Rein In the Tax Man

It is widely thought that the American Revolution was fought over excessive taxes. Not true. When Boston held its famous “tea party,” the tax in question amounted to a few pennies per pound of tea. The real issue was consent. Hence the rallying cry “no taxation without representation,” because “if we are not represented, we are slaves.”

Today, Americans do not lack the opportunity to consent in the same way. We do not face an uncooperative king and parliament across an ocean, but government has become unaccountable. Revenue agents and those who spend the money they collect operate with broad and virtually unchecked powers.

How did they obtain such power in the first place? Congress delegated it to them, abandoning its own responsibilities to write clear laws. Congress has the power to take it back. That it has not done so is a failure not just of lawmakers to hold the IRS accountable, but of voters to hold their own representatives’ feet to the fire.

This is foreseeable. More than a century before the 16th Amendment was ratified and the IRS was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the corruption that goes hand in hand with taxation.

The founders did two things to maintain a close connection between taxation and consent. They kept the tax system simple and clear--emphasizing consumption taxes, which would be easy to understand--and chose a method of collection that was decentralized. Income taxes, in particular, could only be collected by the states. Today, it’s difficult to imagine a tax or fee that the federal government would be unwilling to collect.

Jefferson had a more sensible view. “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill,” he wrote, “is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, ‘the guarantee to everyone of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.’ ”

Too many inhabitants of Washington, D.C., have either forgotten that or have chosen to ignore it. They would do Jefferson and the American people an honor and a service to remember it.