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

Reason, May, 2004 by Brian Doherty

Not merely Protestant, the tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom--of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. It's just that, in this case, that world of words isn't a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series--it's U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, it's like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillain's origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man.

The tax honesty movement's vision of the world is fantastical in another way. It is not merely obsessed with continuity; it is magical in a traditional sense. It's devoted to the belief that the secret forces of the universe can be bound by verbal formulas if delivered with the proper ritual. There are numerous formulae in the tax honesty spellbook, with rival mages defending them. Which spell is best: The summoning of the Sovereign Citizen? The incantation of the Constitutional Definition of Income? The banishing spell of No Proper Delegation?

The tax honesty folks similarly believe that their foe the IRS must also be bound by these grimoires of magic: that without the properly sanctified OMB number an IRS form holds no power, that without uttering the mystic word liable no authority to tax can truly exist.

And always, always, the ultimate incantation, The Question: Where does it say that I owe income taxes? Show me the law!

"There Is Hereby Imposed on the Taxable Income of ..."

You hear this all the time. When presented with the simple request to "show me the law that unambiguously requires me to pay income tax," I was told, everyone from congressmen to tax lawyers to ms agents is stymied, even when Schiff and others offer enormous rewards to anyone who can do so. It didn't take me long to find what seemed to be an answer to that question.

In U.S. Code Tide 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 1, it says, "There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of ...," followed by subcategories that seem to include most Americans, complete with tables showing the percentage owed for each income range. (Subchapter A even comes close to that magic word liable that many in the movement insist is nowhere applied to personal income taxes--it's called "Determination of Tax Liability.") But "taxable income" is the rub. Tax honesty types claim the "constitutional" definition of income, as set forth in such Supreme Court cases as Doyle v. Mitchell Brothers (1918), is corporate profits, not individuals' wages. (Courts have knocked down this claim regularly during the last 30 years.)

The movement has an argument against the income tax for every level of abstraction, from the highest (taxing the fruits of our labor is against our natural rights as sovereign individuals) to the lowest (the IRS can't manage to get everyone, so it is reasonably safe just not to file). One California paralegal who speaks at the We The People conference relies on everything from the Magna Carta to the Treaty of Paris of 1765 to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights to defend her contention that she doesn't owe any income tax. Massed together, the chorus of tax honesty voices can't help but remind you of the lawyer in the old joke who argued that his client was not even in town when the victim was killed; and if he was in town, he didn't kill him; and if he did kill him, he was insane when he did it.