The Lost Horizons News

Great Service From The IRS!

Well, "service", anyway...

Back in late October of last year, with yet another season or truth or lies about to come upon us in a couple of months, I suggested a little illumination exercise to everyone. The idea was to ask the IRS to explain in its own words the proper manner by which someone who has concluded he hasn't engaged in any taxable activities should rebut assertions to the contrary made by payers on "information returns" such as 1099s or W-2s and, if appropriate, reclaim property deemed to have been improperly withheld or paid-in.

Here's what I posted as sample requests:

Sir:

I would like you to tell me the proper forms and procedures for rebutting tax-related allegations which have been made to your agency by someone who has paid me money, allegations that I believe to be erroneous. I also wish to learn the proper procedures and forms for reclaiming amounts which I believe have been improperly withheld from me by this payer.

Here are the relevant facts: A company for which I worked has reported payments to me on your "information return" form W-2, characterizing these payments as being of "wages" as defined at 26 USC 3121(a) and 3401(a). I don't believe this characterization is correct, and wish to rebut the allegations that I have received such "wages".

Please understand: I'm NOT asking for your views concerning what payments are or are not "wages". I am not interested in those views. I simply want to know how to register MY view with your agency in order to rebut the W-2 in the manner provided for by your agency's protocols.

The payer WILL NOT correct the erroneous W-2 on his own (or I don't want to imperil my relationship with this otherwise good and valued company), so please don't waste either of our times with anything about W-2c forms. What I want from you is guidance on what form I should use to introduce what I deem to be correct information into your records to counter the erroneous W-2.

In addition to rebutting the bad W-2s, I would like to learn how to properly reclaim amounts withheld from payments to me by this errant W-2 creator, who has been treating my earnings as "wages". Obviously, since I don't believe my earnings qualify as "wages", I also don't believe any related tax liability has arisen, and I wish to claim a complete refund of all amounts withheld in connection with those earnings. Please explain the procedure for doing so, and the proper forms or other instruments to use.

Please respond promptly, in case I have follow-up questions, and because your answers will be very relevant to the next tax-related filings I make. I feel compelled to make those filings on a schedule you impose because even though I am not actually subject to that schedule, not having engaged in any taxable activities or having received more than the exemption amount of "income" prompting a requirement to file at all, I realize that until I file rebuttals to the errant "information return", your agency will presume that I AM under such an obligation, and will harass me accordingly.

I am sure that immediate response is not a problem, as you must have the information I seek on your computer, available in seconds for printout and mailing. I have enclosed a SASE for your convenience.

If I do not receive your answers within 30 days, and from that point until I DO receive answers from you instructing me otherwise, I will use your form 4852 to rebut the erroneous W-2 allegations; and I will declare what I believe to be my correct "wages"-received amounts, and calculate and claim any appropriate refund of the amounts withheld, on your form 1040, as my study of your forms and related instructions and the regulations under which you operate leads me to believe is proper.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this request.

____________________________/__/__

...and...

Sir:

I would like you to tell me the proper forms and procedures for rebutting tax-related allegations which have been made to your agency by someone who has paid me money, allegations that I believe to be erroneous.

Here are the relevant facts: Someone for whom I worked has reported payments to me on your "information return" form 1099-__, characterizing these payments as being of "self-employment income" as defined at 26 USC 1402(b). I don't believe this characterization is correct, and wish to rebut the allegations that I have received such "self-employment income".

Please understand: I'm NOT asking for your views concerning what payments are or are not "self-employment income". I am not interested in those views. I simply want to know how to register MY view with your agency in order to rebut the 1099-__ in the manner provided for by your agency's protocols.

The payer WILL NOT correct the erroneous 1099-__ on his own (or I don't want to imperil my relationship with this otherwise good and valued company), so please don't waste either of our times with anything about such payer corrections forms. What I want from you is guidance on what form I should use to introduce what I deem to be correct information into your records to counter the erroneous 1099-__.

Please respond promptly, in case I have follow-up questions, and because your answers will be very relevant to the next tax-related filings I make. I feel compelled to make those filings on a schedule you impose because even though I am not actually subject to that schedule, not having engaged in any taxable activities or having received more than the exemption amount of "income" prompting a requirement to file at all, I realize that until I file rebuttals to the errant "information return", your agency will presume that I AM under such an obligation, and will harass me accordingly.

I am sure that immediate response is not a problem, as you must have the information I seek on your computer, available in seconds for printout and mailing. I have enclosed a SASE for your convenience.

If I do not receive your answers within 30 days, and from that point until I DO receive answers from you instructing me otherwise, I will use a photocopy of the errant 1099-__, with explanatory attestation and the "corrected" box checked, to rebut the erroneous 1099-__ allegations; and I will declare what I believe to be my correct "self-employment income" received amounts and calculate other figures accordingly, on your form 1040, as my study of your forms and related instructions and the regulations under which you operate leads me to believe is proper.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this request.

____________________________/__/__

Obviously, the agency responses to these questions would be of great interest. As I wrote at the time,

Let's see what kind of reaction will be prompted by broaching the last subject any tax agency ever wants aired. Will any of them dare to lie and claim that there ARE no provisions for rebutting an "information return"? If they admit that there ARE such procedures (as of course there are-- CtC-educated folks use them constantly to predicted good effect), how will such an on-paper acknowledgement of the purpose and use of instruments like 4852s affect anyone facing corrupt efforts by the tax agency to evade the legal effects of such rebuttals; or to pretend that filings in which they are used might thereby qualify as "frivolous"?

Well, ten long months has gone by, and I think its safe to say that we have our answer:

Acquiescence by silence.

Only one person has gotten anything back in the mail in response to his request.* Here is the request:

Here is what was sent as a "response":

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but this strikes me as unresponsive... And to my mind the agency's failure to answer what was actually asked, and the deliberate pretense of misunderstanding that request so as to avoid answering, speak volumes. I think this active (if ludicrous) evasion is an even more emphatic acknowledgement and admission than the hooded eyes and sullen silence with which other inquiries have been met.

Either way, there we have it: acknowledgement and admission, in one way or another, straight from the horse's ass.

*NOTE: One warrior DID get a verbal response, after walking into an IRS office in person and asking directly how an erroneous W-2 that the payer refused to correct should be addressed. He was given a Form 4852, and told that it was the proper mechanism to use.

One other fellow, who unfortunately has hindered his understanding with errant notions that there is some income-tax-relevance to the use of "Federal Reserve Notes" and submitted a request rendered somewhat confused with an irrelevant description of how he endorses his paychecks, received something back in the mail, but it was simply a stall claiming that no response was possible unless the agency was provided with his SSN (and also suggesting that this fellow had asked about something more or other than this exercise proposed, since the stall-response makes reference to a specific tax year and return form, neither of which are mentioned in the request letter he says he sent).

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Did Manning And Snowden Do Anything Illegal?

I CAME ACROSS AN INTERESTING ASSERTION about Manning and Snowden the other day made by Jeffrey Toobin, a pressitute at CNN and The New Yorker. I was reading a New York Times article about the vicious attacks by supposed "journalists" like Toobin on real journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras and others who have been outlets and analysts for the revelations of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden (and also, by implication, those who have help exposes by Thomas Drake, Sibel Edmunds, Russell Tice and other whistle-blowers see the light of day). David Carr, the author of the NYT article, says,

Mr. Toobin agrees that an important debate has been joined, but says no story, no matter how big, justifies journalists’ abetting illegal acts, saying, “Journalists are not above the law.”

This prompted an immediate reflection: Isn't any "law" by which government violations of the Constitution are concealed (or are meant to be) itself illegal (meaning, "unconstitutional and therefore invalid")? Doesn't that mean that Manning and Snowden (and the others) didn't violate any valid law when revealing these government crimes?

We can't have it both ways, after all. The state certainly can't enjoy the luxury of being able to conceal its own illegal acts with barriers the breaching of which subjects those exposing the offenses to lawful punishment for doing so! That'd be crazy.

I SUSPECT THAT TO THE DEGREE that Toobin has thought about this at all (rather than just mouthing what his owners say he must), he suffers from the slavish distortion of law that holds that the proper definition of "illegal" is "disobedient to the state". This is predicated on two other fallacies: that "the state" is "us", and that anything "we" want is legal (which means in practice that those who claim to act on our behalf can do anything THEY want).

These ARE all fallacies, of course. "We" can't do anything we want-- we can only do what our individual rights and the respect we owe to the rights of others permit. The state isn't "us"-- it is a thing we created, and we did this by means of a chartering instrument which explicitly prescribes and proscribes all that the state can do, including what duties of obedience it can claim from any individual American.

"Disobedience to the state" is, in-and-of-itself, never illegal at all-- there is no duty of obedience to the state. There is only a duty of obedience to the state insofar as its claims upon someone conform to the limitations on its behavior laid out in the chartering Constitution. Axiomatically, acts of the state-- whether purporting to be laws, or judicial constructions of laws-- serving to conceal the state's violations of those limits (for which simple logic says no authority can be given by the charter itself) are inherently and inescapably unconstitutional and invalid.

Manning, Snowden and the others have broken no laws. Nor have Greenwald, Poitras, Assange and the rest of the real journalists out there.

EDWARD R. MURROW ONCE OBSERVED THAT a nation of sheep begets a government of wolves. He was right. However, even once this has happened, the wolves still don't have the authority to make abandoning sheephood a crime.

Bradley Manning Is Acquitted Of The "Aiding The Enemy" Charge

I HAVE MORE ABOUT THIS OUTCOME (and the conviction on other charges) here. For now, I want to observe how gratified we all can be that this American hero wasn't ordered by the court to create false evidence against himself supporting this charge, as Doreen Hendrickson has been ordered by a federal court to do in her case. Had Manning been subjected to the outrage Doreen is facing, things would have gone worse for him.

To learn about the deep assault on Doreen's rights being practiced simply to frighten you away from CtC (in lieu of any presentation of facts or authorities with which to dispute the book, since there are none) and how it not only is profoundly evil in own right but is a deadly threat to the tattered remnants of the American rule of law, read the brief here, the government's response here and the reply to that response here.

The ramifications of this outrageous assault are obvious. This is the complete collapse of even the pretense of due process and the rule of law.

If this order is sustained against Doreen, the state's power becomes total. As in Doreen's case, the state will simply move a compliant court for an order commanding its chosen victim to endorse its preferred view of the facts in any legal contest. A failure to do so (or a failure to do so in a way that hands the victory to the state) results in criminal charges for contempt.

This is the end of legal "disputes" with the state. What we are left with is just a charade of a legal contest with the outcome being pre-ordained: one way or another, the state wins, and the will of Americans to resist state-serving, state-dictated orthodoxies erodes away.

My friends, my fellow Americans, you let this happen at your dire peril. Don't let it happen.

Shake the walls of the Institute for Justice, the ACLU, the Rutherford Institute, the Center For Individual Rights, Judicial Watch, the Pacific Legal Foundation and every other organization that fancies itself a champion of liberty and the law. Every one of these organizations can and should file immediate amicus briefs explaining to the court in which this outrage is taking place that the world is aware, and is not pleased.

Do the same with the media-- your local outlets, the national MSM and new media like LewRockwell.com, Infowars.com, DrudgeReport.com and so on. Every one of these organizations can and should be denouncing this outrage and making clear that it isn't going to be allowed to take place in a dark alley, as the government would prefer.

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

-Edmund Burke

P. S. It is important to recognize that this unprecedented assault on the rule of law is part of a ten-years-and-counting effort to suppress the ultimate whistleblowing on government malfeasance; a malfeasance of such broad impact and liberty-and-limited-government-significance as to make Edward Snowden's NSA revelations and Bradley Manning's war-crimes revelations pale by comparison.

That's quite a statement, I know. But the whistleblowing being attacked here is the laying bare of 70 years of relentless, deliberate misadministration of the federal tax power.

It is this sustained government misbehavior in regard to the tax power that provides the means for the offenses revealed by both Manning and Snowden, and most other whistleblowers on government crimes over those decades. More, that misbehavior in regard to the tax power is ALSO responsible for an improper diversion of half the wealth of most Americans from their own pockets and purposes into the hands of those operating the state-- and their clients and cronies-- for three generations now.

The fact is, we have an arrogant Leviathan state today, with all its endless evils, because of the long-running government malfeasance CtC has revealed to the world. Those not already familiar with the revelations being attacked by this unprecedented corruption of the judicial authority should read this document and get up to speed.

P. P. S. Although good comes in all shapes and sizes, and each person writing from his or her own heart with his or her own words is best, here is an excellent example of a "letter to the editor" being sent out by one warrior in response to this outrage. Reading it might help get the juices flowing for your own effort.

Sirs:

In recent months, all sorts of illegal criminal behavior on the part of federal government officials at the highest levels has come to light. These misdeeds range from the Fast & Furious scandal, the Bengazi fiasco, to massive illegal domestic spying against US Citizens by the unnaccountable NSA, where its intelligence head James Clapper outright lied to Congress about its activities. The typical response of tyrants to exposure of their illegal acts is, instead of owning up to their errors, to attack the one who has exposed them so as to divert attention from their culpability. However despicable these acts are, there is a threat to this country much greater than gun-running in Mexico by the federal government, a commander-in-chief denying protection for an ambassador which cost him his life, or a stasi-state surveillance apparatus called Prism. This clear and present danger is an in-the-shadows attack on the very precious due process of law.

Right now, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, egged on by crooked lawyers from the Department of Justice (sic) who are engaging in subornation of perjury, is being asked to find a law-abiding woman in criminal contempt of court for failing to follow a 'lawful order' to create false testimony and swear to its authenticity. Doreen Hendrickson, several years ago, after being ordered by this court to commit perjury and sign a sworn statement testifying to the validity of a document containing false information that was composed by her legal adversaries, did sign the document, while indicating that it was under duress and that it did not reflect her true beliefs. Both she and her adversaries know full well that this document she was coerced to sign contains false information, yet they are now seeking to find her in contempt of court for having indicated that the testimony was not her own.

Though the law requires her legal adversaries to create and swear to the accuracy of their own version of this document, if they really doubt her freely-given testimony, they refuse to lie for themselves and risk the penalty for perjury. Instead, the DOJ lawyers are trying to force Mrs. Hendrickson to commit perjury with this threat of criminal contempt of court, which carries a prison term as punishment.

More details about this exceedingly corrupt effort on the part of the Department of Justice can be read on the newsletter of the losthorizons.com website. If this crooked court and dishonest lawyers are allowed to operate in the shadows and subvert justice in such an egregious manner, we all are in very grave danger of quickly becoming a country much worse than Nazi Germany or Stalinistic Russia, where there WILL be no representative government obedient to the people it should serve.

Yours Truly,

___________________

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What Do The People Do About The Rogue State?

The most important question facing Americans today

I HAD THIS QUESTION POSED TO ME BY AN EMAIL CORRESPONDENT the other day. I guess this just shows how poor a job I've done at communicating, because I have been trying to shout the answer to this one from the rooftops for a long time.

That answer is simple: The People impose restraint on the rogue state by choosing-- one by one-- to cease voluntarily turning control over their resources to the state, and choosing instead to retain control over those resources. This is done by refusing-- one by one-- to engage in "income tax" excisable activities (and refusing to blindly or fearfully allow their activities to be treated or taken as excisable activities upon which the tax arises, when they really are not).

The refusal of individual Americans to voluntarily engage in excisable activities forces the state to resort to highly-politically-accountable, highly-politically-vulnerable alternatives revenue sources. These include options like direct, apportioned taxes (which will not be tolerated by the people or approved by Congress at $multi-trillion annual volumes), and/or increased revenue tariffs (which can raise amounts adequate for legitimate state needs, but are very self-regulating, since consumers naturally choose domestic product alternatives when higher tariffs raise the prices of imports beyond a certain point).

This solution is precisely the one intended and provided for by the Founders-- who didn't impose the taxation rules in the US Constitution just so they could admire their handwriting. They put those rules in place in direct anticipation of state behavior of the sort with which we are now plagued.

As even so odious a character as Hamilton pointed out in Federalist #21:

“Imposts, excises, and, in general, all duties upon articles of consumption, may be compared to a fluid, which will, in time, find its level with the means of paying them. The amount to be contributed by each citizen will in a degree be at his own option, and can be regulated by an attention to his resources. ...If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them.”

What we've got today is simply the direct (and perfectly predictable) consequences of NOT adhering to the Founders' plan. As Frederick Douglass trenchantly observed,

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

We've got plenty of injustice and wrong these days. But our fix to the problem was bought for us with blood a few hundred years ago.

All we have to do is stop playing along with the rogue state's false (and rather embarrassingly crude) paradigm concerning who owns what, and what powers to tax have really been granted. As soon as enough of us quit endorsing that nonsense, it's all good.

By the way, let's not forget that not only is adhering to the Founders' plan the very essence of wisdom, it is also a simple matter of acting in conformity with the law...

Victories Recently Added To The Hundreds And Hundreds And Hundreds Previously Posted

(out of the thousands and thousands and thousands being won by Americans across the country for the last ten years):

L. W. shares his first victories on behalf of the rule of law: Two complete refunds of everything withheld from him during 2012 and put into the hands of Kansas and the United States.

The filed docs producing these victories are posted at links found beneath each of the checks shown below, as is always the case when those docs are supplied to me for this purpose by the upstanding victor. But I'm going to precede those checks and doc sets with one of the items included in each filing this time, because these explanatory notes with which some accompany their filings do so thoroughly debunk the absurd notion that some outside the CtC community persist in harboring to the effect that even the tens of thousands of ongoing victories must somehow be all some sort of mistake. Enjoy:

See the filing that produced this debut victory here.

See the filing that produced this victory here.

K. & S. G.

See the docs that produced K. and S.'s debut victory here. It will be noticed that this refund is about $800 shy of the total withheld and the couple's corresponding claim. They say they made a mistake handling the 1099-R, and also had a few hundred nicked off this refund for an alleged liability from a previous year. K. says he'll be doing some amending...

Tyler

This victory for 2012 is Tyler's first on behalf of the rule of law!

Bill Harding

See the filing that led to this victory here (Bill deliberately declined to recapture what had been withheld from him as the FICA income taxes, as he is currently accepting the benefits from that program and feels this is the right way to deal with that situation). Enjoy Bill's federal victory for 2008, and his Michigan victories for 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012.

Noel Berube

See the filing that produced this debut victory here.

Click here to see more than 850 additional examples of the tens of thousands of times CtC-educated Americans have enforced the Constitution and restrained the state in accordance with the Founders' plan over the last ten years.

Click here to see a couple score fully-documented instances in which the tax agency involved tried hard to resist issuing those refunds to educated claimants, the progress and outcomes of which nicely illustrate who's got the law on their side and who doesn't.

But, hey! Don't forget the "official position" on the matter:

Do you have a victory to share? Click here to learn how to do so.

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New Educational Tools: 'Knowledge Is Power' Flash-Cards!

ANOTHER SCHOOL-YEAR IS UPON US, and millions of little Johnnies and Janies are off to government schools to have their minds turned to mush. Millions more will be staying home getting a real education at the hands of their own loving parents, but even those kids can't learn if Mom and Dad don't have the materials they need.

Thus, I'm pleased to introduce a new resource for the CtC community and everyone else: 'Knowledge Is Power' flash-cards! These are concise, easily-remembered definitions and facts necessary to any American's preservation of his or her rights, and critical for the transmission of our American heritage of liberty to each new generation.

Every week I'll be adding at least one card to the collection, in a printable .pdf format. You just download the file, print double-sided on good-quality card stock, and trim-out the flash card. Then study, learn discuss and test! Before long, your kids will be equipped to be masters of their own lives (and your own knowledge will get a good polishing, as well)!

The first card in the collection deals with a very key concept indeed: Capitations.

Here's what this card looks like:

Download the .pdf here

Are You Ready For More Power?

"Peter Hendrickson has done it again! 'Upholding The Law' does for individual liberties what 'Cracking the Code' did for tax law compliance: exposes the reader to the unalienable truth!"

-Jesse Herron, Bill Of Rights Press, Fort Collins, Colorado

Have You Taken A Military, Law Enforcement or Public Office Oath To Uphold And Defend The Constitution?