Here we go again: The “Fair Tax Act”  is out for its perennial limp around the dead legislation track.

The “Fair Tax” (or “FairTax” for those with defective space bars on their keyboards) proposes to replace the current federal tax regime with:

First, a 30% national sales tax, falsely advertised as 23% by calculating it “inclusively” — e.g. a 30 cent tax would be 23% of $1.30, which is the total cost, including tax, of a $1 purchase — on all services and “new” goods.

Second, a cradle-to-grave monthly welfare check for every man, woman, and child in the US, falsely advertised as an “advance rebate” or “prebate,” even though it’s not conditioned on payment of any tax at all.

Third, pretending to “eliminate” the IRS by re-naming it and/or parceling out its functions to other government bureaucracies.

In baseball, three strikes is an out. With legislation, three lies means extra innings until the bill passes or everyone dies.

It was a bad idea when Congress first considered it in 1999.

It was a bad idea when Neal Boortz and John Linder published The Fairtax Book (which should have been subtitled “Putting Lipstick on a Pig, Badly”) in 2005.

It’s continued to be a bad idea, and recognized by most as such, every time it’s raised its hoary head.

But for some reason, many supposed advocates of “smaller government” seem to think it would be an improvement on that metric. It wouldn’t.

“Fair Tax” advocates paint the proposal as “revenue neutral” (that is, the government would be taking just as much of our money as it did before). They also say that, with the monthly welfare checks, it would remain just as “progressive” — that is, redistributive — as the income tax.

What they don’t like to mention is that everyone who’d already paid income tax all their lives would have their savings taxed AGAIN, by 30%, when they spent that savings.

Or that the prices of “used” goods would rapidly rise — when the price of all “new” goods instantly goes up by 30%, there’s a lot of room to demand more for “used” while still remaining competitive.

Or that the “prebate” checks would instantly join Social Security as a political “third rail” that must not be touched, and a political football that could be kicked around to get anything politicians want by claiming a threat to the checks.

Does that sound like “smaller government” to you?

If so, check your hearing aid battery.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On January 23, a District of Columbia jury convicted three members of an organization styling itself the “Oath Keepers,” and a fourth associate of that group, of “seditious conspiracy” for their roles in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

There doesn’t seem to be much to quibble with on the verdict, pursuant to 18 US Code § 2384:

“If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.”

That is, the defendants do seem to have conspired to “prevent, hinder, or delay” the execution of the Electoral Count Act so as to prevent Congress’s confirmation of Joe Biden as Donald Trump’s successor.

What I find interesting about the “seditious conspiracy” statute — other than that Congress breaks it every time it conspires to pass a measure “hindering” the Supreme Law of the Land, the Constitution — is that it describes, in a nutshell, the operating theory of government itself.

George Washington is sometimes (incorrectly) quoted as warning that “government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force.”

Former congressman Ron Paul kept a placard on his desk reading “Don’t Steal — the Government hates competition.”

Government is an ongoing conspiracy to utilize force against you  on behalf of the political class.

If the conspirators steal something, it’s policy. If you steal something, it’s theft.

If the conspirators use force to overthrow, put down, prevent, hinder, or delay you — and they will ALWAYS use force if threats don’t get the job done — it’s “the law.” If you use force to overthrow, put down, prevent, hinder, or delay them, it’s “sedition.”

As an anarchist, I’d be lying if I claimed I wouldn’t like to see the US government overthrown, put down, prevented, hindered, or delayed at any and every opportunity. Not for some unworthy goal like keeping Donald Trump in the White House, but on principle.

I’m not keen on using force to accomplish that, but my hesitation is of a practical, not moral, nature.

Morally, any force I used against government would be inherently defensive, while theirs is powered by malice aforethought.

But as a practical matter, they’re a large, well-armed gang, fat on the take from hundreds of millions of robberies every year, while I’m just a guy who’d like to be left alone.

Furthermore, I can’t be sure that what follows their overthrow — which sooner or later, will inevitably happen — will be any better.

But I’m looking forward to finding out.

If this be sedition, make the most of it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

If I mention the date February 24, 2022 to you,  you’ll likely note it as the day on which Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Whether that date will remain carved in stone in your memory probably depends on where things go from here, nearly a year later, with the war in what looks like stalemate but all sides continually threatening escalation and promising resolution.

Humans tend to latch onto this or that “date which will live in infamy,” as FDR dubbed December 7, 1941 — the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the US fully into World War Two.

Most Americans who were alive and aware can tell you where they were on November 22, 1963 when they heard that JFK had been assassinated, or on September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center went down.

Those dates feel like “turning points” in history, but they really aren’t. They’re just convenient, explosive markers that we use to organize our understanding of the continuum of history.

Pearl Harbor followed years of US sanctions on, and confrontations with, Japan, as well as two years of material support for the war against Hitler in Europe.

The bullets that killed JFK, under almost any theory of who fired them and why, were part and parcel of the US national security state’s ongoing war with “world communism.”

The 9/11 attacks followed a decade of US military intervention in the Middle East, multiple warnings to cease that intervention, and several prior attacks to drive the warning home (a previous attack on the World Trade Center, the bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia,  and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, to name three).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine followed eight years of “frozen conflict” in seceded provinces from that country’s eastern edge, after a US-sponsored coup in 2014 to install an “anti-Russian” regime.

And, like Korea, Vietnam, the 1979-89 war in Afghanistan, and numerous smaller conflicts, the Russo-Ukrainian war  is really just one more “proxy war” of the kind the US and Russia have conducted against each other since the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — two more “days which will live in infamy” — brought World War Two to a formal close.

With all the nuclear saber-rattling lately, many fear that we’re on the cusp of World War Three.

In actuality, that war has raged for 78 years now, if such markers make any sense at all (we could just as reasonably posit a single war starting between some primordial Cain and Abel).

For 78 years, two big questions have loomed over us: Will the US-Russia confrontation become direct, and will the nukes come out again?

The survival of humanity likely hangs on those questions.

And the only answer that can save us is finding a way to end war. Not this war — war itself.

I’d like to believe that can be done, but the evidence says otherwise. Humans seem to have conflict engraved in our cultural DNA. It’s central to our history, our religion, and our politics.

But we should keep trying.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY