spermfear wrote
Form 1040 nor the instruction book has ever contained any statement that the application of the income tax law was ever limited in the way that the tax protester literature typically claims? If the federal income tax did not apply to ordinary private sector worker's salary in, say, the year 1913, why doesn't the Form 1040 say that? How the heck did the average person supposedly "know" in 1913 that he or she
Did the IRS just "lie" when it printed the forms, and nobody ever noticed for years and years and years?
Did you know that the highest marginal tax rate for individuals in the early 1950s was 92% for a couple of years, and 91% for many other years in that period? Don't you think that if that income tax were legally invalid, people would have complained?
Note how your response addresses none of my points about Beardsley Ruml's "Taxes Are Obsolete" or Milton Friedman's admitted fraud (with Ruml by the way). Instead you throw out a bunch of straw men arguements.
As far as tax dissent because of high rates, it has always existed and you know it.
WWII ended and the Victory Tax provisions were repealed but it was not publicized. Most Americans assumed that paying the Victory Tax and Paying normal income taxes were the same thing and they were led to that belief by guess who,
the veracious IRS and Treasury.
Most Americans and businesses rolled over for the Friedman and Ruml's withholding fraud.
Over time the abusive state of the tax system
was recognized even by the main stream and some reforms of the rates and filing provisions took place. Most Americans are not so independently minded as they think they are and they will look for relief from the apparatus of governement that lied to them in the first place.
The IRS lies constantly - This is why the American people are terrified of their own government. Even filing "conventional" returns, people run a foul of the service and a letter from the IRS is feared more than induction to the military!
Here are some a neat comments on why the Public Salary Act was passed which may clear up Dan Evan's confusion as to whether 1938 comes before 1939! The congress were simply trying to strong arm the Supreme Court into reversing itself as to the constitutionality of the tax!
And to lend to the 16th amendment and the IRC "a presumption of constitutionality". At best that is all you can say about current IRS and Treasury practices. They have a presumption of constitutionaly without the REALITY!
Congressional Record-Senate, April 4, 1939, page 3765, Senator Brown of Michigan:
“The Senator from Vermont for himself may certainly make that reservation; but there is no question, under the accepted practice here and in the courts, that the fact that we pass the bill
will lend to it a presumption of constitutionality.”
Congressional Record-House, February 9, 1939, page 1321, Congressman Reed of New York:
“I repeat
that the purpose of this bill is not to raise revenue, for it is conceded that it will not produce more that $16,000,000, a sum insufficient under the present spending program to run the Federal Government two-thirds of 1 day.
The purpose is to bring congressional pressure upon the Supreme Court to destroy the fundamental principle that one sovereign power shall not destroy the functions of another sovereign power through the power of taxation, which is the power to destroy.
…We know the evil at which the sixteenth amendment was directed. The Court had held that you could not impose a tax upon the income from real estate or from personal property without apportionment. The people wanted an amendment that would have the effect—and all the debates here has brought out that this was the understanding of the States when they ratified that amendment—of making it possible for the Federal Government to tax the incomes from these two sources without apportionment. That is all in the world the sixteenth amendment did.”
