead sick of that restoration being thwarted by mindless repetition of falsehoods, especially by folks who claim to be friends of liberty and truth.

In the grip of that mood, last edition I posted an "open letter" to everyone in a position of responsibility for accuracy of information about the "income tax" (or who COULD and SHOULD take on that responsibility). In that letter, I pointed out to my addressees in painstaking detail and with overwhelming supporting authority that the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution did NOT authorize an unapportioned direct tax of any description, and particularly not an unapportioned tax on "all that comes in" (or anything like it).

Instead, the amendment merely overruled a court decision (in Pollock v. Farmer's Loan & Trust, 157 U.S. 429 (1895)) that had briefly interrupted the application of the already-long-standing tax. That decision was based on a novel argument that when applied to excisable gains realized in the form of dividends and rent, the "income" tax was transformed into a property tax on the sources from which the gains were derived.

The 16th Amendment says the Pollock court's reasoning was wrong (or, in any event, is overruled). The amendment provides that Congress can apply the "income tax" to anything that qualifies as excisable "incomes" (the nature of which had long been established at the time of the amendment) without the apportionment requirement arising as a result of judicial consideration of the source, as had happened in the Pollock decision:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

The amendment doesn't transform the "income tax" into a direct tax, nor modify, repeal, revoke or affect the apportionment requirement for capitations and other direct taxes. It simply prohibits the courts from using the overruled reasoning of the Pollock decision to shield otherwise excisable dividends and rents from the tax:

"[T]he amendment made it possible to bring investment income within the scope of the general income-tax law, but did not change the character of the tax. It is still fundamentally an excise or duty..."

Treasury Department legislative draftsman F. Morse Hubbard summarizing the ruling for Congress in hearing testimony in 1943.

 

"The Amendment, the [Supreme] court said [in its unanimous ruling in Brushaber v. Union Pacific RR Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916)], judged by the purpose for which it was passed, does not treat income taxes as direct taxes but simply removed the ground which led to their being considered as such in the Pollock case, namely, the source of the income. Therefore, they are again to be classified in the class of indirect taxes to which they by nature belong."

Cornell Law Quarterly, 1 Cornell L. Q. 298 (1915-16).

 

"The Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice White, first noted that the Sixteenth Amendment did not authorize any new type of tax, nor did it repeal or revoke the tax clauses of Article I of the Constitution, quoted above.  Direct taxes were, notwithstanding the advent of the Sixteenth Amendment, still subject to the rule of apportionment…"

Legislative Attorney of the American Law Division of the Library of Congress Howard M. Zaritsky in his 1979 Report No. 80-19A, entitled 'Some Constitutional Questions Regarding the Federal Income Tax Laws'

The class of what qualifies as "income" subject to the tax remains the same after the amendment as it had been before it. If something didn't qualify as taxable without apportionment prior to the 16th Amendment it still cannot be taxed without apportionment-- all that changed is that the application of the tax to certain of those objects can no longer be viewed as a property tax on the sources from which the "income" objects are derived, for which apportionment would be required.

"The Sixteenth Amendment, although referred to in argument, has no real bearing and may be put out of view. As pointed out in recent decisions, it does not extend the taxing power to new or excepted subjects..." 

U.S. Supreme Court, Peck v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 165 (1918);

 

"[T]he settled doctrine is that the Sixteenth Amendment confers no power upon Congress to define and tax as income without apportionment something which theretofore could not have been properly regarded as income." 

U.S. Supreme Court, Taft v. Bowers, 278 US 470, 481 (1929).

 

"[T]he sole purpose of the Sixteenth Amendment was to remove the apportionment requirement for whichever incomes were otherwise taxable." 

U.S. Supreme Court, So. Carolina v. Baker, 485 U.S. 505 (1988).

In short, as I pointed out clearly in my "open letter", the Pollock court had said, "Congress has laid a tax on a big class of excisable objects (which it calls "incomes"), and it's all good. But when the tax is applied to dividend and rent "incomes", it actually functions as a property tax on their sources and therefore, in regard to those two "incomes", the tax has to be apportioned." The 16th Amendment simply says, "Nix to that last bit."

I COULD HAVE ADDED THAT THE EASIEST WAY TO COMPREHEND THE LEGAL REALITY OF THE "INCOME TAX" TODAY in light of the actual meaning and effect of the 16th Amendment is to simply think of the Pollock decision as having gone the other way. Simply imagine that the Pollock Court had upheld the application of the tax to excisable dividends and rent without apportionment, and the 16th Amendment had never happened. What we would have had from that course of events is exactly what we have now-- federal authority for an indirect excise tax falling, as always, only on objects suitable to that type of tax, and unthwarted by the argument that as applied to excisable dividends and rent, it becomes a property tax requiring apportionment.

Another easy way to understand the legal reality of the "income" tax today in light of the actual meaning and effect of the 16th Amendment is to recognize that "capitations"-- that is, taxes on general revenues and/or the unprivileged activities which produce them-- remain subject to the apportionment requirement. Thus, whatever difficulty anyone may have in understanding the nature of objects taxable under the "income" excise can be relieved in a roundabout way by understanding that the objects of a capitation cannot be among them.

"If [a] tax is a direct one, it shall be apportioned according to the census or enumeration. If it is a duty, impost, or excise, it shall be uniform throughout the United States. Together, these classes include every form of tax appropriate to sovereignty. Whether the [income] tax is to be classified as an "excise" is in truth not of critical importance [for this analysis]. If not that, it is an "impost", or a "duty". A capitation or other "direct" tax it certainly is not."

U.S. Supreme Court, Steward Machine Co. v. Collector of Internal Revenue , 301 U.S. 548 (1937) (Emphasis added; citations ommitted.)

Per that persistent Constitutional prohibition of unapportioned capitations, the "income tax" cannot fall on or be measured by:

• "all that comes in";

• "every different species of revenue";

• "the fortune or revenue of each contributor";

• "the [common-meaning] wages of labour";

• "what is supposed to be one's fortune [per] an assessment which varies from year to year"; or

• "[an assessed percentage] of [one's] supposed [commonly-defined] income").

Nor can the "income tax" fall on any other object whose nature would make the tax direct, regardless of its label.

I DID POINT OUT THAT THE "INCOME TAX" LAWS MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO VIOLATE THESE RULES: Though the mechanisms by which it does so are thoroughly hidden from casual discovery, the tax law, as written, confines itself carefully and scrupulously to gains resulting from the exercise of federal privilege, just as a federal excise tax must do. It is not by accident or oversight that the "wages" by which the application of the tax to the pay of workers is measured are custom-defined in the law to describe only payments made to federal workers, for instance, or that "trade or business" is defined only as "the performance of the functions of a public office."

I DID ALSO POINT OUT THAT THE BOTTOM LINE IS SIMPLY THIS: Get the 16th Amendment right, and the liberating truth about the "income tax" becomes crystal-clear and unmistakable, and easily taken-in, even without any digging through the details of the tax laws. Mis-understand the amendment, and seeing that truth becomes much more of a slog, making it much easier for people to be dissuaded from or discouraged by the exercise of coming to understand the tax.

So, what the hell is going on here? It is not possible for any competent person to mis-understand the truth presented above concerning the amendment. It isn't possible no matter how much past misunderstandings about the subject may have made it difficult to grasp the more detailed truth about the tax overall (or resistant to even looking at those details, and instead disposed to blindly dismiss evidence challenging their deeply-embedded misunderstandings).

Since it isn't possible to misunderstand, why have these folks not acknowledged this irrefutable truth? Worse, why have these folks PERSISTED in disseminating false assertions about the amendment?

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?

In my letter I acknowledged the strength of the Kool-Aid clouding minds about this subject. But that dog only hunts in the absence of correcting information. In the presence of correcting information, persistent error is willful. And sadly, these "errors"-- which is to say, the continued disseminations of FALSE INFORMATION-- have persisted.

Directly but very courteously contacted about all this by several different people, two of my addressees simply blew each of them off with breezy versions of "I haven't got time to look at this stuff..." Nonetheless, they both found time to subsequently post more articles making the same bogus claims about the 16th Amendment designed and circulated by the state in order to perpetuate its self-serving, liberty-and-rule-of-law-crushing mis-application of the tax.

Ironically, one of these same "can't be bothered" deniers just a few days ago posted an article on one of his favorite subjects, the JFK assassination (on which he very sensibly supports the "conspiracy side"). In his article this fellow mocks what he calls "the deferentials"-- people who slavishly defer to the "official story"-- with the following words:

"Many lone-nut proponents mock conspiracy theories in the JFK case not because they feel there is a lack of evidence to support the theory. That is, they don’t say: “After carefully reviewing the evidence in the JFK case, I’ve concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone-nut assassin.” Instead, many of the lone-nut proponents subscribe to what I call the “inconceivable doctrine,” one that holds that it is simply inconceivable that the U.S. national-security state would have conspired to assassinate a U.S. president."

And yet, this very writer does the same thing with the 16th Amendment. That is, he doesn't say, “After carefully reviewing the evidence concerning the meaning and effect of the 16th Amendment, I’ve concluded that it was the origin of the "income tax" and authorized that tax to fall on all economic activity.”

Instead, he himself apparently subscribes to what he calls the "inconceivable doctrine," holding that it is simply inconceivable that elements in the revenue-hungry state, benefitting industries like tax law and accounting, and "progressives" hoping to accomplish by stealth what they could not manage politically, would systematically cultivate misunderstanding about the amendment's purpose and effect over the last 70 years or so. I guess "deferentiality" is only bad when someone else is guilty.

I guess "deferentiality" can play both ways, too. After all, this fellow's unquestioning deference is not to the actual official holdings on the subject of the amendment (which are the Supreme Court rulings I've laid out above), but to the mere IRS representations on the subject (which defy the official holdings, but serves the agency's interests much more satisfactorily)...

A nationally-syndicated author who regularly produces dis-information about the 16th and the income tax (and had just published such an article last week) was contacted by several people with very polite and earnest entreaties to get right on this subject. He responded with a blithe reference to http://taxfoundation.org/blog/today-history-income-tax-ruled-unconstitutional-pollock-v-farmers-loan-trust-co as his authority for his false assertions-- an "authority" which actually closes its page on the amendment with the entirely erroneous-- indeed, patently ridiculous declaration: "That amendment [the 16th] conceded that the income tax is a direct tax, but removed the constitutional requirement of apportionment for income taxes."

I'M AT A LOSS! HOW MUCH ACTUALLY AUTHORITATIVE EVIDENCE EXPLICITLY TO THE CONTRARY DO THESE FOLKS HAVE TO BE SHOWN BEFORE THEY WILL CEASE AND DESIST? How many times does the U.S. Supreme Court, among many other ACTUAL authorities, have to EXPLICITLY declare the contrary before these folks STOP SAYING WHAT PLAINLY ISN'T TRUE??!!

As I said in my "open letter", I don't really care so much that these folks simply don't understand the truth. I mean, I do care, but in the larger scheme of things it's no skin off my nose for these individuals to be ignorant.

But their practice of pushing this mushroom-juice into other people's veins is a different story.

HERE'S THE THING: As anyone who has been on this march for awhile has learned, the only thing standing in the way of our liberty from the terrible affliction of the mis-applied income tax, by which vast unauthorized power is acquired by the state and the people are made progressively more infirm, is the suppression of the truth about the tax.

All the practical knowledge concerning the tax has long-since been laid-out, as is endlessly demonstrated by victories old and new, complex and simple. Just today a new batch are posted-- most of them complete refunds of every penny withheld or paid-in, including Social Security and Medicare withholdings. The problem is that this practical knowledge is not in enough people's heads.

If dis-information was not actively reinforcing misunderstandings, all but a relative handful of Americans would soon be enjoying those victories-- which are nothing more than restorations of control over resources to their proper owners.

Better, if those with bully pulpits went beyond simply ceasing the dis-information and instead began disseminating the liberating truth, this happy day would be upon us with a startling immediacy. I don't think I need to explain the course of events once a critical mass of Americans learns that the "income tax" only applies to the banksters, the bureaucrats, the office-holders and the cronies.

But if the steady dissemination of lies from these folks continues instead, we will all go on suffering the predations of the contemptuous, arrogant, pelf-strengthened state for a whole lot longer than we ought to. Check your content and your consciences, ladies and gentlemen of the "alt" and "mainstream" media, and those of you who are purely pundits, whether on the pages of the Post or just some little news group or chat room.

Liberty right around the next turn, or only at the end of a long road. That's the choice, and it's all on you.

***

As Barry Sullivan did with Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, CtC Warrior Jim McGrath has stepped up with an FYI and call for correction to Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. for its inclusion of errors about the 16th Amendment in one of the books it produces. Excellent!

These fine warriors for the truth, like those who have been putting in the effort contacting the addressees of these "open letters", are doing important work dealing with ignorance and lies that harm us all-- work that WILL pay off, if enough participate. It really is true that just quashing the lies and getting the truth about the 16th Amendment out there instead will win this fight. PLEASE DO YOUR PART, TOO.

I have done everything I can to simplify and render unmistakable the critical historical/legal facts about the amendment. GET THE PDF HERE.

All you need to do is put it in front of people-- publishers and pundits who get this wrong, certainly, but just as importantly, your friends, neighbors, family, acquaintances, co-workers and others. This information is SO easy to understand, and SO unambiguous that NO ONE who actually takes a look will find it uncompelling. Some will still resist, of course, because that Kool-Aid is strong. But even more than the revelations of the mechanical harmony of the tax laws with the Constitutional tax rules, this material is accessible, easy and definitive, and once it takes hold, it's a short step to liberty.

"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."

-Thomas Jefferson

 

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"It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error."

-United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson