Root of All Evil

That’s the subtitle of Frank Chodorov’s classic, The Income Tax: Root of All Evil.  Among the evils that he discusses are:

• Enabling government to put its hands in everyone’s pockets.
• Drawing the public’s allegiance away from its local governments to Washington, D.C.
• Causing citizens to have less control over faraway federal representatives.
• Making citizens subject to the whims of federal politicians.
• Causing state governments to lose their autonomy.
• Causing state governments to become subservient to Washington, not their citizens.
• Enabling the federal government to bribe and threaten state governments, forcing them to bend to its will.
• All of this was the final nail in the coffin of federalism and the establishment of centralized, monopolistic government.
• Turned Americans into slaves of the state.  As Chodorov wrote, the income tax amendment effectively said:  “Your earnings are not exclusively your own.  We will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, but not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide . . . .  The amount of your earnings that you may retain for yourself is determined by the needs of the government, and you have nothing to say about it.”

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