Comment by all2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by all2 | Hacker News Reader

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For those down voting, I will note the US Internal Revenue Service is amassing firearms and ammunition [1]. I will also note that civil forfeiture (your stuff did the crime, so we'll take it and you have to prove it was innocent) was practiced until very recently. [0]

Relevant quote:

    In 2015, Eric Holder ended the policy of "adoptive forfeiture", which occurred "when a state or local law enforcement agency seizes property pursuant to state law and requests that a federal agency take the seized asset and forfeit it under federal law" due to abuse.[21] Although states proceeded to curtail the powers of police to seize assets, actions by the Justice Department in July 2017 have sought to reinstate police seizure powers that simultaneously raise funding for federal agencies and local law enforcement.[22]

It is horrifying and hysterical that the example of case law if simply titled "United States v. Forty-Three Gallons of Whiskey". We live in an insane age.

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... - [1] I've managed to find multiple sources that state the IRS spent ~700k USD on firearms and ammunition. Why do the country's accountants need guns or bullets?

It's being downvoted because the idea that taxes == theft is both well trod and not directly relevant to the article. Clearly governments do bad things, my view is that this article describes one such thing and civil forfeiture is another, but you (assuming you're American) get to vote on those things. In the US the IRS is authorized to make arrests and cary guns as part of their duty to investigate crimes related to tax avoidance with some parts having a special focus on the illegal drug trade. It's weird that conservative circles are turning something that has happened since 1919 into some weird new menace.

I do hope that Civil forfeiture in the United States is vastly reformed, but again not really related to the idea that taxes == theft

It’s not exactly some kind of nefarious secret scheme. The IRS puts out a 50 page report each year on what the Criminal Investigations department is for: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3583.pdf

It’s for pretty much what you’d expect: tax fraud, corruption, money laundering, and so on.

> Why do the country's accountants need guns or bullets?

If you've actually inspected a reasonable subset of the multiple sources you found on this, you'd understand that these are purchases for their Criminal Investigations Division, a division with a narrow remit which has been armed for over a century.

The only reason why this is suddenly shocking news is because right-wing media has been increasingly hyping this up as some unprecedented and dangerous overreach since ~2020, cynically playing into the enduring paranoiac belief that govt stormtroopers are just around the corner (yet somehow never actually materializing). You're dancing to the tunes that your echo chambers choose for you.

If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear from an audit by armed goons.

What’s remarkable about your comment is how precisely it identifies your media diet. There’s no way you could credulously repeat this unless you were exposed to it from far right wing propaganda outlets and you lack any exposure whatsoever to credible sources of information.

As for the substance of this claim, the IRS has always had an armed law enforcement role. I suggest researching the origins of the American colloquial word “revenuer”.

https://loganwv.us/the-reverends-and-the-revenuers/

Alarmist claims aside, there are a lot of verifiable stories in the right-wing media bubble that are completely unknown to people in the left-wing bubble, and vice-versa. I really dig https://ground.news/blindspot just for giving some perspective on who's (not) getting exposed to what.

All I see on that site right now is trivia. If that's all I am missing out on by reading the New Yorker, I think I will survive.

"WH Press Room Contains Figurine of What Appears to Be Trump's Head Beaten Up" is not something I need to waste my time reading.

The Left side tends to miss a lot of trivia, although occasionally something meaningful or important - but knowing those things helps me have conversations with people in the right-wing bubble and know what they're talking about. The Right side tends to miss a lot of fairly serious stuff related to Trump's legal problems. I find it worthwhile to keep a finger on the pulse of that site, but it's not my primary news source.

You would have a fairly difficult time convincing me that some Trump grievance junk reported only by RedState and InfoWars, sourced from Twitter, would be worth spending any time pondering. Conserving one's mental capacity is really the entire benefit of filter bubbles.

I think we're talking past each other. I'm talking about what facts are reported, and I'm saying that facts about ongoing Trump cases are not reported by news outlets on the right. (Just as facts about ongoing Hunter Biden cases are not reported on the left).

I find it useful in my daily life to know what each side is focused on and what their blind spots are. Call it information arbitrage.

As someone who doesn't fall squarely into the corporate left or corporate right bins I'm used to being attacked for not getting my news from the approved corporate media organs.

How can people think that someone is producing free news and research without an agenda? Do you think Elon Musk gets his information from reading blogs and $2/month NYT subscriptions? Musk, and people like him, have teams that research current events for them, and Musk has a platform on which he can influence the free information that people get and manipulate them for his benefit.

You can’t imagine why the tax man would need a police force?

You may also be surprised to hear that the DoE has paramilitary capabilities as well.

Fully-armed IRS agents also raided a Montana FFL.

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/irs-confiscates-tens-of-th...

We do live in insane times.

It's less insane than it used to be, because individuals have been fighting and debating for their rights in all imaginable ways for millennia now.

It used to be that monarchs were absolute rulers; gradually humanism developed; now we have rights and so on.

But it's imperative that each generation keep pushing for a more humane and less autocratic world, especially now as tech changes everything.

I wonder how many people wouldn't love a chance to live on an organic heirloom farm in tune with the seasons, surrounded by old friends and family? The serfs also had about one third of their time off for feast and holidays.

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