"Redeeming Lawful Money"

[The Observer]

A great exposition on why this garbage doesn't work. Hopefully most of that can find its way into the wiki.

[Burnaby49]

Just read your write-up on the issue. There is one question that has puzzled me from the start of my reading up on this whole issue.

12 USC § 411 allows for "the redemption in lawful money" of the actual money you have in your wallet. However, as you have pointed out, US treasury notes are already lawful money and all you will get on a redemption demand is more of the same. The reason for this pointless situation is the lingering remnants of old law which applied to silver certificates and other forms of currency which no longer exist. As you put it:

Those no longer exist today, but that provision of § 411 remains, basically an anachronism. The law contains many anachronisms. Everyone has seen the compilations of laws still on the books which do things like prohibit herding cattle on Main Street.

However most anachronistic law is irrelevant to any modern context and has just stayed on the books through indifference because nobody tries to apply it. This is not the case with 12 USC § 411 because it is being actively used to promote tax avoidance schemes. So, given that it no longer serves any useful purpose and is instead being used for an illegal one which costs the government time and money, why doesn't the government just end the issue by repealing it?

[Judge Roy Bean]

...why doesn't the government just end the issue by repealing it?

Because 99.99999999999% of people dont' give a rat's patoot.

[Burnaby49]

...why doesn't the government just end the issue by repealing it?

Because 99.99999999999% of people dont' give a rat's patoot.

I agree that the man on the street (in my preferred terminology "the Man on the Clapham Omnibus", blame it on my British background) doesn't care, but the government should care since government resources, particularly wasted court time, are being used to contest this issue. A repeal would save the government money and aggravation without, as far as I can see, any negative political consequences since the only affected parties are the morons pushing this stupidity. They probably don't even vote.

[The Observer]

Repealing the law would just create another opportunity for the scammers to say that the repeal is just more evidence that the gubmint is trying to cover up the "truth.

[wserra]

A repeal would save the government money and aggravation without, as far as I can see, any negative political consequences since the only affected parties are the morons pushing this stupidity.

Burnaby - I agree with the comments of both JRB and Observer. In addition, please consider the following.

There are wackos on both sides of our mutual border who (in the words of Judge Easterbrook) believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest. Many times those things are stupid readings of statutes. The oldest TP canard of all is that there is supposedly no law requiring one to pay income tax. Does that mean we should re-enact our respective income tax codes, perhaps prefaced by a (in our case) Congressional finding to the effect that "We find that there are idiots who claim that no law requires one to pay this tax. Well, here it is, you nitwits"?

Whatever the law reads, there will be those who claim that it doesn't mean what it says. You don't tailor the law to them.

[notorial dissent]

As witness the grammatically challenged who continue to insist with the greatest of fervor that "includes" is limiting, in spite of all the considerable to the contrary.

[The Observer]

As Wes said, the people embracing this nonsense will not accept reality and will come up with any excuse to defend it. David Van Pelt has been following this thread over on Sui Juris and comes up with a new excuse for every loss reported here. His latest defense? "Well, the suitors aren't complaining about the results so it [referring to the "evidence repository"] must be effective."

Well, the "suitors" may not be complaining because they are too idiotic to realize that they lost. But they conclude that they have "won" because the government isn't knocking on their door every day looking for money. This the same mentality Pete Hendrickson relies on when he crows about the refunds being received by CtC filers. Yet he won't go back and update the victory page when the Crackheads end up getting levied and liened for the erroneous refunds.

Face it, when people decide to go this far out into the woods, you are never reeling them back in by cleaning up the legislation.

[Pottapaug1938]

Repealing the law would just create another opportunity for the scammers to say that the repeal is just more evidence that the gubmint is trying to cover up the "truth".

You bet! They'll claim that their "truth" is set forth in the Magna Carta, the Articles of Confederation, and in the decision of a trial court judge in some podunk jurisdiction;and since this all came before 1862 or 1913, they win!

[AndyK]

...
The oldest TP canard of all is that there is supposedly no law requiring one to pay income tax.
...

That evasion approach is based on the fact that the current version of 26USC has never, in its entirety, been enacted into "positive law."

Od course, if Congress would pause with their constant tinkering with the Code and enact it -- en masse -- into positive law, that wouldn't be enough.

The evaders would whine that the Code doesn't reflect (or isn't) common law; that it conflicts with their interpretation of the Constitution or the Bible; or that Congress forgot to say some particular set of magic words when passing the act.

The various compliance-challenged arguments are bread-and-butter for Treasury's Office of Chief Counsel. The newly hired attorneys get the pleasure of handling these 'not ennobled with somber argument' cases and drafting the opinions for the Tax Court judges.

The more experienced attorneys get the better cases: those with plausible arguments on the part of the taxpayer ofthose which might set major precedent.

[LPC]

Whatever the law reads, there will be those who claim that it doesn't mean what it says. You don't tailor the law to them.

That is part of the rational of the Wnuck decision.

I. Why we usually decline to refute frivolous anti-tax arguments

The reasons that courts decline “to refute these [frivolous] arguments with somber reasoning and copious citation of precedent”, Crain v. Commissioner, 737 F.2d at 1417, include the following.

A. The number of potential frivolous anti-tax arguments is unlimited.

If one is genuinely seeking the truth, if he focuses on what is relevant, and if he confines himself to good sense and logic, then the number of serious arguments he can make on a given point is limited. However, if one is already committed to a position regardless of its truth, if he is willing to say anything, if he is willing to ignore relevance, good sense, and logic, and if he is simply looking for subjects and predicates to put together into sentences in ostensible support of a given point, then the number of frivolous arguments that he can make on that point is effectively limitless. When each frivolous argument is answered, there is always another, as long as there are words to be uttered. Such arguments are without number. Consequently, a Court that decides cases brought by persons willing to make frivolous arguments--such as “tax protesters” or “tax defiers”--would by definition never be finished with the task of answering those frivolous arguments.

Wnuck v. Commissioner, 136 T.C. 498, 501-502 (2011) (footnote omitted).

[wserra]

That passage from Wnuck is indeed apt.

So apt, in fact, that we have a new entry in the Quatloosian Thesaurus under "Tax Protester": "Wnucklehead".

[Quixote]

Removing troubleson legal fossils won't do any good. The TPs will just find a different statute to misconstrue. Several LostHeads, for example, in order to "prove" that the word "compensation" in IRC section 61 does not apply to the money they receive, look to the definition of "compensation" as used in, iirc, the Federal Salary Act of 1936. Anyone who thinks the UCC applies in criminal cases is not going to be fazed by Congress cleaning up the applicable statutory language.

[JamesVincent]

That, and something I ran into with Bork, they will go to ANY law to find a definition that meets what they want it to say. When we had the debacle over Wiki, during one of his rants, he quoted a statute that, literally, applied the word "person" to a Va law on vandalism. He also quoted another law and used the definition of "person" from a Va law on sanitation removal. Yes, he used a law on garbage collection to make his "point". Maybe removing one archaic section will stop that particular section being used, but wont stop the stupid. Md still has laws on the books requiring a person with a lantern to proceed in front of an automobile while traveling at night. Doesn't mean it needs to be removed since it does not get enforced.

[Pottapaug1938]

Removing troubleson legal fossils won't do any good. The TPs will just find a different statute to misconstrue. Several LostHeads, for example, in order to "prove" that the word "compensation" in IRC section 61 does not apply to the money they receive, look to the definition of "compensation" as used in, iirc, the Federal Salary Act of 1936. Anyone who thinks the UCC applies in criminal cases is not going to be fazed by Congress cleaning up the applicable statutory language.

That goes double for anyone who thinks that any of our rights as citizens (of whatever variety) come from the Magna Carta, or that the Articles of Confederation or the Declaration of Independence have any current legal significance.

[grixit]

Has anyone tried quoting from the Twelve Tables?

[rogfulton]

Has anyone tried quoting from the Twelve Tables?

Prior to Common Law and so, not applicable?

[wserra]

DMVP is claiming that in the Frink case (which we discussed above), his "methods" succeeded in "vacating a prosecution". What? This should be worth looking at.

And, as the reader who has been following the lies and misrepresentations David has made in this thread alone might suspect, it's complete bullshit. David takes a screen shot of just the top page of the six-page criminal docket and posts that without the rest of the docket. Some clerk has erroneously marked the seven counts of the indictment "terminated". The entire docket (which, of course, David doesn't show anyone) clearly shows that, not only was the indictment not dismissed, but that there is a trial date for June 18, 2013 (entry #57). Moreover, as I write above, far from being successful, the "libel of review" was dismissed sua sponte.

It's truly beyond me how anyone with a few functioning brain cells believes anything this guy says.

[AndyK]

Just in case a potential Daved Merrill acolyte happens to be reading:

First, David has never met a fact or document which he couldn't obfuscate, misinterpret, misrepresent, or flat-out lie about to make it fit within his personal view of reality.

Second, what he has written is such a word-salad combination and compilation of different theories and documents that it is almost impossible to comprehend, much less refute. However, he uses big words and citations to plausible (although misinterpreted, misquoted, and overly "sanitized") sources. This gives the uneducated reader some credence that David Merrill knows what he's talking about and that David Merrill is correct.

Third, David Merrill has found a number of legal cases which he has managed to interpret (with some falsification applied) as supporting his theory.

Finally, there are thousands of people who desperately want to believe that someone has found a silver bullet which they can use to make all their problems vanish. They are willing to grasp at anything no matter how remote.

If it weren't David Merrill, someone else would step up and fill the void. At least David Merrill isn't charging thousands of dollars for his methods.

[Pottapaug1938]

Just in case a potential Daved Merrill acolyte happens to be reading:

First, David has never met a fact or document which he couldn't obfuscate, misinterpret, misrepresent, or flat-out lie about to make it fit within his personal view of reality.

Second, what he has written is such a word-salad combination and compilation of different theories and documents that it is almost impossible to comprehend, much less refute. However, he uses big words and citations to plausible (although misinterpreted, misquoted, and overly "sanitized") sources. This gives the uneducated reader some credence that David Merrill knows what he's talking about and that David Merrill is correct.

Third, David Merrill has found a number of legal cases which he has managed to interpret (with some falsification applied) as supporting his theory.

Finally, there are thousands of people who desperately want to believe that someone has found a silver bullet which they can use to make all their problems vanish. They are willing to grasp at anything no matter how remote.

If it weren't David Merrill, someone else would step up and fill the void. At least David Merrill isn't charging thousands of dollars for his methods.

You forgot to add that David Merrill Van Pelt has never, to our knowledge, answered a direct question or a direct challenge to any of his legal fantasies with anything except with evasions, irrelevancies or inanities.

Also, the cases which he proffers to us are never on point; all he ever gives us are cases in which a selected sentence or two get twisted to support his fantasies. He has never named a court case in which the holding supports his contentions; instead we get excuses like "the courts are afraid to rule against the IRS", or something like that. In at least one case ("Milam"), the court's holding directly contradicts David's premise; but that has never stopped him from persisting with his premise.

You will never, ever hear him say anything like "I was wrong". EVER.