RationalWiki and Tax Protestors

'It's not even a good idea' -- the motto below this "pseudolaw" portal logo on the rational wiki web page. 

The excellent rational wiki page about tax protestors (or protesters) has all the usual -- detailed -- tax protestor nonsense debunked. It is well worth a visit since it deals with all kinds of pseudoscience and debunks it. It is common for tax protestors to also be creationists (like "Dr. Dino" [Kent Hovind]), conspiracy theorists (like - well - most of them), believers in psuedohistory, and even (in the case of the NESARA scammers, which are not technically tax deniers but share many of the same beliefs) in UFOs.

Note: All links go to the "rational wiki" portal, which is well worth pursuing for its own sake.

Naturally all these areas overlap. They all share the same important point, namely, of making the believer in the theory think that he (usually; most women seem to have more common sense) is special, part of a tiny elite which knows THE TRUTH(tm), and everybody else is brainwashed and wrong.

This explains, incidentally, why many of them fight the IRS even if their financial situation is such that they actually don't owe much, or even any, income tax. It really is a matter of principle, or perhaps worldview, for them -- not necessarily the money.

Dennis The Constitutional Peasant in Real Life

Well, it had to happen.

A certain "sovereign citizen", Rory Daniel Hawes, this time from Canada, had claimed -- of course -- that he is not under the jurisdiction of the Canadian courts.

Now, the interesting thing is that he, first, agrees with Dennis the Constitutional Peasant that just because some watery tart threw a sword at someone, that hardly makes them a sovereign. He therefore concludes that people must have voted for Queen Elizabeth II:

Mind control drug needles in his ass! In his ass! All because you voted for Queen Elizabeth II, you bastard Canadians!

What's more, he is -- you guessed it (see the same link) -- convinced that he is being oppressed, and that we all should come and see the violence inherit in the system.

Monty Python comes to life.

Real Tax Protestors... and Chess

You might know, from my other blog, that I am interested in chess. Well, just for the heck of it, I searched on the Internet for "tax protester AND chess" (yes, yes, I know the "AND" operation here is unnecessary) -- and, quite surprisingly, found something quite enlightening.

I was referred to the Wikipedia page about Ralph Ginzburg. Turns out he conducted a famous 1962 interview with Robert "Bobby" Fischer, who later won the world chess championship, ending Russian domination of the field since the Russian emigre Alexander Alekhine won the title in 1927, or, less dramatically, since the Soviet master Mikhail Botvinnik won the world championship in 1948.

The late Ginzburg, most famous for publishing Eros magazine (link NSFW as it contain some nudity, but is not a porn site), was also a tax protester. Surprising, you say? Well, he was a real tax protester. He protested the war in the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest (scroll down for details, but the web site is well worth reading).

Some major differences between the two groups -- the real tax protesters and the fake ones, the tax deniers who call themselves "protesters":

1). The real protesters didn't deny they have a legal obligation to pay income tax. They knew they were breaking the law and expected to be punished for it. Unlike the tax deniers, who think they aren't legally bound to pay taxes.

2). The real protesters didn't think they shouldn't pay any tax. They specifically limited their protest to refuse the particular share of their taxes that went directly to a purpose -- the Vietnam war -- they thought they cannot morally support. This unlike the tax deniers, who don't actually "protest" anything the government does with the taxes, but simply the fact that they pay tax at all.

3). The real tax protesters didn't think people should get some sort of special veto power and only pay taxes for purposes they like. The correct way to deal with a tax that goes towards a purpose you think is wrong is, they would surely agree, almost always to elect as legislator someone who would repeal that tax. It is only in what they consider a very extreme case (in their view) that the duty to pay taxes is overruled. This as opposed to tax deniers who latch to any annoying or stupid government use of tax money as "proof" one should not pay taxes.

One need not agree with their anti-Vietnam war views to agree that their "yes, we need to pay taxes, but in this particular case we won't and break the law since it's morally important" is quite different than the "don't wanna, don't hafta, not gonna" attitude of the tax deniers.

Dammit, Where is MY Part of the Action?

Many conspiracy theorists, tax protestors, etc., claim that "the zionists" or "the Jews" or someone similar rules the world. All this tax money illegally stolen is going to finance Israel, you see.

Well, here I am, living in Israel, Jewish, and so on -- and all I get from all this international Jewish conspriacy, which first was responsible for 9/11 and then for the ground zero mosque, not to mention controlling all of the world's money, is a big fat zero.

Where are the nubile gentile women to be my slaves? The oodles of money we are stealing from the gentiles? The power and glory?!

Somebody in the international Jewish conspiracy is holding on to my part of the stuff, I'm telling you.

Tax Protestors Abusing Language: Latin Edition

www.cafepress.com

Tax protestors love to abuse the language. For example, they love to claim nobody is liable to pay income tax because they tax code doesn't use the word "liable" or "taxpayer" exactly the way they think it should (that is, in a way that would exclude them).

An amusing example of this is how tax protestors, whom I suspect are usually not fluent in Latin, abuse the term "sui juris" (or, as the Romans would have written it, SUI IURIS). "Sui" is the genitive reflexive pronoun -- that is, "of his (her, its, their) own". "Juris" means "laws". So, literally, "(of) his (her, its, their) own laws".

Tax protestors think that this means the legal concept of "sui juris" means that if one is legally "sui juris", one is only subject to one's own laws. Whoa! Not so fast. "Sui Juris" is something much simpler: it means, in Latin, precisely what is meant by the Greek (and English, from the Greek) word "autonomous" (autos - self, nomos - law).

It merely means, in other words, that a person has independent standing in the law -- that is, that the person is legally an adult and need not get a parent's or guardian's permission to sue (and can, equivalently, be sued directly and not through a guardian). It doesn't mean one is independent of the law and can do what one wishes without concern to what the law says.

So, yes, most tax protestors are in fact "sui juris" (although most of them would surely benefit from being declared incompetent and having a guardian appointed to them). They, and not their parents, can be sued for their non-payment of taxes. As usual, the tax protestors are ranting and foaming in the mouth -- and proving exactly the opposite of what they think they're proving.

Orwellian Language

Image credit: "Thinking about it..." blog.

Many so-called "tax protesters" claim they live in an "1984" world, where words mean the opposite of what they're supposed to. That true! The problem is, it's a world of their own making.

One of the problem with the "tax protesters" is that they love using words to mean the opposite of what they really mean. Let us start with "tax protester". There are real tax protesters -- people who refuse to pay taxes to protest something, such as the Vietnam war, or Ghandi refusing to pay the salt tax.

Real tax protesters do not argue the legality of the tax. They think that a certain tax is immoral, but that's something else. They are quite willing to pay the penalty, including jail time, to make a point about the immorality of the tax.

So-called "tax protesters" are in reality tax deniers. They believe that they found some magic word ("freeman on the land", "admiralty court", "sovereign citizen", "writ of mandumbass... er, mandamus", "non-federal citizen", etc.) that makes them magically tax-free. They think that if they merely call themselves "protesters" it makes them so, just like they think that if they call themselves "sovereign citizens" they are tax free.

This is precisely what Orwell was speaking about in Politics and the English Language (1946): the use of terms, not to clarify, but to deceive:

[M]odern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

Read any so-called tax "protester" "legal" "argument" and see for yourself. Or go to one of their conferences, and notice how, as Orwell writes:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

How correct he was, more than 60 years ago! Far from being "rebels", the tax "protesters" merely conform to the same dogma everybody in their social circle agrees with, and the "truth" of the dogma is reinforced by repetition, by A telling B it's true and B telling A it's true in return. The only difference is that in their case the dogma is more absurd than most.

"Rebels"? "Protesters"? HA!

Conspiracy Theories

Those who follow the "tax protestor" -- actually, tax denial -- movement know they are deeply conspiratorial. Everything is part of an awful conspiracy, including the exact typeface used on letters they receive. In the immortal words of Aldous Huxley, paranoids live "in a world of terrifying significance."

While it is possible that some of the people who believe in conspiracy theory are actually paranoid (in the clinical sense), for most it fills some other psychological need -- in paricular, the need to explain away the inevitable failures and disappointments of life as a nefarious plot against them, and the need to feel important for being "in on the secret".

For this, any conspiracy theory will do. It is no surprise that tax protestors often believe in many other conspiracies -- such as in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (or its modern equivalents, replacing "Jews control the world" with "Zionists control the USA"), 9/11 conspiracy theories (decisively exploded here, for example), and so on.

Tax Protestor Daniel Benham Convicted

Tax protestor and promoter Daniel Benham of Twin Lakes, Michigan, was convicted of tax evasion for failing to file tax returns from 2000 to 2003. Benham gave seminars on how to use bankruptcy and various legal entities to avoid paying taxes. Now he can give seminars on how to survive federal prison camp.

Source: Click Here