The Income Tax Violates the Thirteenth Amendment

in #taxation8 years ago

Before I make my case, let me present a disclaimer: I don't believe anyone in the United States of America, official or otherwise, would take this seriously enough for its revelatory value to be acted upon. That doesn't change the fact that it is unequivocally true, and here's why.

AMENDMENT XIII
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the 13th amendment.
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.(1)

That was copied directly from the National Archives website, so it is the Thirteenth Amendment, verbatim, as it is understood in legal terms. Any income tax is a violation of Section 1 of said amendment, where it states clearly that you can't involuntarily obligate a person to do anything unless it's in answer for a crime that the same person has committed. Since there isn't any clause in the U.S. Code of taxation stating that any person being taxed must first commit a crime, or that any due process needs to be conducted, income tax is a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude.
I've heard the argument that evading your income taxes, for example, doesn't violate any actual laws. This is just plain not true. If you don't believe me, do some research on Al Capone. Or better yet, send in next year's federal tax return with the words "FUCK YOU" scrawled across the page in magic marker to see what happens. Make sure to include your name, address and Social Security number to make sure they know who you are and where to find you. Even better yet, and more reasonably so, read the following quote from Title 26 Chapter 1 of the U.S. Code (2):

There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of—

(1) every married individual (as defined in section 7703) who makes a single return jointly with his spouse under section 6013, and

(2) every surviving spouse (as defined in section 2(a)),
And these ones as well:

There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of every head of a household (as defined in section 2(b)) a tax determined in accordance with the following table:

There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of every individual (other than a surviving spouse as defined in section 2(a) or the head of a household as defined in section 2(b)) who is not a married individual (as defined in section 7703) a tax determined in accordance with the following table:

You get the point I think. Taxes are written into law, and if you violate them, you will be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, you will be imprisoned. In the case of Al Capone that I mentioned above, he was placed in prison for the rest of his life because he didn't pay his income taxes. Not because he bribed police officers. Not because he killed his opposing gangsters. Because he evaded his taxes.
You are compelled, by force of imprisonment, to work for the government for a certain percentage of the year. At the low point, it's 15%, which works out to roughly 2 months of your life each year that you're forced to work for the man. No crime need be committed. They just take it, and for no reason other than that they want it. That is, literally, slavery.
And as you do better, they take more of your time. If you're not married, it jumps to 28% of your time when you make more than $22K per year, or 3.6 months. It jumps to 31%, 36% and 39.6% as your yearly salary increases to $53K, $115K and $250K respectively. If you make more than $250K, you spend 5 months of the year working, just to pay your income taxes. There is no obligation for them to provide any service or good in return for your labor. That part of your life is just gone, and poof! Into a cloud of bureaucracy and interest payments on the national debt (another tax, but somewhat hidden).
Nobody really cares about the plight of a guy making $250K though, because they know that he's still got $151K left to buy yachts, houses and sports cars with. But what about the guy making $22K? After income taxes he's only got $18700 left to feed, clothe and provide shelter for himself. In most places in major U.S. cities, that means that he's either starving or homeless (unless he lives with his parents), even before the government taxes him. They're literally taking food out of the mouths of the poor. Which means that you, if you support the authority of the federal and state governments to tax income, are doing the same. It's a statistical inevitability that this practice has directly resulted in some of their deaths.
And even if we forget about the fact that people who have a lot of money don't really need $250K a year to live off of, it's still their stuff and their life. Nobody has the right to take it, just because somebody's got a little extra lying around. That's like saying it's okay for people to borrow my car when I'm not using it because I wouldn't need to use it in the interim. I could have them arrested for doing so, because that's called grand larceny in our legal system. But when the government does it with an equivalent amount of money (or many multiples of that in the case of the rich $250K earner), and calls it taxation, it's perfectly fine with most people.
Well, it's not fine with me. It's immoral. It's inefficient. It's theft. It's slavery.

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