RayGunChops

In 1913, Congress sold you the income tax as a tiny levy on the rich. The top rate was 7 percent, and it only kicked in on income above $500,000 (roughly $15 million today). The bottom rate? One percent. They promised it would stay that way. They lied, of course, but the lie was elegant: target the millionaires, calm the working man, then expand the definition of "millionaire" until it includes a plumber in Ohio. By 1918, five years later, the top rate hit 77 percent. Five years. The "temporary" emergency of the First World War gave the state its excuse, and the state never gives an excuse back. Once you accept that Washington owns a percentage of your labor, the only question left is which percentage, and that question gets answered every April by people who have never met you and never will. Income tax is a claim on your time. When the government takes 24 percent of what you earn, it takes roughly three months of your working year and assigns that labor to itself. You work January through March for the Treasury. Call that what it is. A man forced to work for another man without pay has a word in the dictionary, and it is not "citizen." Free market thinkers spotted the trick a century ago. Frank Chodorov wrote a whole book on it, "The Income Tax: Root of All Evil," published in 1954, and his argument has aged better than the dollar has. The tax requires you to confess your entire financial life to the state and prove your innocence on demand. No warrant. No suspicion. Just compliance, backed by liens, wage garnishment, and the polite threat of armed men. The IRS now employs more people than the FBI, ATF, and DEA combined. You were told 1913 was the beginning of a fairer system. It was the beginning of a permanent one. Nothing the government touches stays small, and nothing it calls temporary ever ends.