Sheep-Shearing Season on the Revenue Ranch

During the most recent Federal Reserve-engineered economic bubble, state and local governments made extravagant promises to their tax-feeder constituencies regarding pensions and other benefits. Now that the bubble has burst, sales and property taxes -- once a mighty, roaring river of revenue -- have been reduced to a thin, pathetic trickle.


This comes at a time when, as the New York Times reports, there is "a $1 trillion gap between what all 50 states have promised their workers [sic -- a more accurate description is "employees"] and what they have set aside."


As the economic crisis deepens, how will state and municipal governments continue to provide for their most cherished constituency -- those who live by plundering the productive?


Wendy McElroy highlights one approach being pioneered by the town of Tracey, California: The city will now impose a surcharge on emergency services that have already been paid for through taxes. Residents of that city will be charged $300 for the fire department to respond to a medical emergency; non-residents will be billed $400 for the same service. There is the option of paying an annual $48 fee for "premium" 911 service.


Note carefully that this is not privatization. Taxes will still be extracted, but tax victims will now have the privilege of paying twice for the same services. If you're a Tracey resident and see someone having a heart attack, McElroy wryly comments, "you should quickly set a trash bin on fire. Otherwise, by calling for help, your monthly budget may not stretch to include mortgage or food." Tracey's political class simpers that the city government is running a $9 million budget deficit. Interestingly, that is exactly the amount spent each year on employee pensions.



Rather than renegotiating those benefits, the city government is putting the screws to economically burdened tax victims, and doing so in a way that is going to cost the lives of some of them. "Forget that phone bills already include a charge to cover 911," continues McElroy. "Forget that property taxes already assist with those costs. The politicos don't care. They want your money. And they will let people die -- many of them elderly poor -- rather than deliver services for which they have already been paid."


In other jurisdictions, the wealth-devouring class is resorting to other potentially lethal revenue enhancement strategies. Before examining the specifics, two principles should be kept in mind.


First, government -- unlike private entities that offer goods or services in exchange for revenue -- engages in pure consumption. As a result, all sources of government revenue involve destruction of wealth, rather than mutually beneficial commerce that enhances both parties.


Second, everything government does to obtain revenue contains an implicit death threat. Anyone who resists or refuses the demand for revenue with sufficient tenacity will find himself on the receiving end of an explicit threat made by an armed stranger in a government-issued costume.

A gathering of statist shearers: Maryland State Police and personnel from the St. Mary's County assemble before carrying out "Operation Most Wanted Weekend," a 2008 exercise in "taxation by citation."

Those principles provide the proper context to examine the tactics employed by various municipal and state governments to conduct what former Sheriff Richard Mack perceptively describes as "taxation through citation."



To put the matter bluntly, police -- the self-described "Sheepdogs" -- aren't here to protect the flock, but rather to make sure that we're securely penned in when it's sheep-shearing season.



During the penultimate weekend of February, police in Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota conducted an elaborate and lucrative sting to enforce the state's primary seat belt law.


Officers disguised as homeless people were dispatched to harass drivers at a busy intersection: The "homeless" people -- most likely in violation of traffic ordinances, certainly in violation of the 4th Amendment and Minnesota's state equivalent -- would peer into cars and then radio ahead to their cohorts in officially sanctioned crime, who would hand each "offender" an extortion note (more commonly called a "traffic ticket").


Dave Kvam, the deputy police chief of Maplewood (a suburb of St. Paul), insists that the multi-departmental racket was a justifiable exercise. After all, he told local reporter Ruben Rosario, "police have received numerous complaints of panhandling, and he believes the seat-belt law is a good one and should be enforced" -- by, among other things, having police violate ordinances against panhandling. That parallel is a bit unfair: Although panhandlers may be obnoxious, even the most tenacious of them couldn't get away with demanding money at gunpoint, as Kvam's fellow street criminals did during the seat-belt ambush.


Each victim would typically be mulcted $25 for declining to wear seat belts, coupled with a $75 "petty misdemeanor surcharge fee" -- which is essentially a tax inflicted on people for refusing to obey a spurious enactment the tax-absorbing class calls a "law" -- plus an additional $8 kickback to the state crime bosses in St. Paul (who had already been given a $3.5 million federal bribe to enact the primary seat-belt "law" in the first place). At least 122 citations were handed out in a space of three and a half hours.


As Rosario points out, the homeless ruse has been used not only in Minnesota but also "in Houston and a few other jurisdictions." (As we will discuss anon, Houston is also the scene of another creative effort to harvest revenue from the plebes.) As the economy sickens and street people become a more visible presence, it's quite likely their numbers will frequently include predatory, revenue-hungry police.


The tax-extracting class afflicting Texas will celebrate the beginning of March with the fourth annual "Warrant Roundup," a yearly event in which police fan out to shakedown or imprison anyone with unpaid citations of any kind. This includes not only traffic tickets, but also fines for violating any of the myriad morally unsupportable but lucrative provisions in state and municipal building, planning, zoning, and safety codes.

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The armed revenue farmers presented in this film clip were on their best behavior, of course. They weren't shown banging on the door of some underpaid, overburdened private citizen at or before daybreak, demanding money and dragging away in handcuffs those who couldn't pay. They weren't shown barging into classrooms or workplaces to present the same demands and inflict public humiliation on those not capable of complying with them.


All of this does occur during warrant roundups, however -- a fact prominently mentioned in official pronouncements, if played down, for propaganda purposes, by government-aligned stenographers in the local media.



At the risk of culpable redundancy, I make the point once again: All of this is done for the purpose of collecting revenue on behalf of the political class, not to serve or protect the productive public. This is made quite clear by the opening lines of a Houston Chronicle account of a "warrant roundup" conducted last August: "Nearly 2 million warrants worth more than $340 million are outstanding in the Houston area, and in most cases they're not for hard-core criminals. They're for average citizens who haven't settled minor traffic and ordinance citations."


Revenue farmer in the rear-view: No good can come from this.



Of the eight people listed as "Houston's Most Wanted" during the round-up -- people who had at least 100 outstanding warrants -- four were cited for the apparently grievous offense of “failure to securely attach a tax permit to a coin-operated machine.” Other grievous offenses committed by that band of shameless rogues include failure “to conspicuously post at every entrance a sign stating smoking is prohibited,” and “having no hand-washing sign in a bathroom used by employees.”


How can Houstonians sleep peacefully in their beds knowing that such marauders are on the loose? As Barney Fife might exclaim: "It's a regular reign of terror!"

According to the Chronicle, in 2008 the Houston Police Department -- in tacit recognition of the fact that its primary function is to plunder the populace rather than to protect it -- “purchased automated license plate readers that read up to 60 vehicle license plates per minute." This allows the police to identify those with outstanding warrants, including the growing number of people who “have to choose between paying their grocery bill or their tickets.”

What a shameful lack of civic consciousness! How dare such people put food on their tables when there are tax-feeders pining for revenue? And coughing up the money is so much more convenient now that police “have the ability to run credit card payments so people can settle their outstanding warrants on the spot.”

For those who cannot pay off the parasite class and its armed enforcers, debtors’ prison awaits: As the Texas Court of Appeals recently observed, Class C misdemeanors “are still crimes, and … the person charged can be arrested on warrant like any ordinary criminal, forced to travel a long distance to attend the court, [and be] remanded in custody and imprisoned in default of payment of the fine.”

The only things that government makes -- as I've said before -- is criminals out of innocent people, and corpses out of living human beings. A Government's lethality increases the more energetically it criminalizes innocuous behavior.

In light of that relationship, it's reasonable to suspect that the ruling class in the Lone Star State appears determined to precipitate a bloodbath: The Texas Public Policy Foundation points out that 779 Texas statutes identify “misdemeanors,” but “only 64 of those instances are in the Penal Code or Code of Criminal Procedure.”

In the once-free Lone Star State, concludes the Texas Public Policy Foundation, "the criminal law is not just for criminals anymore. The same is true of imprisonment: Half of all Texans behind bars were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

This trend is not confined to Texas. The state and municipal governments that disfigure our country like pustules on the face of a smallpox victim are relentless in devising new measures intended to justify the extraction of wealth at gunpoint. This aggression will only increase as the depression deepens.

At some point, those presuming to rule us won't be satisfied merely to fleece their increasingly bedraggled flock. That's when the options for the sheep will be clarified into a stark and unmistakable choice between revolt and slaughter.

Be sure to tune in to Pro Libertate Radio for your daily dose of sedition -- weeknights from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Economic Show Trials Begin

The inverted pyramid of corporate socialism: The wealthiest are subsidized, through inflation, by those who can least afford it.



Could it be that our ruling elite has effectively transcended hypocrisy? As the aphorism informs us, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; it is the product of a person's capacity for decent shame, the fig-leaf garment concealing one's naked corruption.


Shame being a vital precursor to hypocrisy, those who rule us -- not only the politicians, but the banksters and image-molders as well -- can't be accused of hypocrisy. This would be a bit like criticizing the fashion sense of somebody who's color-blind. This doesn't mean, however, that they should be allowed an indulgence for the evil that they do.


Last week, during a brief digression in the ongoing efforts to socialize the losses suffered by the super-rich kleptocrats at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Congress conducted an authentic Orwellian hate-fest directed at "super-rich" people who had earned their money through legitimate enterprise.


The Fannie/Freddie nomenklatura built huge profits through the government-subsidized generation and "securitization" of bad mortgages and criminally corrupt bookkeeping. Last week's hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations focused on people who had made large sums of money through honest, productive commercial activity -- and then tried to preserve their honest earnings for their posterity by protecting it in bank accounts in Liechtenstein.


Congress and the ruling elite it serves are eagerly stealing everything in sight, through taxes, subsidies, and inflation. But as last week's Senate hearings-cum-show trial illustrate, they are tuning up the machinery of mass hatred in anticipation of scapegoating authentic capitalists for the ongoing economic collapse.


The fault, we will be told, lies not with our corrupt and incurably profligate government, or the incorrigible official counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve, or the government-subsidized corporatist interests who are their clients -- but rather those who greedily insist on keeping what they earn instead of paying their "fair share" in the name of the "common good."


The calculation here is that a hate campaign of that sort can keep the public from noticing how the phrase "common good" always seems to refer to policies that confer benefits on one particular elite. And it's quite likely that members of that elite have their own numbered accounts in places like Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Which is probably another reason they're so eager to go after well-heeled people who aren't part of their club.


As I have noted before, Liechtenstein, unlike the United States, is a relatively free country. It is presided over with a gentle hand by Prince Hans-Adam II, rather than being ruled by a degenerate fascist oligarchy like the one entrenched in Washington. Hans-Adam II is on record saying that a top tax rate higher than 6% is "tyrannical." This puts him well ahead of any other political leader I can think of in pursuing the truth, which is that taxation is always and everywhere nothing but officially sanctioned theft.


As would be the case in any civilized country, Liechtenstein's banking secrecy laws were designed to protect the assets of depositors from the scrutiny of predators serving the ruling class. Many foreign depositors have, in accordance with the sound and commendable laws of that estimable alpine country, set up foundations to protect their earnings from rapacious tax-gatherers in their own afflicted nations.


Weasel at large: Heinrich Kieber, convicted of fraud in Liechtenstein, esteemed informant for the tax gestapo of various governments. He is what I call an "SOS" -- someone who should be Slapped On Sight (I only use a closed fist on a real man).


Unfortunately, a squalid little creature named Heinrich Kieber who had been a clerk at Liechtenstein's LGT Group, pilfered several CDs worth of data regarding foreign depositors from the United States and Europe. Driven by a variant of the invidious impulses that sixty years ago would have led him to rat out those who protected Jews from the Gestapo, Kieber -- as viscous as he is vicious -- oozed into the offices of Germany's BND intelligence service and sold his stolen information for $7.3 million stolen at gunpoint from German taxpayers.

Kieber conducted similar transactions with ruling criminals in London, Paris, Rome, and Washington. His information This led to last week's hearings, chaired by the loathsome Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), who -- in the interests of "bipartisanship" -- gave a prominent co-starring role to the even more repulsive Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota). Kieber himself, who has been taken into the "witness protection program," testified by way of a videotaped statement from a secret location.


The target of Comrade Levin's show trial was the reported $1.5 trillion cached by wealthy Americans in offshore accounts, including those in Liechtenstein, Switzerland's UBS, and elsewhere. Those banks, Levin complained, had employed "tricks" that made it "impossible for the Internal Revenue Service to follow the money, bring tax cheats to justice, and bring back into the US treasury the tens of billions of dollars owed to Uncle Sam."


Well, sure: The banks that sought to protect the assets of Jews during WWII employed the same methods to protect the assets of honorable people from the contemporary tax gestapo, who are the true moral heirs of the Nazi officials who sought to seize the assets of persecuted Jews. Impeding the efforts of criminals to steal wealth is not a "crime," and it's interesting that Levin didn't use that word to describe the "tricks" he protested.

And, if I can be permitted a brief digression, Levin's statement that the money should be brought "back to the US treasury" in order to pay "the tens of billions of dollars owed to Uncle Sam" is a Marxist lie sandwiched between two crusty slices of chutzpah.


For the purposes of this discussion, we'll refer to the fraudulent fiat currency issued by the Fed as "money."


Any quantity of "money" honestly earned does not belong to the Treasury; it belongs to the individual or enterprise that earned it, until he or they decide to spend it for some purpose. Accordingly, that money cannot go "back" to the Treasury, although it can be diverted there to be wasted on corrupt government undertakings of various kinds.


Furthermore, taxes are not "owed" to the federal government; they are seized by the federal government. One "owes" money to another party from whom he has received goods or services pursuant to a legitimate contract. "Contracts" imposed through duress (such as extortion pay-offs) are illegitimate. Those of us who pay taxes do so not because a legitimate contract exists between us and the Regime that extracts our wealth; we do so because of a desire to stay out of prison, or to avoid violent death at the hands of the State's hired killers.


Levin is a nearly ideal representative of the parasite class. His mind, or what passes for it, is entirely hostage to collectivist assumptions. Just as a dog cannot discern colors, Levin can't see anything amiss in extending official protection to a foreign criminal (Kieber was convicted of fraud in Liechtenstein) so he can testify against those who have done no injury to persons or property, or in treating foreign bank officers as if they were under Washington's jurisdiction by demanding that they testify before his committee.


All of this is being done, Levin insists, to bring "tax cheats to justice." Leaving aside, for the nonce, the fact that the word "justice" when uttered by the likes of Levin is like the word "love" in the mouth of a whore, the cruel fact is that tax avoidance is impossible for anyone who conducts business using the Federal Reserve's fraudulent scrip.


This brings us to one history-making admission offered last week by Fed Commissar Ben Bernanke beneath the avuncular but relentless cross-examination of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) during Bernanke's recent congressional testimony.

Actually, this illustration is deceptive regarding the innate value of the Federal Reserve Note: The paper grade used in creating that bogus currency is ill-suited to such use.



“Inflation is a tax," Rep. Paul observed during his colloquy with Bernanke. "And if the Federal Reserve, and you as chairman, have this authority to increase the money supply arbitrarily, you’re probably the biggest taxer in the country."


"I couldn't agree with you more that inflation is a tax," admitted Bernanke, quickly seeking to evade responsibility by saying that "inflation currently is too high." The criminal syndicate over which Bernanke presides imposes taxation without representation or accountability.


Furthermore, it exports that inflation world-wide, thanks to the fact that the instrument of debt the Fed calls the "dollar" is the world's reserve currency. This means that nearly everyone who uses the dollar to conduct business is paying the tax called inflation. This is a unique form of withholding, in that the Fed steals an increment of value from each dollar before it ends up in the hands or accounts of private actors in the economy.


Pity poor Emmett Neverend: Once a rational and respected academic, he lost his wits when he finally came to understand the moral implications of the Regime's financial system.


Where a government exercises the power to tax through inflation, no other taxes are "necessary," including the income tax. Furthermore, where governments tax through inflation, no tax evasion is possible, as long as people conduct business in that adulterated currency.


The redoubtable G. Edward Griffin points out that former Fed Chairman Beardsley Ruml admitted that, because of the Fed's ability to tax via inflation, "Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete" -- the title of an essay Ruml published in the January 1946 issue of American Affairs. As Ruml wrote,"given control of a central banking system and an incontrovertible currency [that is, a fiat currency not backed by gold], a sovereign national government is finally free of money worries and need no longer levy taxes for the purpose of providing itself with revenue. All taxation, therefore, should be regarded from the point of view of social and economic consequences."(Emphasis added.)


Thus, where Washington is concerned, taxation exists purely for the purpose of social manipulation through vulgar redistribution of wealth, not to pay the operating costs of government. And as carried out by the IRS, taxation is an instrument of intimidation and terror used to compel social conformity.


By keeping their money in dollars, or any currency "pegged" to the dollar, so-called "tax cheats" aren't evading taxes. They, like the rest of us, are being taxed through the Fed's relentless inflation. Their only hope to evade being taxed by the Fed would be to take the advice offered by Jim Rogers last fall: Get out of dollar-denominated assets entirely.


There are only two ways to acquire wealth: It can be earned through mutually beneficial voluntary action, or it can be stolen through force and fraud. Any effort to acquire wealth that involves any degree of force or fraud is theft.


Senator Levin and his comrades, who are preparing to bail out the politically favored thieves running Fannie and Freddie, spent many taxpayer-funded hours last week dilating upon the supposed iniquity of those "super-rich" Americans who seek to protect what they earn from people whose professional lives are nothing but one prolonged exercise in theft.


It would avail nothing to point out such hypocrisy to Levin and his ilk; they can no more feel honest shame than a chimpanzee can compose a cantata.


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Dum spiro, pugno!