Chodorov Speaks

Having to do your taxes is always a mournful occasion, as we all know. But having to do them during an election year is an even sadder experience. Not only do you struggle with forms and documentation that have no inherent reason, and have to pay an amount far beyond what reason would dictate, you are also constantly bombarded with by political candidates reminding you that the main use of those dollars will be to support policies you oppose and fund bribes to buy other people’s votes. While paying taxes you don’t believe are justified, for purposes you don’t approve of, is painful, it is not unpredictable.

50 years ago this year, in The Income Tax: Root of all Evil , Frank Chodorov showed how the abrogation of citizens’ property rights by the income tax leads to the rapid expansion of that exact result, and corrupts Americans and America’s experiment in liberty in the process. It is worth revisiting Chodorov’s insights about the consequences of the income tax. It won’t reduce your bill, but it can bring your attention back to America’s first principles, which is the only way any substantial improvement in the situation can ever occur.

A government is as strong as its income. Contrariwise, the independence of the people is in direct proportion to the amount of their wealth they can enjoy. We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government’s power to tax.
...trace this wholesale infringement of our rights to the power acquired by the federal government in 1913 to tax our incomes-the Sixteenth Amendment...the”evil” has reached the point where the doctrine of natural rights has been all but abrogated in fact, if not in theory.
A people who are intent on getting something-for-nothing from government cannot cavil over the infringement of their rights by that government...There is evidence enough that this trade is often made, and that the government is able to enter into it because of its income-tax revenues.
The government says to the citizen: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.”
The right of decision as to the disposition of your property rests in the government by virtue of the Sixteenth Amendment of the Constitution...it gives the government a prior lien on all the property produced by its subjects.
...when the Sixteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution, the American political order, which rested on the axiom of inalienable rights, underwent a major operation.
The Constitution of 1789 barred the income tax. The Founding Fathers could not have put it in, even if they had a mind to, and there is no evidence that they had...They had come by freedom the hard way and they meant to hold on to it.
A people who remonstrated so vigorously over a measly tea tax could hardly have understood the idea of letting their pockets be picked. The suggestion would have sounded preposterous.
In the important matter of taxation, the Constitution quite definitely granted the new government very limited powers: import tariffs and excise taxes...And so, the government of the United States got along with what it could get out of tariffs and a few excise taxes until the Civil War...As a consequence, it was a weak government, in the sense that it could not become bothersome; and the freedom of the people made them strong, so that wealth multiplied and the country flourished.
...on the whole, previous to the Civil War the government of the United States confined itself to the business for which it was created, that of protecting people in the enjoyment of their God-given rights. It should not be forgotten that the Founding Fathers, agreeing with John Locke...thought of government principally as an instrument for safeguarding private property; and that was considered the prime business of the United States government until 1860. The dictum that “all men are created free and equal” held in the matter of taxes...No one, and no group, could be singled out by the government for special spoliation.
In name, [The Sixteenth Amendment] was a tax reform. In point of fact, it was a revolution... every activity of government turned Santa Claus by the income tax...
Thus, the immunities of property, body and mind have been undermined by the Sixteenth Amendment. The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913.
...the Sixteenth Amendment changed our country economically, politically, and morally...the Sixteenth Amendment has widened the area of government power, and as a consequence has reduced the area of liberty.
The Internal Revenue Bureau quite sensibly takes the view that every one of us is a potential lawbreaker, as far as the income-tax law is concerned. To approach its task with any other point of view would undermine its effectiveness. It has a war against society on its hands, and to win that war it must make use of the artifices of war, such as espionage, deception, and force...If this setting produces corruption, we must look to the law, not to the human beings involved, for cause.
...corruption...is simply the inevitable consequence incident to the operation of an immoral law. Of far greater concern is the use of income taxation to undermine the principles of republican government and to make a mockery of our tradition of freedom.
...the income tax, by transferring the property of earners to the State, has disintegrated the moral fiber of Americans to such a degree that they do not even recognize the fact.
The income tax, by attacking the dignity of the individual at the very base, has led to the practice of perjury, fraud, deception, and bribery.
...with the advent of income taxation, socialism was unavoidable...The more power the government exercises the less freedom will the people enjoy.
From the very beginning of the Union it has been customary for Congressmen to try to wangle out of the federal government some special privilege for their more influential supporters, or some appropriation of federal funds for spending in their states. “Pork barrel” legislation did not begin with the Sixteenth Amendment. However, before 1913 the best the party in power could do for a Congressman (or a state governor), by way of a bribe, was to let him hand out a judgeship or a postmastership, an occasional franchise or perhaps a land grant. Such favors helped the state machines to see eye to eye with the federal government and win their support for its programs; but the total of such patronage was not enough to reduce the states to subserviency. The manna that fell from Washington was hardly enough to buy up the independence of the states or the votes of their citizens. No candidate for Congress could offer his constituents gifts paid for by the citizens of other states.
The ink was hardly dry on the Sixteenth Amendment before the heretofore picayune federal patronage began to blossom...The laws multiplied and the appropriations grew bigger.
This practice of buying votes with political favors is inherent in popular government...due so much to the depravity of the politician as to the human hunger for something-for-nothing.
However, this weakness of democracy is only as dangerous as the amount of the citizens’ wealth the government has at its disposal. Before 1913 the American government was comparatively poor and political jobbery was correspondingly limited in scope. When the government acquired this power of confiscating the national wealth, the corruption was limited only by the amount that expediency would permit it to confiscate. At this writing the confiscation amounts to one third of the production of the citizenry. That is a lot of “pork” with which to buy votes. And so, as the Sixteenth Amendment gradually achieved its fulfillment, the politician’s attention was more and more directed toward the “barrel”; so was the attention of those who are compelled to keep it filled.
This centralization of power, which the Founding Fathers feared and sought to prevent by constitutional safeguards, is made possible only by income taxation. This is the atomic bomb that has virtually destroyed the Union.
Somehow, a Mississippian sees no immorality in forcing a Pennsylvanian to support his local economy. His pride might stop him from accepting a gratuity from his neighbor, but he suffers no such inhibition when he knows it comes from a “foreigner.” So, it came to pass that a Congressional coalition, representing the poorer states, and held together only by their common greed, pressed for legislation that would bring them dollars mulcted mainly from the citizens of the seven rich states. That is the bald fact, though the legislation was glamorized with the “public interest” label. According to the label, New York profits by its forced contribution to Arizona irrigation projects or Montana roads. However that might be, the immediate beneficiary of federal grants to local projects is the politician who solicits it, and the ultimate beneficiary is the federal bureaucracy. Everybody else pays.
The American Revolution was unique in history...because it made possible the establishment of a government based on a new and untried principle, namely, that the government has no power except what the governed have granted it. That was a shift in power that had never occurred before.
A new American revolution was initiated in 1913, when the government was invested with the power to confiscate private property...that this power over the economy of the country put into the hands of the American government a means of liquidating the sovereignty of the citizenry.
As a result of income taxation, we now have a government with far more power than George III ever exercised...an inevitable consequence of income taxation. The citizen is sovereign only when he can retain and enjoy the fruits of his labor. If the government has first claim on his property he must learn to genuflect before it. When the right of property is abrogated, all the other rights of the individual are undermined, and to speak of the sovereign citizen who has no absolute right of property is to talk nonsense. It is like saying that the slave is free because he is allowed to do anything he wants to do except to own what he produces.

Those who want your money for their purposes will meet your grumbles and complaints with the argument that “taxes are the price we pay for civilized society”, (said by Oliver Wendell Holmes 100 years ago, before the income tax and when taxes were minuscule in comparison to today’s burdens) or that every one of your dollars headed for the Treasury is absolutely essential for the “general welfare.” Frank Chodorov knew better.

Certainly, no tax on incomes got into the Constitution. That was unthinkable. A people that had but recently kicked over the traces because of taxes far less onerous would hardly have countenanced an income tax. They knew their freedom.
The general welfare is not improved by the increasing load of taxation. On the contrary, the upward climb of civilization is retarded in exact proportion to the levies...