The Case for Abolishing the Income Tax

Your Money or Your Life                    Back to NCPA Debate Home Page

Your Money or Your Life: Why We Should Abolish the Income Tax By Sheldon Richman, (January, 1999, Future of Freedom Foundation) [Sheldon Richman is Editor of Ideas on Liberty.] This 112 page book makes the case for ending the tax in incomes in America. Sheldon Richman presents historical, political and economic arguments for ending the Income Tax. Unlike many others who recommend replacing the revenue from the Income Tax with a National Sales Tax or other revenue sources, Richman argues that federal revenues lost by abolishing the Income Tax need not be replaced. Instead, he argues that the size of the Federal government is actually the result of the somewhat accidental passage and expansion of tax on income (such taxes were prohibited by the Constitution). There is no upper limit to the amount of revenue that government programs could spend on roads, airports, dams, schools, aircraft carriers, space programs, health care, stealth bombers, parks, monuments, welfare, cancer research, agriculture, FBI, BATF, DOJ, etc. In fact advocates of each of these programs and agencies (and hundreds of others) currently complain bitterly that they lack adequate federal funding to carry out their missions. The field of Public Choice economics helps explain why the size and scope of federal programs depends upon their funding, rather than the stated intentions of legislators who created them. Thus, because the Income Tax opens a massive source of federal funding, it is the Income Tax, rather than any political or economic need, that has driven the steady growth of the federal government. Richman draws upon historical records to show that the Income Tax was never intended to be more than a small (less than 5%) tax on the very rich. However, two world wars enabled "temporary" income tax increases to become permanent. Later, inflation pushed average income earners into tax brackets originally designed for upper income tax payers. This steady bracket creep allow income tax rates and revenue to expand vastly beyond what anyone imagined as recently as the 1960s. As Income Tax rates grew they naturally became more intrusive, and the mandatory Income Tax Form became more invasive of privacy. Highly recommended for students investigating protecting privacy of employment. -- Greg Rehmke ----- A compelling moral case against the income tax reviewed by Jim Powell This is the most refreshingly radical book about the income tax to come along in quite a while. Unlike other books which complain about the excesses of the IRS or suggest that it be replaced by another odious tax, Richman presents a compelling case that life would be better without it--and that we certainly shouldn't trouble ourselves to replace it. Richman focuses on the moral issues. He shows that the income tax made possible the explosive growth in the power of the state. He observes how it has "given the government unprecedented access to the American people's wealth, provided the rationale for the government to intrude into our personal affairs, reversed the traditional rule-of-law relationship between government and those suspected of lawbreaking, corrupted morality by labeling efforts to keep one's own money as "cheating," bewildered the American people with constantly changing technical rules that no one could possibly comply with perfectly [and] permitted lawmakers to influence our conduct through selective tax deductions and exemptions." Your Money or Your Life documents plenty of horrors which reflect the basic workings of the IRS rather than excesses which might be reformed. He talks about the roughly 3 million IRS penalties a year, including 50,000 erroneous levies on citizens and firms... ------ [review below is from Amazon web site] Booklist 2/15/99 "Although not quite as bracing as his brief for Separating School & State (1994), Richman's writ against income taxation is lively and to the point. Richman wastes no time sloganeering for libertarianism, putting down the dang liberals, or telling IRS horror stories ad nauseam. Instead he scores the income tax as the vehicle for too much government intrusion into privacy, for turning the usual U.S. presumption of innocence on its head in IRS disputes with taxpayers, for making citizens the state's subjects instead of its masters, for exacerbating falling individual incomes, for discouraging saving, and for being the imposition of a nominally progressive elite on an electorate never allowed to deal with tax issues directly.