Publicani

Greenwich Post (CT)

April 17, 2008

Fight income tax and we could save the United States

Section: Editorial
Page: 6A

To the editor

Iraq, the world’s highest percentage of people in prison, warrantless phone and e-mail searches, the Fed printing money like there’s no tomorrow, bans on medical use of marijuana and other drugs, suspension of habeas corpus, searching your shoes at the airport, transferring private property from one citizen to another for higher government tax revenue – these are examples of the modern state of the United States.

Those are not necessarily the best examples, just some indicators pointing to a rotten state. Who do you think the enemy is? The lobbyists? Potential terrorists? The rich? It feels like a seven-headed dragon is conducting a full-scale assault on our lives, property and liberty. It attacks us from the left and right – both Republicans and Democrats voted for the Iraq war and the Patriot Act. It attacks us from above and below – both the government makes laws assaulting our liberties and the people keep voting for such a government.

How do you fight a dragon? Face to face, or rather face to seven faces will not work: even if you are successful and you cut one head/government program, two others will grow in its place. The right approach is to shoot a silver arrow at the red bird so that it drops a key from a lockbox with a magic sword that you use to fight a tiger guarding the bottle with the dragon’s heart.

So, where is the red bird? What is the single target we should aim at? It is the income tax. There is a social perception that taxing the rich is fair. Try saying “I hate the income tax” to other people. You will find it is as hard as in the famous psychological experiment to ask strangers on the subway to give up their seat for you.

I don’t want to argue that the income tax is illegal or unconstitutional. Such arguments have been made and even recently have been tried with partial success in court. But the laws are made by the people and could be changed by the people.

Also, let’s put aside for a moment the belief that without income tax we are not able to function – the highways, the schools. Because actually, we can. The income tax is about one trillion dollars a year. This is as much as we spent every year in Iraq. We could do without Iraq, couldn’t we? Even if we couldn’t, one trillion dollars is about as much as we spend every year on our foreign bases in Germany, Japan, and hundreds of other places. We could do without them, couldn’t we? Even if we couldn’t, one trillion dollars is about the difference between the federal budget now and the budget 10 years ago. We could make do with the budget of 10 years ago, couldn’t we? Because I hate the income tax, I wrote “Publicani.” You can read it for free on Publicani.com/book. The word “publicani” originally meant the same as an IRS agent during biblical times.

Zak Maymin