Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

would be now, but there’s no doubt that one of the ways to avoid inflation was to finance as large a fraction of current spending with tax money as possible.”16

In his memoir, Two Lucky People, which he coauthored with his wife, Rose, Friedman conceded that during World War II, he “was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom.”17 According to Friedman, “I really wish we hadn’t found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.”18 The author of the truism about the permanence of temporary government programs was himself the regretful author of the most pernicious and permanent of temporary government programs whereby the federal government steals money from each of our paychecks, every time we receive one.

Through income taxes, the government taxes our personal production, only to redistribute our hard-earned cash to others (often wastefully). This is an oppressive infringement on personal liberty and one that we should not passively accept. The idea of abolishing income taxes is hardly radical. The Founding Fathers did not support them, and they are a relatively new custom in America. Nevertheless, the only politicians who had the backbone to suggest such a policy in the 2008 presidential election were Ron Paul and Bob Barr.

Congressman Ron Paul’s plan to abolish the income tax and, consequently, eliminate wasteful federal programs like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign aid, agricultural subsidies, and the United States Department of Education, is absolutely consistent with the intent of the Framers.19 Under Paul’s plan, much more responsibility would be taken on by the States, within which funds would be handled by local politicians who can better gauge the needs of their citizens than the federal government can.

When explaining his stance on taxes, former Congressman Bob Barr stated, “It is not enough to eliminate the income tax. We also must also repeal the 16th amendment, which authorizes Congress to levy an income tax. Without doing so, there would be an ever-present danger that a future Congress would attempt to bring back the income tax on top of the Fair Tax or any other alternative to the income tax.”20 These ideas are in step with the Framers’ intent, but until Americans wake up and realize that they do not need to accept an oppressive income tax, these plans will remain far from mainstream.

Frank Chodorov argued, in “Taxation Is Robbery,” that the government immorally pilfers our money from us through any and all forms of taxation. He wrote, “Those who hold to the primacy of the individual, whose very existence is his claim to inalienable rights, lean to the position that in the compulsory collection of dues and charges the State is merely exercising power, without regard to morals.”21

When the government takes from us, it is just as immoral as any other type of burglar. Because humans have an indisputable right to life, it follows that we have the same right to enjoy the products of our life’s labor. Yet, when the government taxes us, the right to our own existence is qualified. Do you know anyone—anyone—who comes home with his paycheck and check stub and after examining what he earned and what the government took from him says: “I don’t think I gave the government enough money this week”?

In addition to taxation itself, there is a whole host of government programs funded by our tax dollars that were originally proposed as “temporary,” but then stuck around for the long haul.

“Temporary” Government Program #2:

Rent Control

During World War I, the federal government introduced rent controls, which are ordinances or laws that place a ceiling on the amount a landlord can charge for rent, but stopped them in the late 1920s.22 Rent controls were implemented again during World War II, via the Emergency Price Control Act (EPCA) of 1942. They were brought back strictly as a temporary “emergency measure,” mainly in order to help the wives and children of soldiers who were serving in the war, and were to be dismantled after the war.23 The EPCA allowed the federal government to regulate the maximum price of residential rents in an effort to counteract inflationary prices and housing charges. It helped tenants, but it severely harmed the landlords who owned the apartments the tenants leased. Nevertheless, in a few American cities, like New York City, rent control is far from temporary.

Today, proponents of rent control justify it as a device to ensure that people who have lived in their apartments for a long time will not be removed due to rising rents in their area. Yet, the rationale behind rent control today is far from sound: It deprives landlords of the right to control the amount they charge to tenants, it acts as a disincentive to invest in real estate, it arbitrarily favors certain groups of people over others, and it allows government—rather than people’s free-market choices—to dictate what people pay for a good in a given neighborhood. It also constitutes a taking since it consists of the government prohibiting owners of private property from putting the property to its highest and best use.

A proponent of abolishing rent control, pop social scientist Malcolm Gladwell, argued that in New York (where rent control is prevalent), rent control is behind the problem of tax-delinquent landlords. He wrote:

Right now thousands of buildings in the city are in receivership— either abandoned by landlords or under the tenuous control of the city because their owners couldn’t pay their taxes. Tax-delinquent buildings tend, almost exclusively, to be older buildings, because older buildings tend to have much higher upkeep costs and also tend to have many more tenants with artificially low rents . . . they are the buildings now getting burned down, or run down, or boarded up because rent regulation makes it impossible for landlords to take care of them.24

Rent control discourages anyone from even going through the grief of being a landlord