Jefferson Review

"Your Liberty is Our Interest"

Home /  Archives / Search / Links / Quotes / Book Reviews / Advertise /Contact us / Subscribe / Calendar

Is the Income Tax Used to Suppress Dissent?

By Gordon Francis Corbett

          People across the political spectrum have long thought that the Federal Government uses the income tax system not only to obtain money, but, informally, to punish support for unorthodox causes or political parties.

          In 1971, I attended a speech by conservative activist W. Cleon Skousen.  Among other things, Mr. Skousen discussed what happened when he was audited.  If I recall correctly, he said that the audit occurred in the early '60's, perhaps in 1962.

          Mr. Skousen had been making speeches all over the country to press the Kennedy Administration for solid anti-Communist action.  One day, he found an I. R. S. agent on his doorstep, saying that he had to audit his records.  Mr. Skousen told him that he had nothing to hide, and the agent took his records and left. 

          The agent looked a bit shamefaced, but, after several days, he returned to Mr. Skousen with a big smile on his face.  "They owe you six hundred dollars," he said.  Six hundred 1962 dollars was, perhaps, three thousand dollars in today's money.  I think that, maybe, Mr. Skousen might deliberately have overpaid his taxes in anticipation of just such an audit.

          Joseph Farah, president of the news web-site "Worldnet Daily," says that in 1994, his tiny tax-exempt Western Journalism Center began investigating various scandals of the Clinton Administration.  Two years later, the Internal Revenue Service audited the W. J. C. for violations of the Internal Revenue Code's prohibitions of engaging in political activity.  The auditor told Mr. Farah's accountant that his "was a political case," and that it would be decided "at the national level." 

          Mr. Farah also says, "Later, representatives of the IRS told me, my employees, my accountant, and my attorney that we were targeted because we were criticizing the president in an election year."  To make a long story short, the W. J. C. and he beat the rap, but the costs almost bankrupted them.

          Such things may not occur regularly, but they occur often enough to cause alarm.  The Clinton Administration audited many of its adversaries.  Earlier administrations have done the same, as Mr. Skousen related in 1971.

          The Internal Revenue Code is not objective.  Its enforcement depends on the assessments of auditors, who have a great deal of discretion in granting deductions, and sometimes, as Mr. Farah's story indicates, very punitive orders.

          Our legal system has degenerated.  We Americans once boasted that ours was a system of laws, and not of men.  With exceptions, those Congressional statutes and court decisions followed the precepts of the natural law, which, besides assuring their near-perfect rightness, lent them a degree of steadiness and stability practically unheard-of today.

          Today, we live, not under the rule of law, but under the law of rules; and those rules change daily, to benefit campaign contributors, to let politicians curry votes from different sectors of our economy, or to punish dissenters.

          We have descended from objective law to subjective rule;  from the rights of man to the privileges of the favored;  and from government limited by a written Constitution to government restrained only by the public's tolerance.

          The time may come when our ostensible public servants will disregard "the public's tolerance," because they will be able to rely on naked force.  At that point, our America will no longer be the land of the free. 

          That future day must never become our present.  If we remember that in our country, injustice cannot survive exposure, we can preclude it. Abuses that we know happened, we must describe.  Why they are wrong, according to the natural law, we must explain.  How departing from the Founding Fathers' philosophy made them possible, we must show.

          Freedom will survive if we remember that facts are its food, sweat is its water, and philosophic truth is its sunlight.  Given sufficient effort, the darkness will recede, and seeds you plant will grow and bloom.

Weather (Louisville) / Mapquest / Search / White Pages / Business Search / CNN / Dictionary / E-card / MSN