Income Tax Conspiracy Theorists?

[Anti-sophist]

So I listened, in the background, to the "Freedom to Facism" CT video..

You have to have some Stephen Colbert size balls to claim that income taxes are unconstitutional when the 16th amendment says:


The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.


I mean.. that is just taking self-delusion to stratospheric heights.

[TriangleMan]

The "tax is illegal" crowd say that one state (I think Ohio) failed to ratify the amendment therefore it's not in effect. They are wrong of course and any tax dodger who has used this argument in court has found that it doesn't work. The IRS has a nice summary of these arguments at their website (http://www.irs.gov/taxpros/article/0,,id=159853,00.html)

[Lisa Simpson]

Yes, it is Ohio. The theory is, Ohio wasn't "officially" a state, in that the federal government hadn't made a proclamation stating so. However, the practice of proclamation for new states didn't start until 1813 or so, with Louisiana (Ohio became a state in 1803). Therefore, when the 16th amendment was being voted on, Ohio didn't have any right to be voting on it. It's all a moot point as there were enough votes to pass the amendment anyway and in 1953 Ohio was retroactively "proclaimed" to be a state.

[ktesibios]

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to the trailer for "Freedom to Fascism". After watching the trailer and taking notes on the claims it made, I wrote back to this effect:

"Flying H. Spaghetti Monster, I want those fifteen minutes of my life back. It turned out to be exactly what I was expecting, a haphazard re-hashing of long-discredited claims that have been circulating among the tinfoil-hat set since long before you were old enough to grow boobs...

In fact, they're so old and hoary that there are @#$% FAQs about them... They've been flung down, danced upon and laughed at by the courts so many times that they now cause judges to do spit-takes and reach for their dictionaries to try to find a way of saying "demented @#$%" without destroying their judicial dignity..."

The patrons of the Alcoa Haberdashery Shoppe keep recycling them because they apparently see the law as a game of magic words. When one of these arguments fails in court it isn't because their evidence or reasoning was faulty, it's because they didn't perform the magic ritual exactly right. So they tweak a few words and try it again, expecting that if they can just find the correct incantation the little man from the IRS will stamp his foot like Rumpelstiltzkin and disappear in a puff of logic.

And there are indeed FAQs about all of these claims. One which I recommend as quite comprehensive is Dan Evans' Tax Protestor FAQ (http://evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html).

There's also an omnibus collection of links about these notions at Quatloos (http://www.quatloos.com/taxscams/taxprot.htm).

I've only watched the trailer for "F to F". Even if you have only a hobbyist-level of familiarity with the culture of paranoid conspiracism in the US, you'll recognize every single assertion made as an uncritical regurgitation of Shinola that's been cyber-metastasizing among woo-woo Web sites for what seems like forever, most of it dead wrong when written and all of it hopelessly out of date in the present.

As an example of that out-of-dateness, the trailer dishonestly imputes to Bush the younger a set of executive orders which were, with one exception, signed by President Kennedy (the exception is from President Ford) which are claimed to give the President arbitrary power to institute a military dictatorship in which all property, resources and food are subject to confiscation and the people of the USA subject to forced labor.

It turns out that when you read the actual text of the cited E.O.s (all readily available on the Web, although obtaining a genuine primary source for some would require a trip to the library), most of them don't even imply the terrifying things the CTers attribute to them and all of them have been superseded or revoked by later E.O.s.

And yet the aluminum beanie brigade continues happily circulating that list without ever updating it, because, as Honest John Barlow said in The Marching Morons, "they won't know enough to do any smart checking."

One thing I gotta grant about the PCT industry- it sure does practice recycling. ;)

[CurtC]

Interesting. I got an email from a cow-orker recently, one who's deeply into the religious-right fringe. I'll copy for you here the emails:
This movie is now out on DVD or it can be watched for free at Google. A must see.

http://www.freedomtofascism.com/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4312730277175242198&q=
Oh brother…

"Are you aware that there are plans being developed to have all Americans embedded with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) computer chip under their skin so they can be tracked wherever they go?"
I see it's from Aaron Russo - isn't he the guy who believes that 9/11 was an "inside job" orchestrated and carried out by the US government?
Don't know about that. Many people now believe that as more evidence has become available.

Did you watch the movie? Aaron Russo is Renee Russo's cousin (I believe that's the relation). He produced "Trading Places" with Eddie Murphy and a few other movies.
Actually, I didn't watch the movie. I opened the link and saw that it's pretty long. I also had heard of Aaron Russo and his relation to the "9/11 Truth" movement.

I'm pretty familiar with the 9/11 evidence, and I'm not aware of *any* that supports the idea that 9/11 was an inside job.
I'm not going to debate you now Curtis, but I'll be glad to do so later. I have read almost every article, seen most of the films, read much of the stuff both for and against, I've even read parts of the "911 Commission" report (should have been called, "Omission" report), and one thing is positively for sure: the official story is BS. What really happen, we may never know.

FYI - Russo's movie is not about 911. It's a full length movie and was recently at the theaters.
So I was complaining recently that I had never run across any Truthers in real life, but I wasn't aware that I knew one all along. Unfortunately he does home office, so I hardly ever see him. Nice enough guy, but has some "interesting" views.

[Miss Anthrope]

Ahh yes, THAT trailer. *gag*

This was forwarded to an e-list I belong to by a religious conspiracy nut. This comes from the same woman who stopped making house payments because of some alleged legal "loophole" (and lost the house, by the way!), believes in chem-trails, refused to get a birth certificate for her baby so the gubment couldn't "own" her kid, and put an older child with a broken arm on a rife machine instead of taking her to the doctor.

My response to the e-list, which is made up of home educators across my state, was "and you wonder why the general population often holds negative views of home schoolers?"

[Gravy]

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to the trailer for "Freedom to Fascism".This post was an enjoyable read, ktesibios!

The patrons of the Alcoa Haberdashery Shoppe...Bwah!