"It's So Simple, It's Ridiculous"

Taxing times for 16th Amendment rebels.

Brian Doherty from the May 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 10)

 

While in the past evangelists of the "income tax is a fraud" message have tended to sell books and seminars, the We The People Foundation has the advantage of being hard to blithely condemn as a scam. It is not a business selling advice but a nonprofit dedicated to spending money -- more than $1 million since taking up this fight -- to spread the word. Its founder claims Gandhi as his influence: From him Schulz learned that to fight an unjust tyranny, you need a proactive, nonviolent mass movement, and that is what he is trying to create.

 

The movement against the income tax has lately adopted one of the tropes that define an on-the-rise minority in modern America: Its members want to be called what they call themselves -- the "tax honesty" movement -- and not be slapped with the pejoratives that most people have known them by (if aware of them at all).

 

At the politest, their nemesis the IRS calls them "tax protesters." (Less politely, they’ve been known as "income tax cranks.") A woman who runs a small business making and selling display boards in Massachusetts, who claims to have not paid personal income tax for a few years now with no practical repercussions, tells me that "when people say ‘tax protester movement,’ it drives me nuts. I do not protest taxes. I think they are absolutely necessary. I protest illegal confiscation of assets, which is what the income tax is." She has no problem, she assures me, with sales taxes, property taxes, or corporate taxes.

 

The partisans of the tax honesty movement go beyond complaining that the income tax is too high, or that out-of-control IRS agents enforce it in thuggish ways. They claim, for a dizzyingly complicated variety of reasons, that there is no legal obligation to pay it. The continued life -- and even flourishing -- of that notion, in the face of obloquy, fines, and jail sentences, says something fascinating about a peculiarly American spirit of defiance. It may even say something encouraging about what it means to live in a nation of laws, not of men.

 

"I Used to Be Normal, But..."

 

Bob Schulz has a long history of fighting the government in the name of constitutionally limited powers and proper procedure. His battles date back to 1979, when he successfully sued to halt a new sewage treatment system near Lake George in New York. (According to Schulz, the proposal ignored environmental impact requirements.) Since then he’s been involved in more than 100 such lawsuits and won many.

 

All that is small beer compared to his latest crusade. Since 1999 Schulz has presented his contentions regarding the income tax’s illegality to the IRS, the president, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and every member of Congress. He has humbly beseeched them to answer a list of questions regarding whether he, or any American citizen, has an actual constitutional, statutory, legal obligation to pay the federal income tax.