http://www.reason.com/0405/fe.bd.five.shtml
Reason:
May 2004
Five Reasons You Don't Owe Income Tax, Dammit!
The most heartfelt beliefs of the "tax honesty" movement
Brian Doherty
Here are some of the core arguments against the legality of the income tax
one finds in the tax honesty movement. Devotees probably would regard them
as oversimplifications. This is certainly not an all-inclusive list.
1) The IRS declares in various documents that the income tax is
"voluntary." And in Flora v. U.S. (1960), the Supreme Court announced,
"Our system of taxation is based upon voluntary assessment and payment."
2) In Brushaber v. Union Pacific (1916), the Supreme Court declared that
"the conclusion that the 16th Amendment provides for a hitherto unknown
power of taxation" is "erroneous," and thus the 16th Amendment did not give
Congress any taxing powers it did not already have. Hence, an unapportioned
direct tax such as the income tax still cannot be legal. (Most mainstream
readings of this extremely hard-to-follow decision say the Court meant
Congress always had the power to levy an income tax, and that it was merely
the question whether it should have to be apportioned that was at issue.)
3) Income, for the purposes of the tax code, should not be understood in
any "common sense" way but only as defined by the Supreme Court. The
Supreme Court, in Merchant's Loan and Trust Company v. Smietanka (1921),
defined it as having the same meaning as in the Corporation Excise Tax of
1909-and as Irwin Schiff has written, "nothing that was received by private
persons was taxable as 'income' under that Act." Income is defined as "gain
derivedVfrom labor" in a previous Supreme Court decision, Stratton's
Independence v. Howbert (1913).
4) Title 26 of the U.S. Code, in which tax-related statutes are found, is
inherently "void for vagueness" because it lacks precise definitions of
such terms as state, United States, employee, and person. Again, "common
sense" definitions aren't good enough. (Many tax honesty types interpret
the use of the word includes in the tax code as properly meaning, "is
limited to.")
5) According to the tax-honesty reading of U.S. Code 26, Section 861, only
income from foreigners or from overseas activity appears to actually be
subject to the income tax.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man, to be
published this summer by Little, Brown.
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R. A. Hettinga