Gary Kinghorn, TDV Correspondent
Over years of studying government tyranny, monetary reform and freedom, I’ve run across a lot of information about how unconstitutional the US Income Tax is, how the 16th Amendment was never ratified by the requisite number of states, and how there’s really no law that compels citizens to pay Federal Income Tax. One of the best documentaries on this topic was the late Aaron Russo’s film “From Freedom to Fascism”. At one of Ron Paul’s early campaign rallies in the Bay Area in July, 2007, I even arranged for Joe Banister, a former IRS enforcement agent and whistleblower living locally in San Jose to speak about the topic. A lot of the arguments seemed very convoluted to me, and for sure nothing seemed clear enough that you could take on the IRS and a heavy-handed judiciary and expect to come away unscathed.
Along comes a fantastic new e-book, “Taxation by Misrepresentation”, by John W. Benson, which I now believe is by far the best resource to understanding the true constitutional aspects of our income tax system, as well as the origin of the laws and processes involved in compelling citizens to pay it. Far from being convoluted, it is an extremely logical, sound and extraordinarily well-researched book. The engineer in me can connect all the dots and see where all the legal facts and foundations lie. The book lays out the definitive case that US income tax is absolutely a “voluntary” tax, which cannot be made compulsory by virtue of its unconstitutional nature, and which requires a great deal of fraud and outright intimidation on the part of the IRS to convince people that what can only be voluntary, is instead a lawful requirement.
The thesis of this book by John Benson is that the US Constitution explicitly disallows a tax on one’s labor, and that the 16th Amendment took “Income” to mean the same thing as used in the Corporation Excise Tax Act of 1909. Current Treasury regulations explicitly state exemptions from “gross income” include “those items of income which are, under the Constitution, not taxable by the Federal Government”, without ever enumerating such. But our treacherous overlords engineered a legalistic workaround for this thorny dilemma. Such a tax could be implemented if it was in accordance with “due process” according to the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, requiring that such due process does not differ in principle from the statute law of England for the King to collect revenues at the time the Constitution was formed.
As a result, all IRS processes and procedures are, in substance and effect, simply the ancient English revenue processes and procedures employed by the king’s revenue officials in the Exchequer (Treasury) in 1791 dressed up in modern garb. To be sure, the author claims, the words used are different and not easily understood. In fact, these procedures and the laws relating back to them are deliberately shrouded in complexity in order to avoid the populace gaining any real insights to the foundations of our tax system.
Therefore, John claims, in order to understand today’s tax processes and procedures, you must understand the ancient processes employed by the Exchequer, some dating back in time before King John was forced to sign the Magna Charta, the Great Charter of Liberties, on the Plains of Runnymede in 1215. If you knew that the foundations of our tax code relate back prior to the Magna Carta, you are in a very small minority.
A precedent-setting Supreme Court tax case in 1856 cited several English treatises as authorities on the ancient processes used by the king’s Exchequer. John and his associate, Glenn Ambort, spent over a year hunting down the four principal treatises, as they are all long out of print, and read through each of them. They traced the tax processes and procedures employed by the IRS today and laid them side by side with the English processes. By this process, John demonstrates a compelling case that the income tax process used today by the IRS must be based upon one of the only two processes used by the king in 1791, both of which are cited in the 1856 Supreme Court case, namely, either the finding of an inquisition, aka an inquest of office (administrative hearing, in today’s terms), or a “statute staple” process (an ancient form of contract enacted by Parliament for the benefit of merchants).
His conclusion as to which of these two processes apply to the Form 1040 tax return is both startling and has consequences that bring into question the convictions of countless Americans imprisoned for alleged tax crimes, not to mention the billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars collected by force in the name of tax laws. Essentially, the statute staple process is a voluntary contractual process used in merchant law and not common law. The result is that IRS taxation is a voluntary contractual process between consenting parties and cannot be compelled on an individual. Much of the IRS code and procedures today are therefore designed to both conform to this fact, while insidiously hiding its significance from the populace, and doing everything in their power to intimidate tax payers to “volunteering” payment, even if at gunpoint.
If this wasn’t bad enough, there’s another staggering implication to be revealed. In another blog post/book review I wrote, I covered how U.S. Citizens “volunteer” themselves into the status of “U.S. citizen” under the definition of the 14th Amendment. As I pointed out, this new “Federal” citizenship was initially intended for the recently freed slaves (rather than making them citizens of their states as most citizens were at the time). John points out in a blog post on his site how Chief Justice Fuller described the 14th Amendment citizenship rule in United States v. Wong Kim Ark:
The rule was the outcome of the connection in feudalism between the individual and the soil on which he lived, and the allegiance due was that of liegemen to their liege lord. It was not local and temporary, as was the obedience to the laws owed by aliens within the dominions of the Crown, but permanent and indissoluble, and not to be cancelled by any change of time or place or circumstances.
And it is this rule, pure and simple, which it is asserted determined citizenship of the United States during the entire period prior to the passage of the act of April 9, 1866, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and governed the meaning of the words “citizen of the United States” and “natural-born citizen” used in the Constitution as originally framed and adopted. I submit that no such rule obtained during the period referred to, and that those words bore no such construction; that the act of April 9, 1866, expressed the contrary rule; that the Fourteenth Amendment prescribed the same rule as the act, and that, if that amendment bears the construction now put upon it, it imposed the English common law rule on this country for the first time, and made it “absolute and unbending” just as Great Britain was being relieved from its inconveniences.