"It's so simple, it's ridiculous": taxing times for 16th amendment rebels

Reason, May, 2004 by Brian Doherty

Schiff tells a group of well-wishers this latest wave of statist oppression swamped him momentarily--he went into a depression and lost 20 pounds--but "I'm back! I'm back! I'm going to kick their ass!"

He proudly points out that all the back taxes in the $2.5 million judgment are from many years ago and that the IRS has done nothing to him for his more recent zero return filings. This proves to him that strategy must be foolproof.

Vernice Kuglin's acquittal on criminal charges has made her one of the movement's new saints and heroes. I witness her taking aside a man troubled by the mess he's in because he advocated these beliefs as an accountant; she tells him kindly but firmly, "We know in our core that's what we have to do." She was involved in Libertarian Party activities in the early '90s and through that was exposed to tax honesty ideas. By 1995 she was sending letters to the IRS asking what specific section of U.S. code or statutes made her liable for the federal income tax. Were she legally liable, she insisted, she would be more than happy to pay.

Despite the liens on her income, Kuglin is optimistic. A juror in her case, she tells me, had a dream during deliberations in which he heard Kuglin repeating, Liable, Liable, what makes me liable?" This was apparently the crack in his mind that convinced him to lead the jury to acquittal. And then her son had a dream in which she and her lawyer were standing in front of the courthouse, and a ball of light spread around them and enveloped the world. She believes it is all fate, that the universe is taking care of her, that her victory is the beginning of the end of the whole evil lie of the income tax, and that "every setback is one more step to the win" in this battle.

A sober assessment of the empirical evidence shows that the exact opposite is true--that victories for the tax honesty movement (the occasional criminal acquittal or mistrial) lead inevitably to a later defeat (further convictions or civil seizures). But that realization doesn't rely on contemplating the Constitution, statutes, codes, or rabbinical parsings of word definitions. Thus, it is not quick to occur to the devotees of tax honesty.

They move, with heavenly grace, through an existential hell: In their minds and hearts they are absolutely certain that they are right, and even doing God's work. (The contention that the Constitution was divinely inspired elicits a fair amount of clapping and no open unrest at the We The People conference.) But they are also fully aware that all the powers and dominions of the earth are arrayed against them and regularly torment them.

They believe, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that their citizen's understanding of the written law should, and in some Platonic sense does, trump the realities of dealing with the government. This makes them uniquely American rebels--more true, they maintain, to the nation's core values than those of us who follow the pragmatic advice an accountant once gave to one man at the conference. When the tax honesty devotee showed him a Schiff-marked copy of the tax code, the accountant replied: "You mess with that shit, you are going to jail"