Tired of Being Pushed Around Every April 15?

Taxes Have Been despised since Biblical times. Today, outside of a few civics professors and some of the more ardent members of the League of Women Voters, nobody really wants to pay taxes. The only reason most of us do is we are afraid not to. With the Bicentennial drawing near, perhaps it is time to remember what we are supposed to be celebrating. It was, after all, a tax revolution.

When the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, it proclaimed in the first paragraph of its first published statement that its purpose was primarily to resist payment of taxes. And that was not merely rhetorical show. Each of the 56 eventual signers of the Declaration of Independence was driven from his home and hunted through the countryside. Nine died of wounds or other hardships. Five were captured and thereafter treated to especially brutal imprisonment. Several lost wives, sons or family. One lost his 13 children in the Revolution. Twelve had their houses burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. That was the meaning of their now-clichéed pledge of "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor." Not one abandoned the Tax Revolution nor went back on his word.

That is the example that speaks to us across the centuries. And it appears to be inspiring a number of modern tax rebels who are holding back an estimated 30 billion dollars a year.

Of course, it takes more to explain the outbreak of tax rebellion than the anniversary of the American Revolution. A major celebration of the American Revolution 100 years ago passed without even a suggestion of tax revolt. In those days, the mood was one of genuine celebration. People gathered at Revolutionary battle sites, listened to patriotic speakers denounce the crowned heads of Europe and generally doted over any memento of American history. People bought and sold miniature log cabins, and even stood in long lines to view the Centennial portrait of George Washington that was fabricated from Simón Bolivar's hair. But, for all that, there was no talk of tax rebellion for the simple reason that there were scarcely any taxes. Furthermore, there was so little government in general that it did nothing to antagonize most people. With government both cheap and popular, conditions were not conducive to a tax strike.

Today, needless to say, things are different. Government has become expensive and unpopular. And this is evident in the current attitude toward tax rebellion. A 1973 Harris Poll showed that fully 74 percent of the American people would be sympathetic to a tax strike. This is a coalition that could be joined on few other issues. Left, right and center, people of all persuasions are disgusted with government. Says Marion Bromley, war-tax resister, "I have refused to pay Federal income taxes because I will not voluntarily contribute to the mass annihilation provided by the weapons these taxes buy." Says Jim Scott of the Tax Rebellion Committee, "The legalized banditry and the legalized plunder engaged in by criminal government at all levels can be stopped if you and I exert ourselves. Don't pay. Stop sending money." An improvised sign sums up the feelings of nonideological rebels: Dear Irs: You Will Never Collect. Sincerely, An Onymous.

The cost of paying for government has been rising seven times faster than the growth of the population. Last year, the personal tax bite for just the lower-level-income family jumped 25.7 percent. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee concluded that Federal taxes outstripped all other cost increases in the average family's budget. Federal tax rates increased twice as fast as the cost of food, housing or transportation. Add to this the staggering increases in local property taxes, city, county and state income taxes, commuter taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes and all the other exactions, petty and great, that are squeezed from our hides. As the economy reels and inflation erodes the total financial assets of the American people to less than they were in 1968, payment of taxes becomes an increasingly unpopular and difficult burden.

A precise estimate of the numbers who have stopped paying is hard to come by. Only the Government knows and it's not telling. But a bare-minimum estimate is about 4,000,000. In 1972, the IRS admitted finding about 1,000,000 people who had illegally failed to file any tax return at all. But that was only the number detected--in the days before Nixon and Agnew set a fetching example for the rest of us. In 1973, U. S. News & World Report stated: "A tax-dodging spree, spreading rapidly, is costing the Government in Washington at least six billion dollars a year and threatening to get completely out of hand.... Tax experts outside the IRS ... put the real losses as high as five times that much, around 30 billion dollars a year." The average Federal-income-taxbill is about $1300. If each resister were holding back an average of $2000, that would mean 15.000,000 Americans are tax felons. The more reasonable estimate of 10,000,000 tax rebels still encompasses a vast cross section of the population.

Of these millions, about 100.000 have dared the Government to retaliate by making public protest of their refusal to pay.

Former Commissioner of IRS Johnnie Walters says of the growing tax rebellion:

"We are headed for trouble. This is a trend, this is frightening and we must do something about it."

He proposes hiring more IRS agents. The major effect of this would be to intimidate people.

What Walters may not realize is that there is a limit. Americans will take only so much harassment. Much of the tax rebellion to date can be laid to resentment that millions feel at having been bossed, bullied and bluffed by the IRS in ways that contradict basic American notions of decency.

It is perhaps inevitable that people should resent enforcement of incomprehensible laws. And no law is more incomprehensible than tax law. The IRS codes and manuals, as presently compacted into 32 shelf feet of the most dismal prose in English, can scarcely be understood by a trained lawyer, let alone the average citizen. While the IRS offers the public a "service" by which it will interpret the incomprehensible laws, this service is meaningless, because the Government may not honor its own interpretations. A taxpayer who turns to the IRS for guidance may be misled and later penalized for his gullibility. Consider the case of a Pennsylvania woman whose husband "had supreme confidence in the IRS." She says: "My husband ... paid what the man at the IRS said was the right amount and forgot about it. One year and a half later, we got a bill from the IRS.... I couldn't believe it. Not only had their man made the mistake but we had to pay interest for 18 months on his mistake.... We had to borrow the money from a bank and pay interest on that, and then, in order to pay the bank, we had to sell an insurance policy, which we had been paying on for some time for one of our children.... It made me a lifelong enemy of the IRS."

Judging from the horrors that others have endured, this woman and her husband got off lucky. Consider the following stories:

One man committed suicide, leaving a note to explain that he couldn't endure any more harassment by the IRS. His 17-year-old son, who had started working for the first time, was due a $400 tax refund. Instead of the refund, he received a notice from the IRS stating that his $400 had been applied to his dead father's taxes.

In Tennessee, mail on a businessman's desk was rifled by an IRS agent. Finding a letter that seemed to imply a romance with "another woman," the agent rushed to show a copy to the victim's wife. Apparently, he hoped that he could persuade the woman to inform against her husband.

In Missouri, a woman nursing her six-month-old baby was subjected to a grueling four-hour interrogation by a team of IRS agents. They admitted that she owed no taxes but wanted to use her to get to her father. Their threatening and bullying traumatized the young woman. Although her father was subsequently found innocent, she suffered a nervous collapse.

In Florida, a one-legged handy man was doing plumbing work in the home of a Miami businessman. IRS agents rushed up and confiscated his car, which was parked in the driveway--in spite of documentary evidence provided at the time that the car did not belong to the person the IRS was out to get. It took six months and a Federal court order to get his car back.

In Chicago, accountant Howard F. Mac-Neil was assessed personally for the taxes owed by a corporation that had been one of his clients. He proved that he had no control of the corporation's affairs and was in no way liable for its debts, but the IRS insisted that he pay $36,000 anyway. When MacNeil declined to be bullied into a "compromise," the IRS attached his bank accounts and posted signs around his house proclaiming: Keep Out. Property OF U. S. Government. Hounded mercilessly, he lost business and fell into debt as he waited years for his case to be heard in court. When the day came, a jury instantly returned a verdict in his favor. He had been vindicated. But the IRS had proved again that, right or wrong, it has the power to bankrupt any citizen.

Some revenue agents themselves have been appalled and have drawn back from their assignments. One agent told John Barron of Reader's Digest of a reprimand he received for sparing an old man who owed only $19. Called to account by an IRS supervisor, the agent explained why he had not placed a lien on the old man's wages. "Look, this guy's an old man with a heart condition. He has just found a job as a fry cook after being out two months with an attack. I decided to give him a couple of weeks to get back on his feet. If I had levied on him, he would have lost his job." The supervisor replied, "So what?"

Vincent Connery of the IRS employees' union claims that IRS agents are graded as if in a contest. The more brutal treatment against taxpayers, the better the agent's score. He said: "You get a point for going out and seizing the money of somebody who is on relief or Social Security or a pension.... You also get a point for notice ... served on someone's life-insurance policy.... It is more than a couple of points if you are regarded as a 'seizure man.' If an American businessman owes money, you go out and seize his business and you get points. Those points translate into promotion."

The "revenooers' " job is to squeeze more money out of anybody who comes to their attention. They can do it, because obscure and contradictory tax laws guarantee that almost everyone will file an improper return. IRS training-school manuals state that "after obtaining and using IRS in house manuals, agents can find errors in 99.9 percent of all returns if they want to."

According to formerly secret IRS in-house manuals, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the IRS normally seeks to extort money that is not owed. Agents are dispatched with quotas for raising additional revenues and are given wide latitude when it comes down to methods.

Senate hearings have established that IRS methods include defying court orders, illegally picking locks, stealing records, illegally tapping telephones, intercepting and reading personal mail, using hidden microphones to eavesdrop on the private conversations of taxpayers with their attorneys, using undercover agents with assumed identities, sexual entrapment and other assorted crimes. As IRS agent Thomas Mennitt succinctly puts it, "I violate laws at all times; it's part of my duties."

Further Congressional testimony has detailed some of the bizarre means whereby the IRS has singled out individuals for harassment. Undercover agents have hung around bars and night spots and randomly struck up conversations with customers they happened to meet. The unlucky customers were then targeted for investigation and audit. In another and similar operation, codenamed Bird Dog, the IRS Intelligence Division stationed spies to record license numbers of "expensive-looking automobiles" observed at "better hotels and motels" at the site of a Muhammad Ali fight. Also singled out for special trouble were organizers and promoters of rock music festivals, and even musicians themselves, such as James Brown.

The list of organizations and individuals who came to be considered "enemies" in the view of the IRS reads almost like a Who's Who of American life. Many have nothing in common other than the fact that somehow, for some reason, the IRS singled them out for trouble. Although Don Alexander, current commissioner, has since disbanded the Intelligence Division, its list included Joseph Alsop, Jimmy Breslin, Godfrey Cambridge, former Republican Senator (continued on page 124)Punch out the IRS!(continued from page 86) Charles Goodell, Shirley MacLaine and Linus Pauling. More amazing is the list of institutional enemies of the IRS. This included the A.C.L.U., the American Library Association, the Conservative Book Club, the Ford Foundation, the University of North Carolina, the American Jewish Congress, the Baptist Foundation of America, the Associated Catholic Charities, the Americans for Democratic Action, the Liberty Lobby, the John Birch Society, Common Cause, the National Taxpayers Union, the Legal Aid Society, the National Education Association, the NAACP, the Fund for the Republic, Human Events, Commonweal, Rolling Stone, The National Observer, The New York Review of Books and, yes, even Playboy.

Little wonder that an estimated 2000 persons join the tax rebellion every day. As the number of tax rebels swells, the IRS has taken vengeful action to punish the tax rebellion's visible leaders and disrupt attempts at organized resistance.

Consider the case of former radio commentator Karl Bray. As the host of a talk show several years ago on KSXX, Salt Lake City, Bray occasionally invited "tax protesters" on his program. His troubles began when he openly expressed sympathy with the protesters' contention that the IRS uses "illegal methods" to collect taxes. In August 1971, Special Agents of the IRS paid a visit to the management of station KSXX and had a heart-to-heart talk about Bray's program, demanding tape recordings of past broadcasts. The next day, Bray was fired.

Unable to find another position in broadcasting, Bray spent his time during the next several months composing a pamphlet titled "Taxation and Tyranny: A Guide to the Tax Rebellion." He later published it, replete with a red, white and blue cover sporting bold quotes from the Declaration of Independence: "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Within two months, IRS agents appeared at Bray's bank and demanded microfilm records of the names of all the people who had paid for copies of "Taxation and Tyranny" by check. After a brief legal scuffle, the names were seized. Not surprisingly, the IRS action placed an immediate chill upon sales of Bray's pamphlet.

But he could not take a hint.

On April 15, 1973, Bray led Salt Lake City's first antitax rally, in front of the IRS offices. Approximately 150 persons stood in the rain to protest excessive taxation. The IRS response was short and to the point. A field auditor of the IRS stated in public, "The IRS is going to get Karl Bray."

Just four days later, on April 19, 1973, it got him. Bray was grabbed from behind by two IRS Special Agents and whisked to the Salt Lake City jail, where he was detained without explanation of charges for 14 hours. The following morning, Bray was brought in chains before a U. S. magistrate and charged under Title 18, Section 701 of the U. S. Code with "illegal possession of IRS Insignia." His crime consisted of possession of a piece of paper, IRS publication 34, the so-called seizure notice. That document, which Bray had employed in his protest activities, is legally obtainable by any citizen under the Freedom of Information Act.

Upon his release from custody, Bray had more bad news. He discovered that his office, automobile and briefcase had been searched without a warrant and that $30,000 of business funds were missing. He filed criminal complaints with the city, county and Federal prosecutors, but to no avail. Bray has not only been unable to recover his money, he has even been unable to obtain any specific reason from the IRS to explain why his money was taken. Without recourse in law to recover his missing funds, Bray was broke. His business failed.

Brought to trial for "illegal possession of IRS Insignia," Bray became the first person ever convicted under Title 18, Section 701, for possession of Government documents. (Even those who held top-secret documents had never been convicted.) In spite of the exotic nature of the charge, Bray was denied a jury trial and summarily found guilty by Judge Willis W. Ritter. Coincidentally, Judge Ritter refused to disqualify himself after reputedly boasting of his intention to "make an example of any tax protesters." Bray was given the maximum sentence of six months in jail.

Unfazed, Bray continues to speak out in favor of tax rebellion while he appeals.

Meanwhile, the IRS has been harassing other tax rebels.

Ernest Bromley, former editor of The Peacemaker and longtime advocate of nonpayment of Federal taxes for war and armaments, was targeted by the IRS' Special Services Staff as an "enemy." Thereafter, the IRS secretly copied the bank records of the Peacemaker Movement, with which Bromley was associated, and used the information to assess a tax liability against Gano Peacemakers, Inc., an entirely separate nonprofit corporation formed by a group including Ernest and Marion Bromley in 1952 to shield the title to their home. Although it was known to the IRS that the Peacemakers and Gano Peacemakers, Inc., were legally and financially separate, revenue agents nevertheless confiscated and made plans to sell the house owned by Gano Peacemakers, Inc. When hundreds of letters of explanation from the Peacemakers failed to dissuade the Government from its course, Bromley concluded that his problems could not be the result of an honest mistake and took his case to the public.

He went to The Cincinnati Enquirer, which published a story detailing IRS harassment of the Peacemakers and Bromley in particular. The reporter who wrote the story was soon after audited by the IRS.

When initial publicity failed to cancel the scheduled sale of the house, Bromley and the Peacemakers organized public demonstrations and a national letter drive. The house was finally sold, but in the end, the IRS succumbed and returned it. All the other tax charges against the Bromleys and the Peacemakers were simultaneously dropped. They had won their struggle with the IRS but only after a protracted campaign in which the IRS did its best to disrupt the Peacemakers' war-tax-resistance activities.

But what the IRS did to the Peacemakers was nothing compared with the desperate and peculiar tactics it employed in the attempt to silence Barbara Hutchinson. Her troubles began after she told an adult-education class in San Diego that the IRS mistreats taxpayers. IRS agents got word of her remarks and appeared at the school board to demand that the class (which had been dismissed for the summer) be reconvened so that IRS information officers could "correct" the record. From that point on, relations between Mrs. Hutchinson and the IRS were distinctly sour. She was charged with technical violations of the IRS Code and hauled through a series of legal ordeals even more complicated and astounding than those that befell Karl Bray. Partly as a result of this experience, she was invited to testify in early 1974 before Senator Montoya's subcommittee investigating IRS abuses. On April 9, 1974, just one day before her scheduled testimony, IRS agents visited Senator Montoya and informed him that Mrs. Hutchinson was unfit to testify because she was under heavy psychiatric treatment. This was totally untrue. Mrs. Hutchinson had never undergone psychiatric treatment. It was only after her testimony, which attacked IRS use of mental hospitals to repress dissent, that she was forcibly subjected to psychiatric treatment. She was brought to trial by the IRS on a charge of having omitted the signature of a tax (continued on page 190)Punch Out The IRS!(continued from page 124) expert on her return, which she was under court order to have. She had her attorney's signature on it, but the court refused to acknowledge that he was a tax expert. Remanded to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation, Mrs. Hutchin-son was shackled with leg irons (over leg braces she wears as a result of a bone disease) and handcuffs and hauled away in an unmarked car. Once imprisoned, they tried to force her to undergo a course of "psychiatric and behavior modification training."

Rather than be "modified," however, Mrs. Hutchinson spent her time compiling evidence of mistreatment in the prison. This was cited as proof of a "lack of remorse." After one session of 20 minutes, three evaluators concluded that Mrs. Hutchinson would successfully resist all efforts to be reprogramed.

With the aid of the Citizens' Commission on Human Rights and special intervention by Senators Montoya and Hatfield, Mrs. Hutchinson was finally able to regain her freedom. She continues to speak out in favor of tax rebellion.

There are many similar stories. Persons have been hauled off to jail and thrown out of their homes on the sketchiest pretexts, and few, if any, have been moved to retract their opposition to the payment of taxes. In fact, it seems likely that rather than suppressing rebellion, the IRS has encouraged it. But in either case, a tax rebellion is clearly under way and it is taking many forms.

The first and perhaps primary method is simple evasion and outright defiance of the law. Millions either fail to file any income-tax returns or significantly shave their tax payments through one ruse or another. They make up phony exemptions and deductions, or they mask income. Often they are caught only because they are either brazen or stupid. A man in Camden, New Jersey, for example, was filing false returns in which he got away with claiming his two burros as children. He might still be underpaying his taxes had he not listed the names of the "children"--Happyjack and Sassafras--on his return.

While tax evasion spreads, so does an attitude of increasingly militant opposition to the IRS. More and more, IRS agents are considered revenooers, just as they have been for so long in the hills of northern Georgia. In short, people are fighting back. In Texas, a businessman who had been constantly pestered by an IRS agent who was auditing his return decided to repay the agent by making his life unpleasant. Through connections with a local credit bureau, the taxpayer got a rundown on the agent's previous employment, revealing that he had failed at several businesses. He then sent an interviewer to question the agent's previous employers, associates and neighbors. The investigation extended to contact with former schoolmates from a smalltown high school. Compiling a history of the flops and failures in the IRS agent's life, the taxpayer then had copies distributed in the agent's home town. The obvious theme of the history was that the agent had been unable to make an honest living and now he was working for the Government, trying to bully people into parting with their hard-earned money. Given the attitudes of small towns, the effect was devastating.

IRS officials are well aware of the increasing militancy of tax rebels. James E. Meyers, an IRS district intelligence chief, bemoaned the new dangers facing agents who attempt to enforce tax laws: "Agents sent on what they thought were routine calls have been locked in rooms and subjected to kangaroo courts. There's one man who dug a six-foot grave, with a headstone, in his front yard and says it's for the first IRS agent who sets foot on his property."

While some tax rabels contemplate the rigors of guerrilla war, others, more moderate or less energetic, employ methods of tax rebellion that they firmly believe to be legal.

One popular and successful procedure is the so-called religious or ministerial method. Apparently, anyone who feels he has been called to do God's work may send $15 to the Universal Life Church or some similar institution to purchase necessary papers for ordination as a minister. Once the check clears, the new minister may be just as exempt as one from Harvard Divinity School. Since the Constitution prohibits the Government from establishing standards for religious orders, any minister, selfordained or otherwise, may start a church. Having done so, he then endows the church with all his worldly goods, consigns any income he might have to the church, opens a checking account in the church's name and proceeds to operate as tax exempt. Not only may the new minister practically exempt himself from Federal income and estate taxation but, depending upon the state in which he lives, he may also be exempt from all other direct taxation as well. That means no more state income tax, property tax or sales tax. The only hitch is that establishing a church for the purpose of tax evasion is a crime for which you may go to jail if you are caught.

Tax rebels with a more secular turn of mind have based refusal to pay Federal income tax upon complicated statutory and constitutional arguments. Although these arguments have a certain tidy logic, the final interpretation of their conclusions will be up to a judge and jury if their legality is questioned.

One such method is the "Fifth Amendment Return," by which the tax resister refuses to provide any information upon which a computation of taxes may be made. Rather than observing the directions for filing a 1040 form, the protester submits a return proclaiming his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. The otherwise-blank return is signed and to it is attached a stack of legal documents that the taxpayer wishes to have considered as evidence in any trial that might arise from his failure to cooperate with the IRS. The material attached to the return, which must by law be entered into evidence, includes previous court decisions in dozens of cases and administrative pronouncements by the IRS that the protesters contend establish the legality of withholding information.

Because the penalties for not filing at all are far lower than those for filing a fraudulent return, the Fifth Amendment Return involves lower legal risks at the outset. Also, a tangle of court decisions and precedents increases the prospect that a jury would find someone employing this method innocent of "Willful failure to file."

The general success of the Fifth Amendment route to avoid taxation is a matter of debate among tax rebels. It appears that persons following exactly the proper legal stratagem and obscuring their financial affairs may avoid payment of taxes. By refusing to cooperate in assessing themselves, they place the burden for determination of the proper tax upon the IRS. Since full-scale investigations may be required to determine a noncooperating individual's income, the Government would often have to spend much more than it could expect to collect in order to determine tax liability. For this reason, many people filing Fifth Amendment Returns have escaped scotfree. On the other hand, the IRS can go through the trouble of establishing an assessment and then collect it. The odds are hard to calculate.

Since the true tax rebels want to eliminate any possibility of having to pay, the Fifth Amendment method is considered inferior to a new method of total avoidance championed by former financial advisor René Baxter.

Baxter gave up a lucrative career as publisher of an expensive investment advisory letter to devote himself full time to the tax rebellion. He decided it was futile to worry about how to make money if the Government was going to take it all away. Armed with a broad knowledge of law and monetary history, and a dizzying faith in logical consistency, Baxter has publicly announced his intention to refuse to file any tax return at all. While he allows that the Fifth Amendment Return is a fine form of protest, he argues that it is a superfluous gesture, since no one is legally obliged to file any tax return at all. While he allows that the Fifth Amendment Return is a fine form of protest, he argues that it is a superfluous gesture, since no one is legally obilged to file a tax return anyway.

This may seem ridiculous, but Baxter thinks he can back it up legally. According to him, income taxation may once have been legal, but due to a quirk in the law, there is no longer any legal money to tax.

Here is how it goes: According to Federal statute, a dollar is specifically defined as 1/42.22 ounce of gold, or 4121/2 grains of standard silver. But no American citizen has been able to obtain gold or silver from the Government in exchange for paper money since March 18, 1968, the last day that silver was available on demand for silver certificates from the Treasury. Since that day, no one, according to Baxter, has received any lawfully defined dollars. Tax codes require an individual to file if he has received, during the previous year, 750 or more dollars in income. Relying on a strict definition of what a "dollar" is, Baxter swears that he has received none and encourages other disgruntled citizens to join him in refusing to file tax returns. What he doesn't say is that the IRS may define "dollar" in a completely different fashion.

For those who are employed and are presently having Federal reserve notes garnished from their wages, Baxter advocates filing of form W4-E, which allows them to escape from withholding and to compute their taxes. He boasts that his method works and that of 12,000 employees of a Southern California firm, 5000 have joined the tax rebellion by filing this form.

Baxter claims that there is little legal danger from using his approach. "The money question never goes to court. The IRS has never been willing to put the issue before a jury or hassle anybody who is using that particular approach," though he doesn't explain how he could get that information. He further suggests that inquiries from the IRS seeking missing 1040 forms be dropped back in the mail unopened: "You might practice your handwriting by writing 'Deceased' on them before you drop them back in the mail. Should the computer operator misunderstand and type this information into a computer, you'll be permanently removed from the tax roles." (What he doesn't tell you is that if you continue to work, have a driver's license or a Social Security card, it wouldn't be very difficult to find out that you aren't in fact dead. For the future, this matter could be made simpler if people stopped registering the births of their children, who would then not exist legally. Numerous people from poor rural areas avoided the draft in the Sixties because they had been born at home, where no records were kept.)

Should the IRS continue to seek information, Baxter has another answer. He claims that the tax rebel can end harassment once and for all by filing a simple affidavit, sworn before two witnesses and notarized. The affidavit reads:

"I hereby swear under penalty of perjury that the following statement is true and correct in every particular: I have received no income since March 18, 1968." Signed and sealed, the document is dispatched to the IRS via certified mail. Baxter claims that this procedure--like flashing a silver cross before a vampire--invariably works. He says that if the folks at the IRS attempt to "toss aside your affidavit and seize your assets without due process of law, they are committing a felony violation of your civil rights under the Constitution and under Federal law. They are very aware of this fact and have never seized the assets of anyone who filed an Affidavit for Taxpayer Protection. If you were to be seized, you would be the first." Again, he hasn't said how he knows this. Court proceedings that do not reach the appellate level are not published. He would have no access to records of IRS proceedings.

Baxter is confident that this method of tax rebellion is legally sound. But as others rush to join him and tax rebellion picks up momentum, he has no illusions. "There may be casualties before this is over. It is war--a corrupt government versus the people--just as it was 200 years ago. Some of us might get hurt, but we don't care. The issue is the freedom of America. We're headed for runaway inflation and dictatorship. The only question is if it can be averted. It seems inevitable. Almost everyone says, 'How are you going to stop it? The Government controls and runs everything and the people are powerless.' But the tax fighter believes that if enough Americans stand up and shout, 'No!' they can stop their Government."

A widespread tax rebellion could be the most important political development in the remainder of the 20th Century. If it succeeds, it could change society not only here but perhaps in the rest of the world as well. Other people are groaning under the burdens of governments that typically demand one and a half to two times as much as was demanded from serfs under feudalism. The example of a tax rebellion spreading across borders would be a far more unsettling influence on the present world order than almost any combination of wars, assassinations, coups and the other normal fare of international politics. The typical "revolution," as Ambrose Bierce noted, is merely "an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment." But a tax rebellion would be a true revolutionary movement that would undermine the very nature of big government everywhere.

Punch Out The Irs!