Reflections on Dave Champion

The interview is over and I believe it went quite well. Dave Champion is an intelligent guy, someone I could share a beer with and hack out some debate or another with neither of us getting too upset and stomping off in a huff. He was fair and courteous to me throughout the show and even invited me back for a later appearance, to which I happily agreed.

However, the bulk of his arguments still centered around a semantic interpretation of the codes and statutes under which we all operate. The last portion of the show contained a magnanimous allotment of time for me to turn the tables and ask Dave a question. My question was:

“If there is no law requiring income taxes, why isn’t there?”

Dave’s answer went down the path of original intent of the founders, the inclusion of the Declaration of Independence as one of the foundations of law (which it isn’t) and still didn’t answer the question.

To be fair, we were running out of time in the latter portion of the show and I didn’t have a chance to clarify for Dave what my question meant. I will do so here.

Essentially, I am asking, if the government has instituted such a convoluted code for the taxation of income that a few have discovered a “secret” that it doesn’t really contain a law requiring income tax, does anyone honestly think it wouldn’t have been rectified by now?

Yes, numerous court decisions have staved off the arguments of the tax protester group time and time again. Yet, you just have to imagine that some guy, sitting in some office in the highest echelons of the IRS with intimate knowledge of all laws under his authority would have, at some point, read the tax protester arguments, uttered an “oh shit” to himself, and picked up the phone to a Congressional representative to see what could be done.

We all know how that process works. They could call it the Tax Code Clarification Act, which would state in no uncertain terms exactly what is meant by such words as “income” and “citizen”. The courts would obviously back such legislation since they have been upholding income tax laws for nearly a century. Thus, the IRS could knock the legs out from under these vocal tax protesters in one legislative swoop. No more expensive court prosecutions or expensive investigations. The tax protest arguments would be dead on arrival as ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law (Vernice Kuglin, notwithstanding).

That isn’t the case, however, and there doesn’t appear to be any such legislation in the works. The question then becomes who knows more about the law, those who write them or those who say they have found a discrepancy?

Without lending whole-hearted support to our legislators, my money is still with the government (no pun intended) as to what the laws say and mean. After all, they are some of the richest people in the country, or at least a phone call away from the very richest. If there was an actual lack of law requiring an income tax, they and their friends would have been the first to discover and exploit it.

Yet, they do pay their taxes. They do file returns. They do submit to the same laws the rest of us do, with just more probable deductions than most of us can pull off.

That is the answer to the question. The fact that the richest of the rich aren’t buying the argument is strong evidence that the argument is false since they have the strongest motivation to believe it.