The Income Tax: Root of all Evil
by Frank Chodorov , 1954
CHAPTER VIII
A Possible Way Out
THE AMERICAN brand of socialism known as the New Deal was made possible by the income tax. But with the advent of income taxation, socialism was unavoidable.
There have always been, and perhaps always will be, people who are averse to letting other people alone. Recognizing the human inclination to err, they are impelled by their kindness of heart to overcome this imperfection; invariably they come up with a sure-proof plan that needs only political power to become effective. Political power is the essential ingredient of every one of these plans to improve the human.
Since all the ills of mankind, they argue, follow from the exercise of free will, it follows that the only cure for these ills is to suppress free will and to compel the individual to behave in all things as per the perfect pattern devised by these improvers. Compulsion means force; there must be a policeman to see that the individual does not follow his own inclinations.
But policemen must live. Since they do not produce a thing by which they can live, others must support them. Hence, the planners must have the means of getting at the production of the very people who are to be improved by the policeman. That means taxes, and the more taxes the greater the number of enforcement agents, and therefore the more comprehensive the plan. No plan can be bigger than its bureaucracy.
The income tax is the ideal instrument for the planner. It not only enables him to exercise his imagination to the last dollar that can be taken from the producers-for their own improvement, of course-but it also weakens the will to resist the plan. The less property the individual has at his disposal, the less room there is for the exercise of his will. He must conform as a matter of necessity. That is to say, social power decreases as political power increases.
The income tax was put upon us in 1913. But the improvers of mankind could do little with it for a long time, for the tradition of freedom still held the American in its grip; and the improvers were confined to expounding theories in their papers, or haranguing crowds from a soapbox.
World War I, with its tremendous costs, opened up the door a little; the politician acquired the habit of increasing the levies, and a few regulators of society were pulled in by the draught. It was not until the depression of 1929 that the opportunity to remake American presented itself. This was the opportunity long hoped for. The distress caused by the depression made a shambles of the tradition of freedom; hunger, and the fear of it, have a way of wiping out the value of everything but food. Americans were willing to forget everything they had prized for centuries in exchange for even the promise of an improved economy. The planners were ready with promises. They never made good, of course, and finally had to resort to war to stir up some economic activity; but they had acquired power, and that was all that counted.
If it had not been Mr. Roosevelt and his horde of self-seeking visionaries, it would have been somebody else. The New Deal, or something like it, was planted when the Sixteenth Amendment was put into the Constitution. It needed only the fertilization of the depression to bring it to flower. Whatever politician happened to be at the helm at the propitious moment would have done more or less what Mr. Roosevelt did. That is because the business he is in, politics, drives the politician toward the acquisition of more and more power, and a good politician is one who takes advantage of every contingency to increase his power. Mr. Roosevelt was an excellent politician.
Once socialism gets hold of a country, there seems to be nothing that will pry it loose except a complete collapse of the political setup, either as the result of a disastrous war or by way of revolution. The revolutionary way is the least promising, simply because under socialism the will to resist weakens in proportion to the people’s adjustment to regulation, control, and domination. Because that is the only way to rub along, they make peace with the conditions imposed on them; they lose the habit of sell-respect.
Thus, in this country it has become quite proper for bankers and industrialists to stand in the Washington line with "tin cups" in their hands, for veterans and the unemployed to press for handouts, for farmers to expect subsidies, for the educational fraternity and the ministry to maintain bounty-begging lobbies. All this is the regular order of things; freedom, which demands self-reliance, is out of style. If the miraculous politician should come along, and urge that all this paternalism should be abandoned, as well as the income tax, he would probably receive short shrift from the public.
Even if the politicians should sidestep a war-one that would decimate the population and destroy the economy- what is the next step toward which socialism leads? Communism. The purpose of socialism is to put control of society in the hands of government through control of its economy. But if individuals persist in trying to circumvent the political establishment, say by establishing "black" markets, or if they preach doctrines inimical to the interest of the ruling group, then it follows that freedom of all kinds, most particularly freedom of thought, must be suppressed. That is communism.
The transition from partial to complete socialism, from the New Deal to communism, will not be easy in this country, because the phases of freedom still sound sweet to us. Given a state of war, or a constant threat of war, or even another depression, and the memories would be obliterated; we will ask for a savior and we will get communism. It will not be exactly what the Russians have; it will be an American version.
Is there no hope? Cannot America, the greatest experiment in free government in the history of the world, be saved from the fate that socialism is preparing for her?
It so happens that when this country was organized, the Founding Fathers, either by design or as a matter of necessity, effected an arrangement that is a road block to complete socialization. That is the division of authority between the several states and the federal government. This separation gave rise to the doctrine of States’ Rights. The following chapters of this book will attempt to show how this doctrine can be employed to prevent the coming of complete socialism, or absolutism, to this country. Of course, the doctrine will have to be implemented with a will to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment; but that will can be generated, simply because it is to the interests of the forty-eight political establishments that this Amendment be repealed.
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