A self-identified IRS employee admitted he would go after, target and try to end conservative groups who wanted to abolish the IRS, to Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing those groups, while on a Washington Journal segment on C-SPAN.
Mitchell, a political law attorney who has represented conservative groups during the IRS targeting scandal since 2010, was recently a guest on C-SPAN to discuss the possible impeachment of the IRS commissioner John Koskinen.
The first caller was a self-identified IRS employee who said he would go after the groups Mitchell represents if their goal was to abolish the IRS.
“I am a lowly clerk at the IRS, looking at your application for tax-free status,” said the caller, Bill, from Elizabeth, New Jersey. “I go to your web page to see the goals of your group and one of the goals of your group is to abolish the IRS.”
“You can bet every dollar you got I’m going to go after you and target you and try and end your group and that’s just the way it is,” the caller said.
“Well, it shouldn’t be that way, actually, and I don’t know anybody who said they would they would get rid of the IRS, but if they did that’s their right, that’s their First Amendment right to do that,” Ms. Mitchell responded. “And a government employee is not supposed to superimpose his beliefs or his judgment or his concern about his job over those of a citizen who has a first amendment right to express that opinion to abolish the IRS or to change the tax code.”
“Many of these groups did say they wanted lower taxes, they wanted to repeal the 16th Amendment, perhaps, that establishes the income tax,” Mitchell said. “But that’s our constitutional right as citizens.”
Why is this even a question?
The whole reason people give in defense of the IRS and the income tax is, “The majority of people want them.” The implication is that “the people” decide what everyone’s rights are.
This might be democracy, but it isn’t freedom.
If “the people” – that is, the majority – are to determine what’s right or wrong, what happens if the majority decide to elect a Hitler, who wishes to put politically undesirable people in concentration camps? At some point, you have to invoke the concept of individual rights. Individual rights override the will of the mob or the majority.
However, even if you accept the will of the mob as the final standard, what would happen if a majority, at some point, wished to repeal the income tax – or the IRS itself? Would the people lose their Constitutional right to express this desire, even though that same Constitutional right gave rise to their supposed right to create the income tax and the IRS in the first place?
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, when recently running for President, proposed abolishing the IRS. Should he be audited or arrested for taking this stand? If he had become the Republican nominee, what would the IRS have done then?
We are a republic, not a democracy. A republic respects the rights of the individual over and above the will of the majority. Democrats and democratic socialists do not believe this, however (nor do most Republicans); but even by their standard, the people should have a right to express their opposing views. The moment we lose speech is the moment we have lost everything.
The IRS and the income tax never should have been established. In a truly free society, all contributions to a legitimate form of government would be voluntary. In the next best case, there would be limited taxes, but only to support the limited government of a defense and a court system to uphold contracts and private property rights. Such a government would not require an income tax, nor most of the taxes we have today, because it would not be nearly as expensive. On top of this, any reasonable tax would not punish people who are successful by raising their rate of taxation as their income went up. The whole progressive income tax itself is unjust and, in a free society, totally unnecessary.
Even so, the IRS, like other government agencies, was created on the premise of the will of the people. If the people have a right to create this agency, they certainly have a right to disband it. And nothing in the creation of that agency permitted it to crush the expression of free speech. It would be like a president using his power and authority to crush criticism of him- or herself. Maybe that’s coming next? Undoubtedly, it’s already happening.
Whether this caller to the CSPAN show is for real or not isn’t the point. The point is, we know that’s the attitude of the current administration and very likely the next one. Obama made it clear that he agrees with the caller by doing nothing to hold IRS officials accountable for their deliberate attempts to silence Tea Party groups who criticized the government’s policies in the 2010 elections.
Advocates of progressive taxation and all the other things our government does today care nothing for individual rights or democracy. They will sacrifice everything to impose their will on us all. For the majority who perhaps still support the IRS and the income tax, that might not seem like such a big deal. But once you give government unlimited authority, and simply look the other way when the government overtly crushes freedom of speech, you can be sure that sooner or later it will come back to bite you.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
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