Let’s Shut Down The IRS

Authored by J.B.Shurck via AmericanThinker.com,

What if the federal government shut down and nobody cared?  

I know what you’re thinking: How can we possibly survive without millions of government bureaucrats micromanaging our lives?  Is life even worth living if some self-important cubicle king isn’t putting me on hold before demanding that I resubmit the revised Form K-12.6.2 of the updated rules and regulations regarding how I may and may not use my private property on odd-numbered days within calendar months that include Hindu holidays?  

As a descendant of those who crossed the American wilderness and settled the frontier, I like to think that my ancestors weren’t risking their lives for the sake of bureaucracy.  If anything, they were most likely running from bureaucracy.  They left Europe to escape monarchs who restricted how they could pray and what they could own.  They explored the American frontier to build lives beholden to none.  I’ve never found a diary entry in the family records that moaned, “If only the federal government would establish an Internal Revenue Service to take half of everything we have so that it can pay the salaries of an army of Environmental Protection Agency know-nothings willing to instruct us on how we can legally use our land.”  

When you think about it, the people who built this country did so to get away from the very thing that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries insist we must fund: Big Government.  You don’t venture out into no man’s land to build a whole new world from scratch unless the old world’s rules and regulations are so oppressive that risking death each day is preferable to living under the yoke of government.  

The Democrats shut down the federal government because they want American taxpayers to continue paying for “free” health care for illegal aliens.  They have bet that Americans will cry “uncle” and agree to subsidize Democrats’ destructive open border policies in exchange for bringing the rest of the bureaucracy back online.  This kind of extortion makes no sense to me.  It’s like a robber telling me that if I don’t give him what’s in my wallet today, he’s going to rob me tomorrow.  Oh, well, good luck.  See you tomorrow, I guess.

In my mind, we have been headed for ruin ever since the Sixteenth Amendment legalized a federal income tax in 1913.  An income tax is a cancer on society that discourages hard work and self-sufficiency and gives authorities a free hand to steal from some Americans and buy the votes of others.  It was birthed as all Big Government monstrosities are birthed: with false promises that its powers would never be abused.  In 1913, less than 1% of the population paid income taxes, and the rate was 1%.  A century later, the most productive members of society hand over a third or more of their earnings to federal bureaucrats who routinely get caught using government-issued credit cards to go boozing in strip clubs.  

Once state income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, regulatory burdens, and dozens of other government fees are added to the tab, hardworking Americans are lucky to keep half of what they earn.  That might seem like a bargain if you live in socialist France, but to the descendants of Americans who chucked the British redcoats back across the pond over a relatively low tax imposed without their permission, the effective tax rate for working Americans today is obscene.  If General George Washington were still around, he would already be marching on the city that cloaks its ignominy under the public’s respect for his name.

Have you ever read the Internal Revenue Code?  It’s roughly ten thousand pages long!  

When you include regulations and official tax guidance, it’s over seventy-five thousand pages long!  

An average reader would require four months to page through all the different ways the federal government legalizes its theft of what you thought you owned.  

Within a labyrinth of chapters, subchapters, parts, sections, revisions, and the steady growth of additional regulations and guidances that sprout like weeds, the federal government makes it almost impossible for a layperson to understand his legal obligations to the Internal Revenue Service.  

That leaves most people three choices:

(1) pay whatever the government demands,

(2) pay a professional to figure out what is owed, or

(3) say a quiet prayer to avoid an audit.  

It’s a system designed to keep the public confused.  Backed by threats of fines and imprisonment, it empowers the federal bureaucracy to snoop into every American’s private affairs.  “No taxation without representation” used to mean that a person has no obligation to pay a tax if he’s denied a representative voice in government.  Now it means that most people have no idea how much they “owe” the government without at least a lawyer and an accountant representing their interests.

As long as the federal government is shut down, let’s disband the IRS.  It is nothing more than a bureaucratic weapon that allows government agents to spy on Americans’ private transactions while keeping them in a permanent state of legal jeopardy.  Democrats want to use this shutdown to coerce taxpayers to fund an even bigger government.  It makes much more sense to take advantage of the government’s “time out” by slashing the bureaucracy and returning a little freedom to the people.