Can I ask why everyone is ignoring leprechaun's post re the freedom to fascism video? I am not intelligent enough regarding politics to have an opinion on this, but the people referenced in the video seem to be rather intelligent. I found it awfully interesting, to say the least. Would love to hear some comments.
Mainly because after 90 years of the same argument, there still is not a shred of evidence that supports the foundation for the argument that is used on the 'film' - "the federal government has no right to directly tax the people".
Taken from the website for Freedom to Fascism;
Are you aware the Supreme Court has ruled that the government has no authority to impose a direct unapportioned tax on the labor of the American people, and the 16th Amendment does not give the government that power?
That question is not even valid because of the ruling, Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company
1894 was corrected by the 16th amendment, giving the power to the government.
Further cases confirmed that the amendment and the supporting legislation is valid (which the supreme court can not rule an amendment is invalid by the way because of the separations of powers clause), these cases were;
Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad - 1916
Stanton v. Baltic Mining Company - 1916
Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co - 1926
All of which affirmed that congress has the power to tax the people directly.
AND
I have to add this, the progressive income tax system we have today is not a result of any republican ideas, it comes from the democrats and if you know the games that were played on the American people in selling the income tax to the people, you can come to understand the present day subjection of the people under a democrat rule. At issue is the selling point of the present congress that they will fix things after 12 years of republican rule and have not passed one piece usable legislation even with a large majority in both chambers. But they have successfully put forth the idea that the problems we have today are a direct result of failed policies of the administraion and that the rich are controling things to keep the people oppressed. Many think there is a need for class warfare, you know it by other names - soak the rich, have people pay their fair share and so on - is the way things need to be and think the messiah Obama is taking the right step by increasing taxes on everyone who is successful but until people realize that the only thing that class warfare has done for the country is drag it down to a level not seen since the European revolutions of the mid 19th century. We have to step beyond the class warfare that people are using today, the dems especially, and think in a way that with government intervention in things, it only gets worst.
I think a better work to illustrate all of these issues we face is Hayek's "road to serfdom"
an overview from Wikipedia;
Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system, the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group, which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal. Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved.
Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea. Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”. After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism. For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.
Hayek argued that countries such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had already gone down the "road to serfdom", and that various democratic nations are being led down the same road. In
The Road to Serfdom he wrote: "The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule."
