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

Taxing times for 16th Amendment rebels.

Brian Doherty from the May 2004 issue

(Page 10 of 10)

 

"See!" Schiff is pleased. "They’re not the same!"

 

It all seems so sensible with the energetic Schiff yapping at you. Of course, to say that something falls into a category is not the same as saying it is identical to the category. Schiff’s argument is ultimately as convincing as saying that if an ap-ple is a fruit, and an apple is not an orange, then an orange can’t be a fruit. Still, he seems happy with it.

 

How, one might ask (and many have), can Schiff continue to maintain there is no legal obligation to pay income taxes when he has spent time in jail for not paying income taxes’ He addresses this question in the latest edition of The Federal Mafia: "Unfortunately, some peo-ple who were persuaded by [my books] that they could legally stop paying income tax (they could) went to jail. How many, I don’t know. But they and their families paid a terrible price because of what they learned....I must again warn you regarding the use of this information. There is no question that it is all correct. Paying and filing income taxes are, by law, voluntary. The law...also provides you with a means for stopping the withholding of that tax, which, by any legitimate standard, you have a perfect right to do. But, by doing so, you run the risk of going to jail!"

 

"Liable, Liable, What Makes Me Liable’"

 

The reason for that seeming paradox, Schiff says, is simple: The IRS and the judges it brings cases before are corrupt and don’t care what the law says. Which is why, since February 2003, Schiff has had his Las Vegas office raided and records of all his clients seized; the IRS has moved for judgment on $2.5 million in back taxes and penalties it claims he owes; and a federal judge has banned the sale and distribution of The Federal Mafia by Schiff and forbade him from publicly saying what he believes about the income tax. (That ban is under appeal now.)

 

Schiff tells a group of well-wishers this latest wave of statist oppression swamped him momentarily -- he went into a depression and lost 20 pounds -- but "I’m back! I’m back! I’m going to kick their ass!"

 

He proudly points out that all the back taxes in the $2.5 million judgment are from many years ago and that the IRS has done nothing to him for his more recent zero return filings. This proves to him that strategy must be foolproof.

 

Vernice Kuglin’s acquittal on criminal charges has made her one of the movement’s new saints and heroes. I witness her taking aside a man troubled by the mess he’s in because he advocated these beliefs as an accountant; she tells him kindly but firmly, "We know in our core that’s what we have to do." She was involved in Libertarian Party activities in the early ‘90s and through that was exposed to tax honesty ideas. By 1995 she was sending letters to the IRS asking what specific section of U.S. code or statutes made her liable for the federal income tax. Were she legally liable, she insisted, she would be more than happy to pay.

 

Despite the liens on her income, Kuglin is optimistic. A juror in her case, she tells me, had a dream during deliberations in which he heard Kuglin repeating, "Liable, liable, what makes me liable’" This was apparently the crack in his mind that convinced him to lead the jury to acquittal. And then her son had a dream in which she and her lawyer were standing in front of the courthouse, and a ball of light spread around them and enveloped the world. She believes it is all fate, that the universe is taking care of her, that her victory is the beginning of the end of the whole evil lie of the income tax, and that "every setback is one more step to the win" in this battle.

 

A sober assessment of the empirical evidence shows that the exact opposite is true -- that victories for the tax honesty movement (the occasional criminal acquittal or mistrial) lead inevitably to a later defeat (further convictions or civil seizures). But that realization doesn’t rely on contemplating the Constitution, statutes, codes, or rabbinical parsings of word definitions. Thus, it is not quick to occur to the devotees of tax honesty.

 

They move, with heavenly grace, through an existential hell: In their minds and hearts they are absolutely certain that they are right, and even doing God’s work. (The contention that the Constitution was divinely inspired elicits a fair amount of clapping and no open unrest at the We The People conference.) But they are also fully aware that all the powers and dominions of the earth are arrayed against them and regularly torment them.

 

They believe, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that their citizen’s understanding of the written law should, and in some Platonic sense does, trump the realities of dealing with the government. This makes them uniquely American rebels -- more true, they maintain, to the nation’s core values than those of us who follow the pragmatic advice an accountant once gave to one man at the conference. When the tax honesty devotee showed him a Schiff-marked copy of the tax code, the accountant replied: "You mess with that shit, you are going to jail."

 

Well, not necessarily to jail. Tax honesty folks adore the Supreme Court’s 1991 decision Cheek v. U.S., which authoritatively ruled that a belief, however objectively unreasonable, that one was not liable to pay income tax could negate the element of willfulness necessary to establish criminal culpability for income tax crimes. In this area, in essence, ignorance of the law is an excuse. But as Daniel Pilla puts it, Cheek "might keep you out of jail, but it won’t mean you don’t owe the tax."

 

Still, the tax honesty folks believe, to their core, that a written Constitution and written laws truly can restrain the unbridled force of government. They push a naive Americanism, but an Americanism nonetheless. They are no more insane, in principle, then anyone else anywhere who has ever tried to fight city hall, sue the government, or halt congressional action by relying on, say, the Commerce Clause.

 

Their facts are mostly wrong. But whether wrong or not, they are irrelevant -- and the tax honesty folks know it. Not a one seems unaware that jail and property confiscation are a likely result of acting on their ardently held conclusions. But they refuse to believe it. This makes them foolish, to be sure. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t heroic. As one conference attendee tells me, "I don’t care how many cowards there are. There’s one less on the planet, and that’s me. Everyone has to stand up for something in their lifetime."