The income tax had the “virtue” of “soaking the rich,” which it did initially with the War Revenue Act of 1917, but later—in combination with the Fed’s confiscatory monetary policy—led to the decline of the middle class and to a seemingly omnipresent government. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men. Both are in complete harmony if only a distinction is made between legal prohibitions on the one hand, expressed in commandments six, eight, and ten, violations of which may be punished by the exercise of physical violence, and extralegal or moral prohibitions on the other hand, expressed in commandments five, seven, and nine, violations of which may be punished only by means below the threshold of physical violence, such as social disapproval, discrimination, exclusion, or ostracism.
Author: George Ford Smith
Published at: 2025-08-19 22:30:48
Still want to read the full version? Full article
