Because the government's voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.
The government's schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud Americans have run the gamut from wasteful pork-barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset-forfeiture schemes, the modern-day equivalent of highway robbery, astronomical health-care "reform," and costly stimulus packages.
Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government's endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet--that is, we the taxpayers.
Those football stadiums that charge exorbitant sums for nosebleed seats? Our taxpayer dollars subsidize them.
Those blockbuster war films? Yep, we were the silent investors on those, too .
Same goes for the military equipment being peddled to local police agencies and the surveillance cameras being "donated" to local governments.
In other words, in the eyes of the government, "we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers" are little more than indentured servants.
We're slaves.
If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government's claims on your property and your money, you're not free.
You're not free if the government can seize your home and your car (which you've bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes.
You're not free if government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely "suspect" wrongdoing.
And you're certainly not free if the IRS gets the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.
It wasn't always this way, of course.
Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property .
It didn't take long, however--a hundred years, in fact--before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry's property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, "Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872."
Determined to claim some of the citizenry's wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock's victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress--united in their determination to tax the American people's income--worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.
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