The IRS is the Scam
[Originally published in The Voluntaryist, by Mike Morris]
In a piece called “Don’t let IRS phone scammers panic you” by the Gazette’s Betty Sexton, we’re warned that scammers are calling around, posing as IRS agents, and asking people for money.
We must ask, though, what is special about an agent of the IRS? How do they, unlike private individuals who would be considered criminal for doing the same thing as them, have special rights over us?
While it’s what generally looks like a good consumer protection piece, the post is missing the point: The real scammers are the IRS. Or at least, they are too.
She’s right, however: “bad guys are out there, trying to scare you into giving them cash.” Yes, they sure are, and they call themselves “the Internal Revenue Service!”
Why doesn’t anyone give the callers money? Because who are they!? No one has a right to demand money from another; this runs contrary to the voluntaryism we advocate.
She notifies us that “you'll never be harassed about a lawsuit, arrest, or the loss of your house or car” over the phone. But while it may not be via phone, this is nonetheless the implications for not complying with the people in government: the cage or the gun barrel. “All those claims have been made by these scum buckets”, she says. Who, the people who work for government and honestly believe they have a superior right to our property?
Taxation is done under threats of violence against those who don’t pay up. There is no way to conceive of taxation as a voluntary payment, and we’ll consistently maintain here that it’s extortion and robbery, and not exempting “government.”
The real scam alert to the public should be that no one can make legitimate claims that you owe them your property (money) simply because they decree so. The only reason some people fell victim to the calling scam is because they pretended to be the IRS; and the IRS operates under the aura of legitimacy that pretends to have a right to steal your money. The people who give others money upon their demand do so, as anarchist Lysander Spooner stated it, for “the fact [is] that the government…says to a man: your money, or your life. And…taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.” If only we had the will to stand up against the taxman as we do the phone scammers.