\u201cEven those who approve the tax despite its faults cannot contend that the same sums could not have been raised more certainly, more equitably, and with less trouble to both payers and collectors by a stamp tax.\u201d The Times warned that in any emergency the tax rates would be sure to rise and that \u201cits unpopularity will grow with its life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since then, with rare exceptions, the income tax has grown like Topsy, fueled in large part by the kinds of emergencies the Times worried about. As journalist David Van Edema put it: \u201cThe government, using Americans\u2019 sense of patriotism and duty, [has] found new excuses to not only raise taxes, but widen the range of who would pay for them, and how.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
While critics will note that America was not a perfectly libertarian country before October 4, 1913 – slavery was certainly a blot on that particular escutcheon – it’s hard to explain to\u00a0 modern Americans that up until the early 1900s, Civil War aside, the federal government paid for itself with import duties and taxes on alcohol, tobacco and the like.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And along with the skinny government went skinny federal ambitions, and skinnier government control over the lives of Joe and Jane Citizen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To someone whose entire frame of reference involves looking at pay stubs and seeing money siphoned off to pay for other peoples’ mortgage insurance and farm subsidies and pensions and goodness knows whatever other crap that generations of politicians felt was more important than my own plans for the money, it seems incredible.\u00a0 Almost incomprehensible.\u00a0 Few of us can imagine anything else.<\/p>\n
Which is what makes it so diabolical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last Friday, the income tax celebrated its 100th birthday.\u00a0 John Fund “celebrates” the birthday: Critics warned a century ago that the new tax would ultimately be ruinous. The income tax \u201cwill tax the honest and allow the dishonest to escape,\u201d the New York Times wrote. That’s right; a century ago, the New York Times stood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38887"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38892,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38887\/revisions\/38892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}