Month: October 2015

A Patriot’s Death & Taxes

With the recent passing of Irwin Schiff, father of Peter Schiff, I feel that it’s an appropriate time to discuss the message that Irwin spent most of his life trying to share with people. Irwin Schiff wrote several books and gave many speeches trying to prove, using the government’s own laws and documents, that the payment of income tax is not actually required by law. As a libertarian, I think this is a compelling topic that is worth examination. I’d like to outline some of the key arguments against the payment of income taxes, comment on a few other tax issues, and finally, summarize my position on what I think an acceptable tax regime could look like.

Let’s start with Irwin Schiff. In my opinion, his key and most powerful argument is based on the fact that our current income tax laws require individuals to “self-assess” their tax liability. Irwin argues, and I tend to agree, that being forced to file an income tax return violates an individual’s 5th Amendment protections against self incrimination. If your tax return can be used against you in a criminal proceeding for tax evasion, which it can, then you should not be forced to “testify” against yourself by filing an income tax return.

“…we may disclose your tax information to the Department of Justice to enforce the tax laws, both civil and criminal, and to cities, states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. commonwealths” – Disclosure, Privacy Act, and Paperwork Reduction Act Notice: Internal Revenue Service Form 1040

Another key claim made by Irwin Schiff is that individuals cannot be held liable to pay income tax because “income” is defined, not in the internal revenue code because that would be unconstitutional (“Congress cannot by any definition it may adopt conclude the matter, since it cannot by legislation alter the Constitution, from which alone it derives its power to legislate, and within whose limitations alone that power can be lawfully exercised” – Eistner vs. Mcomber), but through a series of supreme court cases. The most comprehensive of which is:

The Corporation Excise Tax Act of August 5, 1909 ( 36 Stat. 11, 112), was not an income tax law, but a definition of the word ‘income’ was so necessary in its administration that in an early case it was formulated as ‘A gain derived from capital, from labor, or from both combined.’  – Stratton’s Independence v. Howbert

There are two key things to take from this. The first being that the Corporation Excise Act of 1909 defined income and applied it to “every corporation, joint stock company or association, organized for profit and having a capital stock represented by shares”. That would suggest that income really only exists for corporations and not individuals. The second is that the definition of income indicates it’s the “gain derived from”, not just the receipt of compensation. That would suggest that individuals should be able to offset their “gross income” with all of their expenses to determine what their “gain” would be. That is the appropriate “taxable income”. 

The last point I’ll highlight is the argument that the income tax is unconstitutional because it violates Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution which states:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons” – CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, ARTICLE 1, SECTION 2, CLAUSE 3

This clause of the Constitution should make it clear that the amount of income taxes collected by the Federal government should be based on the population of the states, similar to the number of representatives granted to each state in the US House of Representatives, and not based on each individual’s income.

Mr. Schiff developed a long list of what I consider very valid legal arguments against individuals’ liability to pay income taxes. I would recommend everyone read his book The Federal Mafia: How the Federal Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes. However, while I agree with his points of view and find his legal positions quite sound, I would still caution everyone from following his advice. The federal courts of the United States government have erroneously interpreted the powers of the government in favor of the government (shocking, I know) and imprisoned Mr. Schiff until his recent death.

Mr. Shiff spent his life arguing against the income tax specifically. With that in mind, I’d like to spend a bit of time on another tax that I find reprehensible – property taxes.

Continue reading A Patriot’s Death & Taxes

Unconvinced by “Settled Science”

One of the recurring topics discussed by the Democratic candidates during the debate last week was the threat of global warming climate change. This has been an ongoing topic of discussion for the past few years, and I’d like to provide a few comments related to the issue. First, I’m going to tell you that I’m neither a climate change “denier” nor am I  convinced that man’s influence on the climate is as dramatic as many climate change alarmists say. More importantly, I’m not convinced that the potential impacts of climate change outweigh the costs many are proposing to combat it. I’ll walk through a few varied topics to try and show that the climate change debate isn’t much of a debate; it’s a monologue of those on one side of the argument.

The first item I want to discuss relates directly to the title of this post. In broad terms, I am immediately skeptical of someone who says “the science is settled”. I don’t think that anyone who makes that claim understands the scientific method. I assume most of you reading this studied this concept in middle or high school, but I’d like to provide a refresher – the point being that science is never really “settled”.

The main steps of the scientific method are as follows:

  1. Make an observation
  2. Ask a question about said observation
  3. Construct a Hypothesis
  4. Conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis
  5. Analyze the results of the experiment to accept or reject hypothesis

A key component of the experiments or tests performed is the attempt to isolate a single variable (i.e., keep all conditions but the key variable being tested constant).  It’s important to note that if testing results do not confirm the hypothesis, the original hypothesis must be rejected, and a revised hypothesis should be subjected to testing.

With this rubric in mind, let’s discuss how the climate change alarmists seem to miss key components of the scientific method. When discussing the human impact on climate change, this generally refers to our collective carbon footprint, or the contribution of carbon dioxide to the environment as a result of the production of goods and industry. The first clear challenge in trying to test carbon dioxide impact on the climate is trying to isolate that variable. The global climate is influenced by a litany of factors, and while we know a lot about these factors, we can’t claim to understand with certainty the intricate ways that these factors work together and impact one another. Some other factors that are known to impact the climate are solar activity, convection, cloud cover, and complex oceanic models. As such, it’s nearly impossible to isolate the carbon factor with our current scientific knowledge.

This has led climatologists to produce computer models that make large assumptions on the impact of all the variables included. These assumptions are a red flag for me, and indicate a flaw in the attempt to “validate” the man-made climate change hypothesis. (That being said, I can concede that using computer models may be the only way to attempt to test and predict the impact of variables on the climate.)

However, even conceding that point, we find other issues. One relevant issue is the fact that all the climate models being used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have overestimated the warming of Earth. In fact, when using their current model they are also unable to accurately calculate historical temperature levels.

Climate Model Predictions
Source: Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH)

This raises a fairly obvious question – if their current “hypotheses”, as translated to their models, cannot be validated using hard data, why would we consider the hypotheses valid?

Continue reading Unconvinced by “Settled Science”

Democratic Debate Roundup

I apologize for missing this past Sunday’s weekly post, but had some personal commitments that prevented me from getting to it. To make up for that, I’ve put this post together. As always, I aim to be fair and provide critiques of both the Democrats as well as the GOP, so here’s my take on the Democratic debate that occurred last night (10/13/15).

DISCLAIMER: As a libertarian, I find the State to be inherently detrimental to liberty, so I am biased against any positions that embrace State intervention vs. allowing the true free market to function.  I’ll provide as brief of a summary as I can on my impressions of the candidates and their policy stances.

Lincoln Chafee – Let’s just come out and say it – he’s by far the worst candidate on the stage. He has switched parties when it was politically expedient, and when you feel the need to say “I have high ethical standards” in your opening statement, I immediately question your ethical standards. If you have high ethical standards, why the need to make that statement? It’s like someone who prefaces a statement with the phrase “to be honest” – should I then assume all your other statements are dishonest? He did profess an aversion to getting into another “quagmire”, referring to a war – that I support. Other than that, I’m not sure he actually said anything worth commenting on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped out of the race next week, because I can’t imagine him getting elected.

Jim Webb – My first impression of him was….BOOORING. He seems like a robot. I actually imitated a robot walk for my wife when he first started speaking.  However, he actually is the only person on stage that is close to the old traditional democratic positions. I feel like day by day, the democrats become more Marxist. However, Jim Webb seems like an old-school Dem. He showed his strong support for the 2nd Amendment and I *loved* when he called out the hypocrisy of Democrats who, with their armed guards by their side, call for restricting law-abiding citizens’ rights to defend themselves with firearms. He did, however, seem to flip flop on affirmative action. He says that he supports affirmative action for African Americans in this country because of their historical exposure to slavery and Jim Crow laws. A few thoughts on this. First, I’d like to ask, “Do you support affirmative action for those African Americans that are immigrants to this country and are not descendants of slaves nor lived through the Jim Crow era”? I think this is a relevant distinction to make. Second, remember that the existence of Jim Crow laws, and the abuse and discrimination that resulted from them, wasn’t the product of racism exercised through free people alone, but were rather statutes enforced by the State. If everyone in the south was vehemently racist, there would have been no need to pass laws and enforce those laws with the guns of the State. The reason the State had to enforce segregation was because the free market and free peoples would have embraced integration of African Americans into the economy. That said, if there was one person onstage that I think would be the least harmful to liberty, it would be Jim Webb.

Martin O’Malley – He seems pretty stiff to me. I wasn’t overly inspired and didn’t really hear any policies that I thought would be a benefit to the country. He was bad on guns, kept bragging about raising minimum wage, and thanked President Obama for all that he did with the economy. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I wouldn’t say we’re in a booming economy right now. He also wanted to make college a “debt free option”, which is a great thought, but who will pay for it? He didn’t say – shocking! He repeatedly called climate change the biggest threat to the country and harped on it over and over. I’m going to write an entire post on this topic, but I’m not sure the church of climate change is really being self critical. I’m not sure imposing trillions of dollars of penalties on the US while other countries continue to emit carbon dioxide will actually shrink the “rich-poor” gap he was complaining about. Overall, he’s really nothing to get excited about.

Bernie Sanders – As most of you can imagine, Bernie is the hardest person for me to stomach. As a professed Socialist, his positions are diametrically opposed to liberty. I can understand the appeal he may have for many people who feel like they are victims of the current economy or are envious of the success of other people. However, many of these people fail to realize it’s not capitalism (which we no longer have in this country; we have corporatism or crony capitalism) that is to blame for their woes, but rather the distortion of the market brought on by government intervention. Let’s drill down on a few of the positions that Bernie addressed:

Continue reading Democratic Debate Roundup

Another Mass Shooting, Another “Gun Free” Zone

The tragedy at Umpqua Community College last week was just that – a tragedy. It was a senseless act of true evil that is almost impossible to comprehend. But what is also tragic is the demagogic language that was immediately rolled out by politicians and pundits alike. Even the President weighed in with his gun control agenda, as vague as his plans are. The irony of a President who is from a city with the some of the tightest gun control laws in the country and still one of the highest gun murder rates in the country, yet still advocates for similar federal laws, hopefully wasn’t lost on the public.

With this event in mind, I’d like to provide some commentary on a couple of items in this post. First, whether calls for gun control can prevent these types of mass shootings. Second, I’d like to poke some holes in the idea that the government has the right to regulate guns in this country.

Let’s start with whether gun control can prevent future mass shootings. I’ll start by saying unequivocally – no. The idea that passing laws against the possession of firearms will prevent criminals from possessing firearms is laughable on its face. The only effects of gun restrictions, including so-called “gun free zones”, is to disarm and victimize law abiding citizens. The reality is that law abiding citizens will obey the restrictions while criminals do not, leaving innocent people without protection against those who would do them harm.

Continue reading Another Mass Shooting, Another “Gun Free” Zone