It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.
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Samuel Adams
The taxman puts his hands in our pockets. But it’s one thing to reach into our bank accounts and take our money, it is quite another when governments engage in different kind of overreach, where they go beyond the rule of law and just start pushing people around.
Take the case of Sabina Loving and Elmer Killian.
The Institute for Justice has.
These plaintiffs are suing the IRS because that bureau of plunderers has ruled that Ms. Loving and Mr. Killian — who provide tax preparation services — must be regulated and schooled and certified by the IRS itself. The IRS says that these independent tax preparers (independent in that they are not part of big businesses) can’t just offer their services on the market, they must undergo an expensive annual education and certification process.
The overreach part is that the IRS has no statutory authority to regulate these businesses. Congress rejected precisely such regulation back in 2008. So the clever kleptocrats now argue that a pre-IRS law hailing from way back in 1884 authorizes their regulatory powers.
But that law doesn’t even deal with representatives of folks who owe the government money. It deals with representatives of people owed money by the federal government.
Nice try.
“You will be as shocked as Captain Renault to learn that big tax-prep companies — H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, Liberty — all support the new regulations,” writes A. Barton Hinkle in Reason magazine, “for the same reason big tobacco companies go after roll-your-own smoke shops: It’s in their interest to stifle low-cost competitors.”
Like Ms. Loving and Mr. Killian.
As we prepare our tax returns in the next several weeks leading up to April’s filing day, perhaps we should burn a little incense along with our midnight oil in support of the plaintiffs and the Institute for Justice. For, really, they are fighting for us, too — eternal vigilance and all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Stamp Act passed
On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the controversial Stamp Act, hoping to raise the funds from the North American colonies to defend the vast new American territories won from the French in the Seven Years’ War. The legislation levied a direct tax on all materials printed for commercial and legal use in the colonies, including everything from broadsides and insurance policies to playing cards and dice, infuriating the colonists, who argued that, as British subjects, Parliament could not impose taxes upon them without their consent, through the various colonial assemblies. Even though Parliament eventually repealed the legislation, the quarrel moved many colonists against the British government, setting the stage for the eventual break and war for independence.
Last Friday, the President of the United States signed an Executive Order on “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” and it’s gotten no small amount of attention. It seems to commandeer the entire economy — pretty much anything the government needs — in cases of a presidentially (not congressionally) declared “emergency.”
The powers are vast.
The checks and balances, vague.
The whole thing is matter-of-fact, sporting that business-as-usual style we’ve come to know and . . . view suspiciously. A few clauses at the end of the document build up to a sort of finale of weirdness with this clarification: “This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.” It may be about “national security,” but the government has certainly protected itself. Against us.
Reasons for angst? Yes.
But the angst should not be conceived as new.
Economic historian Robert Higgs, writing for The Independent Institute, notes our long history of what he calls “fascist central planning.” Citing his own milestone work Crisis and Leviathan, he fingers warfare as the major rationale behind the centralization of power and industry. Under the Defense Production Act of the Truman Era, “the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.”
It’s breathtaking. It’s sweeping. It’s almost ancient.
And it shows how important actual peace is to our freedoms, our property rights, our very lives.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Patrick Henry
“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
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Ponce massacre, Sharpeville massacre
On March 21, 1937, a peaceful Palm Sunday march in Ponce, Puerto Rico, turns deadly when National Guard and Insular Police, under the direct military command of the U.S.-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, General Blanton Winship, open fire on the crowd killing 18 people, including a 7-year-old girl. The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party organized the march to commemorate the ending of slavery in Puerto Rico by the governing Spanish National Assembly in 1873 and to protest the imprisonment, by the U.S. government, of Nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos on alleged sedition charges.
On March 21, 1960, South African police open fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180 in the Sharpeville Massacre.
A Washington Post feature story on Kent Conrad refers to the retiring U.S. Senator as “the Democrats’ balanced-budget guy for more than a decade.”
Of course, no budget has been balanced for “more than a decade.” Being the Democrats’ “balanced-budget guy” is sorta like being the Taliban’s diversity outreach guy or AARP’s youth activities director or the bartender for the Temperance League.
I won’t dispute Sen. Conrad’s claim that he’s “done [his] level best,” but, in the time he’s been in Congress, the federal debt has climbed more than 700 percent, from $2.1 trillion in 1986 to $15.4 trillion today.
Nonetheless, Conrad continues to work his colleagues in the dark corridors of the capitol, and The Post reports his goal is to “draft far-reaching legislation to tame the debt and present it for a vote after Election Day, when lawmakers will be under intense pressure to reach an agreement to avert huge tax increases and deep spending cuts set to hit Jan. 1.”
But how will the desire to avoid tax increases and spending cuts “pressure” Congress to pass Conrad’s preferred package of tax increases and spending cuts? Especially in a lame duck session that sidesteps public pressure?
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan offers a different view: “We shouldn’t be insulating this from the American public, trying to cut back room deals on commissions or whatever. I think the process is moved forward if we put plans out for the public to see and defend our ideas.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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GOP Formed, LBJ Calls Bama Guard
On March 20, 1854, former Whig Party members met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to establish a new party, the Republican Party, that would oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories.
On March 20, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson notified Alabama’s Governor George Wallace that he would use federal authority to call up the Alabama National Guard in order to supervise a planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, after violence by state troopers and local police against a group of demonstrators had broken up their March 7 walk from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital city, in what became known as the “Bloody Sunday.”
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A. Philip Randolph
“A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.”
“And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country`s pride.”