All Posts Tagged With: "IRS"
The Census: Vehicle for Social Engineering
In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott commented on the role played by census data in the rise of the modern State: “If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state [...]
19Apr2010 | Wendy McElroy | 1 comment | ContinuedTransfer Machine
“The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul,” George Bernard Shaw once said. For a socialist Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested. The theory of government I was taught says that government provides [...]
1Jan2010 | John Stossel | 7 comments | ContinuedNew IRS Unit to Target Tax Shelters
“A new Internal Revenue Service unit set up to catch rich tax cheats hiding their wealth in complex business entities is rapidly taking shape with the hiring of hundreds of employees ..The high-wealth unit is focusing on trusts, real estate investments, privately held companies and other business entities controlled by rich individuals.” (Reuters, Friday) Key [...]
14Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | ContinuedIf You Really Love Volunteers, Mr. Obama . . .
Barack Obama gave volunteerism a big boost early this year, visiting service centers on Martin Luther King Day, greeting volunteers, and working alongside them. “Everybody’s got to be involved,” he said. “If we’re waiting for somebody else to do something, it never gets done. We’re going to have to take responsibility, all of us.” These [...]
23Sep2009 | James L. Payne | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Rise and Fall of Curaçao’s Offshore Financial Sector
A longer examination, with footnotes, of Curaçao’s rise and fall, “Change, Dependency, and Regime Plasticity in Offshore Financial Intermediation: The Saga of the Netherlands Antilles,” by Craig M. Boise and Andrew P. Morriss, is forthcoming in the Texas International Law Journal and is available on SSRN. In the late 1970s virtually every major U.S. corporation [...]
23Sep2009 | Andrew P. Morriss | 2 comments | ContinuedFiscal Force
“I know ev’rybody’s income and what ev’rybody earns; And I carefully compare it with the income-tax returns.” —W.S. Gilbert, Princess Ida April is the cruelest month, for reasons other than what T.S. Eliot had in mind. This is the month in which you must account for yourself to Caesar. The authorities, having relieved you of [...]
1Apr2007 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedSales, Flat, or Spherical, Tax Reform Isn’t the Answer
Lately there has been a flurry of interest in tax reform, typically aimed at making compliance less onerous, removing the incentive for special-interest lobbying, and reducing the size and intrusiveness of the tax-collection agency. While few people will reject those ends, that does not imply that the attempt to achieve them is the optimal use [...]
1Nov2006 | Gene Callahan | 13 comments | ContinuedGovernment Should Regulate Charities?
Forbes magazine editor and columnist William Baldwin is upset that nonprofit charitable corporations are able to evade accountability, pay their executives too much, and engage in shady bookkeeping. He wants something done about it: “This country’s several million nonprofits escape with only the sketchiest of oversight by the Internal Revenue Service. Revenue agents figure they [...]
1Dec2004 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – November 2003
Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life by James R. Otteson Cambridge University Press • 2002 • 338 pages • $70.00 hardcover; $26.00 paperback Reviewed by Robert Batemarco One of the puzzles confronting students of the history of economic thought is the apparent inconsistency of the two masterworks of Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and [...]
1Nov2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedThe State’s Quest for Total Information Awareness
David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the second of two parts. Efforts to transform the United States into a surveillance regime on a totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian model are currently underway. In addition to attempts to beef up and make uniform the state driver’s licenses-thereby blending them into either a de facto [...]
1May2003 | David M. Brown | 4 comments | ContinuedOn Guests and Customers
Stephen Barone is a consultant with Barodine Marketing Communications & Research, LLC, located in Madison, Wisconsin. Nowadays, whenever I go shopping I seem to be a “guest” at every store where I used to be a “customer.” But what occurs between a proprietor and his patron is the opposite of what occurs between a host [...]
1Mar2002 | Stephen G. Barone | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – 2002/2
Voodoo Science by Robert Park Oxford University Press — 2000 — 230 pages — $25.00 Reviewed by Patrick J. Michaels I really wanted to like Robert Park’s Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud a lot more than I did. It’s a pretty good book about how bad science manages to prosper and replicate, [...]
1Feb2002 | FEE Admin | 1 comment | ContinuedFeeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years by James Bovard
St. Martin’s Press · 2000 · 426 pages · $26.95 Reviewed by George C. Leef The battle over the history of the Clinton presidency is on and the early reports from the battlefield indicate that the fight is going in favor of those who prefer truth to spin. The jaw-dropping last-minute pardons seem to have [...]
1Sep2001 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Power to Destroy
The Internal Revenue Service penalizes a taxpayer $46,806 for an alleged underpayment of ten cents. Armed IRS agents storm the homes of a restaurant owner and his manager because of unsubstantiated charges from a fired ex-employee that the men were drug dealers. A taxpayer is driven to suicide by the IRS’s hounding after it had [...]
1Oct2000 | John Attarian | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Permanent War
This is excerpted from the first chapter of his book Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax (The Future of Freedom Foundation). Some years ago Stanley McGill, 93, mailed a check for $7,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. When he died, his daughter discovered that Mr. McGill had made a [...]
1Jun1999 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedWithholding the Taxpayer Hostage
How often have you heard people say with pleasure, “I got a tax refund this year!”? Americans have grown so immune to income-tax withholding that many people regard IRS refunds as gifts. Misperceptions about withholding are widespread. In fact, withholding is a regressive, costly, and furtive system for collecting taxes. Fifty-six years ago Congress approved [...]
1Apr1999 | and Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | ContinuedThe IRS, Now and Forever?
Since late last year, politicians in Washington, D.C., have been promising to save Americans from the Internal Revenue Service—to fundamentally reform the agency, once and for all. The surge of anti-IRS outrage fits a dismal pattern in recent American history. On July 30, 1996, when signing a bill to provide meager additional protections to taxpayers, [...]
1Nov1998 | James Bovard | 1 comment | Continued-
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