A.L.E.R.T.
(America Law Education Rights & Taxation)

03-11-2002
Tax Evasion As A Public Service

This just in: The March 4, 2002 issue of "THE LIGHTHOUSE" -- a publication of The Independence Institute; write to <info@independent.org> to subscribe) -- quoted an article by Pierre Lemieux which originally appeared in the February 27, 2002 issue of Canada's "National Post", titled "Tax Evasion As A Public Service", in which the author asserts "A statue should be erected to the Unknown Tax Evader".

This is certainly one of the more interesting pieces I've read in a while. Lemieux (who shows more restraint than I did; I chuckled out loud) argues that "tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody" because "by drying up the source of funds, [it] constitute[s] a built-in restraint to state growth...".

Tax evasion as a "public service"? Jail doors everywhere would spring open! Restraining the growth of the welfare state? This could cause Algore to hurl himself against a tree! Refusing to fund your own subjugation? What will they think of next!?

Our Communitarian-in-Chief, President George Dubya Bush, has called for us all to donate our time (for free, of course) to "public service". Did he have tax evasion in mind?

One can only hope that future articles from Lemieux will discuss withdrawing from the banking system (!), severing all connections to a SSN (!!), or no longer making applications for licenses (!!!). Would there be no end to such irresponsible suggestions? What is the world coming to? 

For a glimpse of what the world is coming to, read "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson, available at amazon.com and elsewhere. The book's subtitle is "How To Survive and Thrive During The Collapse Of The Welfare State". Davidson describes how freedom-fighting folks the world over are voting with their feet and heading for the exits (diving under the financial covers, that is) in droves. 

Yes, the dam is springing leaks, big time. Are there enough fingers in Washington to plug them all? Can you spell "exploding underground economy"? So is this "gray market" some vast, subterranean financial world in which copious amounts of cash changes hands "under the table"? Yes! Just ask the CIA.

Don't allow your destroyers to co-opt your language. The so-called "underground economy" is the REAL economy, where consenting adults come together to agree on exchanges of value within an unregulated, free enterprise marketplace, untampered with by government. No minimum wage, no price fixing, no subsidies, no free cheese. What ... no free cheese?

Bear in mind that one can only evade a tax (a premeditated, willful act) for which one has first been made liable. Liability precedes evasion. No liability, no evasion. No tickee, no washee. So who (whom?) has Congress made liable for the income tax? Answer: the withholding agent. See code sections 7701(a)(16), 1461, 1441, 1442 and 1443.

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TAX EVASION AS A PUBLIC SERVICE

Chicago gangster "Big Al" Capone was a murderer, extortionist, bootlegger and pimp. But when the feds realized they couldn't make any of those charges stick, they got him on tax evasion.

Little has changed since Capone's day to make dodging what Ben Franklin called one of life's two certainties any more respectable. And even if you think taxation to fund Uncle Sam's "services" is too high, still you may think that tax evasion is a criminal affront to law-abiding taxpayers, who are unable or unwilling to avoid the taxman.

Leave it to economist and Independent Institute research fellow Pierre Lemieux to argue that tax evasion is a public service.

In a recent op-ed in Canada's NATIONAL POST, Lemieux argued that because the conventional wisdom assumes -- naively -- that public servants actually serve the public's interests, any threat to the funding of government programs is viewed as necessarily undesirable. In reality, says Lemieux, bureaucrats and politicians want to maximize the state's revenues because this is in their interest, not the public's. And that, according to Lemieux, means tax evasion isn't the crime against taxpayers that most people make it out to be.

"In this perspective, revenues drive expenditures, not the inverse," writes Lemieux. "The more income the state gets, the more priorities it will find to justify its spending, regardless of what is really economical. It follows that tax evasion and the underground economy, by drying up the source of funds, constitute a built-in restraint to state growth...

"Consequently, tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody, tax evader or not. Confiscatory taxes corner taxpayers into the sort of peaceful self-defense called tax evasion. Tax evasion, and its twin sister, the underground economy, are a second-best to what would otherwise be an even more interventionist state. Without the threat of the underground economy, all taxpayers would be milked, and regulated, more. A statue should be erected to the Unknown Tax Evader."