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Thursday, October 27, 2005
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California's Prop 75. California is having a November 8 special election with nationwide consequences. Of particular importance, because of the implications if it wins and its momentum spreads similar initiatives throughout the country, is Proposition 75, which would require public employee unions to obtain members' permission before using their dues for political activities. The large stakes are reflected in campaign spending of over $100 million, with substantial amounts from outside the state.
Proponents call it "paycheck protection," since it protects employees from union spending for political purposes they oppose. Unions say it is about weakening the political voice of working people. But even beyond the facts that all workers would remain free to contribute to whatever causes they support and more than a third of union members routinely oppose positions union leaders fund (and members have been reported as roughly evenly split on the measure), that claim is noteworthy only for its brazen misrepresentation. [Mises Economics Blog]
2:17:01 PM 
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Anthony Gregory at LewRockwell.com -
The Dead Ends of Technicalitarianism - why Irwin Schiff's approach
to avoiding income tax is bass ackwards. The gummint doesn't care
about its own laws. Never did. Never will. It is a criminal
enterprise, supported by theft and murder. Always was. Always will
be. [clairefiles]
Drawing on the technicalities of law as the chief tactic of fighting
the state has its severe limitations and drawbacks, however. Instead
of helping to expose the naked emperor or the man behind the curtain,
it can lead us to grant undeserved legitimacy to the state. To obsess
over the income tax as a supposed violation of statutory law is to
give far too much credence to statutory law. The reason income tax is
wrong is that it's theft, not because some legislator back in 1913
failed to dot his i's and cross his t's. Moreover, if enough Americans
began calling the IRS's alleged bluff, and stopped filing, the state
would simply make the income tax "official" and "properly ratified" in
any ways it had presumably failed to do so.
...
The state is not about laws on pieces of paper. It is about looting
and violence. Its principal methods of funding are theft and
counterfeiting, its regular modus operandi is extortion and its most
conspicuous projects are assault and murder. Ultimately, finding a
technicality that saves Americans from income taxation will prove as
effective as finding one that saves foreigners from incoming
U.S. missiles. (Can you imagine an Iraqi screaming at the bombing of
Baghdad that since the war had not been declared properly, the
explosions cannot legally hurt him?) A loophole might save you money
in the short term, but it will likely do you no good if the IRS has it
in for you, and it will certainly do little in the long term to help
in the eternal clash with the state.
Instead of searching for the magic loophole that will swallow up the
state and all its oppression, we should devote our time to learning
about how the state actually works, its historical and modern
relationships with the private and semi-private sectors, and the
effects of its domestic and foreign interventions. We should not fool
ourselves. The state does not steal our incomes because we have
overlooked a confusing regulation or fail to know our case law. The
reason we have an income tax is because the politicians in power want
an income tax, and have bamboozled the public into believing that
taxation is acceptable in the first place. The tax code is confusing
and contradictory for all sorts of historical and operational reasons,
but it certainly does not contain the final key to our freedom from
taxation.
[End the War on Freedom]
11:47:03 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
11/3/2005; 10:22:25 AM.
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