Reflecting on the story of the Internal Revenue Service targeting groups with names that included tea party, patriot or any other name that marks a group as pro Constitutional, pro Freedom or pro Bill of Rights, leads us to consider the history of the IRS.
Why would you even approach the IRS for blessing? Your group is, itself considered to be an enemy of the Fed to which the IRS owes allegiance. Any way they can, the IRS will cause opposition to its perceived enemy. Did the American army ask the enemy governments to finance them for WWI or WWII?
The federal income tax was created in 1913 with the ratification of the 16th amendment to the Constitution. Before that time the Fed ran on “tariffs.” Using only tariffs was wise, it kept the government constrained to its Constitutional duties. There were some high tariffs, which did cause some anger and resulted in the “Tariff of Abominations,” but even that was not so high as to stifle the free enterprise system. And the Fed had plenty of money to run what is properly within its scope.
In arguments during the consideration of the 16th amendment (1909), Representative Samuel McCall (Mass.) stated “….leads me to believe that the chief purpose of the tax is not financial, but social. It is not primarily to raise money for the state, but to regulate the citizen and to regenerate the moral nature of man. The individual citizen will be called on to lay bare the inner-most recesses of his soul in affidavits, and with the aid of the Federal inspector, who will supervise his books and papers and business secrets, he may be made to be good, according the notions of virtue at the moment prevailing in Washington.” Continue Reading →