Tax Rebellion: Faith in the Courts
I received an email recently. "Gary, you said you ...pay a lot of taxes. Why?"
My answer is simple: I do not trust the courts for legal protection when the judges' salaries are at stake. Taxes pay their salaries.
Let me begin with Irwin Schiff, the father of Peter Schiff. Read Wikipedia's account.
Irwin Allan Schiff (born February 24, 1928) is an American and prominent figure in the tax protester movement. Schiff is known for writing and promoting literature that claims the United States income tax is applied incorrectly. He has lost several civil cases against the federal government and has a record of multiple convictions for various federal tax crimes. Schiff is serving a 13-plus year sentence for tax crimes with his location listed as the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Worth, Texas. His projected release date has been changed from October 7, 2016 to July 26, 2017. . . .In October 1985 Schiff was convicted of tax evasion[19] with respect to his personal income taxes for years 1980, 1981 and 1982, and willful failure to file[17] a corporate tax return for Irwin A. Schiff, Inc. (a company for which he served as president), and that conviction was affirmed the following year. Schiff was released from the Federal prison system in June 1993. Despite having spent four years in the system, he continued his tax protest related activities. . . .
On February 23, 2006, Cynthia Neun, another co-defendant, was sentenced to 68 months in prison and was ordered to pay over $1.1 million in restitution. Neun's conviction was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.[41] According to the prosecutor's office, Neun sold materials encouraging people not to pay taxes, prepared false tax returns, and represented hundreds of taxpayers in dealings with the IRS where she promoted Schiff's arguments. She is required to submit to three years of supervision following her release, which occurred on December 28, 2010.
I reported this to my subscribers in 2006. //www.garynorth.com/public/692.cfm
A year later, I explained my position on Schiff's position. //www.garynorth.com/members/2240.cfm
Now, let me cite another pro-Schiff site: http://www.takelifeback.com/irwin
Irwin Schiff is the nation's leading authority on income tax and how the government illegally collects it.He has written more books on the subject of the income tax than any other American, selling over 500,000 copies.
Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Americans no longer pay income taxes because of the information contained in his books.
His name was put in for the nomination for President of the United States at the 1996 Libertarian Party National Convention held in Washington D.C.
Since 1962, when he stopped a group of left wing Yale professors from raising money to buy medical supplies for North Vietnam (he went to Washington with 4,000 signatures), Mr. Schiff has fought long and hard in the courts, before Congress and in numerous books and publications, exposing and fighting the destructive and unconstitutional practices of the federal government.
His latest book "The Federal Mafia - How it Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes", exposes every facet of the government's illegal collection of this tax.
His current book "The Federal Mafia" shows you:
How you can immediately stop having income taxes taken from your pay;
How to get back every dime you paid in income taxes this year;
How to stop IRS agents from seizing your property... a power no IRS agent possesses;
How to break "offer and compromise" agreements you might have with the IRS, since these agreements were entered into on the basis of fraud and intimidation;Remember, "The power to tax involves the power to destroy" and that's what those drunken sailors in the U.S. Congress have been doing, destroying America with your tax dollars, and its your patriotic "duty" not to let them get away with it any longer.
Click Here to buy one Now.
There is no mention of the fact that he is in federal prison.
I think it is a bad idea to follow the advice in a book on how not to pay income taxes, when the book was written by a man who is in prison for having followed his own advice.
If I believe the book's title, which I do, why would I want to take on the Mafia? Private citizens who take on the Mafia usually do not win. They sleep with the fishes.
There are other tax protestors who are in jail for having used similar arguments to those used by Schiff. Here are 53 pages of case summaries. These people lost in court. This one especially caught my attention:
Edwards v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2002-169, 84 T.C.M. (CCH) 24, 42 B the court found that sanctions were appropriate against both the taxpayer and the taxpayer=s attorney for making groundless arguments. The court stated that A[a]n attorney cannot advance frivolous arguments to this Court with impunity, even if those arguments were initially developed by the client.@ In a supplemental opinion, the court imposed sanctions against the taxpayer in the amount of $24,000 and against the taxpayer's attorney in the amount of $13,050. Edwards v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2003-149, 85 T.C.M. (CCH) 1357.
Do you think your $200/hour lawyer might sell you out when he learns of this case?
There are people who think that convoluted legal arguments that no one understands, and which have lost in federal courts, will deliver them from the IRS. They believe in word magic. Rattle off some arcane phrase in front of a judge, and he will dismiss the IRS's case against you. Or plead in front of a jury, all of whom pay taxes. You are telling them that hey are suckers. How do you think they will deliberate behind closed doors? "Let's all declare him innocent, and join the tax revolt." I think not. A jury of your peers will convict you. They will say: "We have to pay, so he has to pay." This assumes that the judge will let your $200/hour attorney to submit evidence that you think will deliver you, which he won't.
Bill Benson co-authored a book, The Law That Never Was, which shows that the Sixteenth Amendment was not ratified legally. It is an excellent book on history. The courts reject its conclusions. The Wikipedia entry on the book says this.
In United States v. Benson, a criminal case, Benson himself raised the Sixteenth Amendment argument, which was rejected by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In this phase of the case, his conviction for tax evasion and willful failure to file tax returns was overturned on other grounds and the case was remanded to the trial court.Upon retrial, Benson was again convicted of tax evasion and willful failure to file tax returns, and his conviction was upheld on appeal. The conduct for which he was convicted involved over $100,000 of income he did not report on Federal income tax returns. He was sentenced to four years in prison and five years of probation.
There is a pattern here. I do not choose to be on the receiving end of this pattern.