Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Towle_ | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

Towle_

"How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn't" by Irwin Schiff.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8009736/Irwin-Schiff-How-an-Econom...

View on HN

Irwin Schiff's sons recently wrote "How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes", a book inspired by their father's book.

The author is currently doing time for refusing to pay income taxes. A crank, IMHO.

And yet his son has been considered one of the celebrities of the economic crisis for predicting it so well and profiting from it. The line between crank and brilliant is blurry.

Although his son predicted the crisis, he might not have profited from it. Part of his investment strategy was based on the assumption that the US economy would decouple from the rest of the world. As it happened, foreign investments were also hammered in the crisis.

A very wise and knowledgeable man, IMHO.

Throughout history people have refused to submit to immoral government controls and have suffered the consequences. They are to be admired by people who aspire to be free.

The income tax is an assertion that government owns the work of its citizens and has a right to take as much of it as it wants. The majority of citizens accept this claim because they don't want to be fined, imprisoned, or otherwise mistreated.

Taxpayers are slaves on the government plantation, forced to work for the government. When a slave protests and is punished, he should not be called a crank by the other slaves.

I rest my case.

You are aware that government provides services in exchange for those taxes, right?

Among the "services" that (American) government provides: Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (countries that have not attacked us), military spending equal to what the rest of the world combined spends, social security and medicare (ponzi schemes in which workers today are forced to finance the retirement and healthcare of the elderly with no realistic expectation that their own retirement and healthcare will be similarly provided for), and of course law enforcement and prisons (a large part of which is devoted to punishing non-violent drug "crimes," i.e., people using illegal drugs themselves or suppling them to those who want to buy them).

Providing services does not justify the income tax, even if those services were useful or moral, which they are generally not (see above). The mafia and private slave owners also provide services (protection and employment) but this does not justify their robbery.

The sixteenth amendment to the American Constitution was only ratified in 1913. Somehow America survived until then without a general income tax.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com