We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Wesley Snipes… anti-statist hero? It seems thespian Wesley Snipes has been duking it out with vampires the IRS based on the rather reasonable notion he should not have to pay them his hard earned lucre.
Wesley Snipes’ attorneys admitted his ideas were crazy – that Americans have no obligation to pay taxes and the IRS cannot legally collect them. […] Co-defendants Eddie Ray Kahn, the founder of a known tax protest group, and Douglas P. Rosile, a delicensed accountant, were convicted Friday by the same jury of tax fraud and conspiracy. Both face up to 10 years in prison.
Oh yes, the notion the state has no right to your money is… crazy. If there is one thing the state will not tolerate, it is choking off the kleptocratic basis of all its power. So is Wesley destined to become the poster boy for anti-statist tax protesters? I am far too cynical to think a Hollywood actor could have coherent anti-statist views, but he would cut a dashing figure for ‘our side’ if it were true.
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Well the various State legislatures voted for different wordings of the 16th (income tax) Amendment – so it is hard to see how it was ratified. In all logic and reason to ratify an Amerndment to the Constitution three quarters of the State legislatures and two thirds of the United States House and Senate would have had to vote for EXACTLY the same wording.
However, the Wesley Snipes case did not turn on that.
The government prosecuted the man for not filing a tax return and ALSO for filing fraudlant returns.
Has Mr Snipes did not file a tax return (he just sent various absusive letters) he was clearly guilty of the former – and the jury so ruled.
However, he did not send in a return with false numbers and such in it (because he did not send in a return) so he was innocent of the latter.
Although, I must stress, I have NOT been carefully following the case.
Snipes is…you should pardon my (actual) French…a putain. His sense of superiority is the only thing that motivates him, there’s no higher ideal there.
Would that it were so, but I suspect it has more to do with the legal argument Paul mentions. (which however accurate it may be is probably pointless)
Kurt Russell?
The really dubious thing here is the state’s position that open refusal to pay amounts to criminal fraud and conspiracy.
That was my point Guy.
If a man openly sends abusive letters to you he is clearly not engaged in a secret plot.
And if someone sends in no return he is, by definition, not sending a fraudulant return.
So the jury spanked the govenment’s bottom.
Well ‘conspiracy’ may have connotations of secrecy, but it can mean a simple agreement to do something. Conspiracy charges have a long history of being brought against people who didn’t, and couldn’t have, kept their joint enterprise secret: the editors of Oz magazine and the Tolpuddle martyrs, for example.
They also have a long history of being treated more seriously than the substantive offence (if any) and used to jack up sentences. That’s particularly dangerous as a prosecutorial option where plea-bargaining is in use or where a peripheral figure can be pressured to give evidence for the state by being threatened with conspiracy charges. One suspects that was what was going on in the Snipes trial: the state seeking utmost severity for someone who had dared defy it.
The reason common law conspiracy was heavily trimmed in England was that there had been a number of prosecutions for conspiracies to do things that were not even illegal. But we still have “conspiracy to corrupt public morals” and “conspiracy to defraud” as substantive offences, both of which remain serious threats to liberty, social and economic respectively.
Well, some people who support Ron Paul believe that the income tax is wrong and the law improperly written. Therefore, it must be false, and I propose higher taxes for everybody. If a person is supported by bad people, he is bad. If an idea is held by a bad person, it is false. Therefore, any thought of small government or tax elimination must be opposed by all who support our continuation of the IslamoMuslim extremist terrorists war on us. And we must continue their war on us at all costs.
Fatuous and fallacious as ever, Rich Paul. If all the government did was the things it should legitimately do, we could increase military expenditure and still halve the size of the state
Interesting stuff Guy.
“Typical” or Rich Paul.
This thread is not about Ron Paul.
The US Government is required to issue a sort of bill to someone who doesn’t file, telling them what income they owe taxes on. But demanding this is asking to get screwed.
Once Congress failed to do its Constitutional duty to remove corrupt Secretary of State Philander Knox for falsely declaring the 16th Amendment ratified, and the US Supreme Court refused to declare the amendment invalid (apparently more on the usual corrupt political grounds than on anything else), the battle was lost. The war goes on….
One weird alternative may be asking to get paid in specific denominations of US gold coins. One man I spoke to a few months ago claimed he got an official response from the IRS that $50 gold coins were only worth $50 . I don’t know how this would play out, if true, especially for the business making the payment. But it would be amusing to know.
Reminds me of that episode of The Practice, where a guy sent the IRS a check written on a pig.
A couple of decades ago a man in Britain spotted that Sovereign gold coins were still officially one Pound.
So he paid his employees in Sovereigns – thus only a tiny amount of tax (if any) to pay.
Of course the law was changed – but he did get away with it (i.e. no retroactive taxation of the wages).
FREE WESLEY SNIPES
http://www.zazzle.com/freewesley/
The government just wanted to stop him from building his secret army, a Brother can never have too much power, ( Our current President doesent have it Either!!!!