by: F.R. Duplantier

"The Internal Revenue Service, under heavy fire from Congress in recent months, announced that it is reprimanding some of its managers and reassigning others," reports Lloyd Billingsley of the Pacific Research Institute. "While these developments are of interest," he concedes, "the real story was what did not happen."

Billingsley points out that recent Congressional hearings into IRS practices simply reconfirmed the abuses documented in earlier hearings "more than 10 years ago." He recalls that IRS employees at that time were being promoted "based on how much money and property they seized from taxpayers. . . . Fueled by that perverse incentive, the agents became a kind of American KGB, terrorizing the weakest, most vulnerable taxpayers, many innocent of any offense."

Billingsley points out that those earlier hearings resulted in passage of the 1988 Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which "forbade the IRS to use enforcement statistics for promotion purposes." In the intervening decade "the agency has consistently violated that policy. This," he concludes, "is an agency that considers itself above the law."

The real story, Billingsley contends, is that "not a single IRS agent lost his job, a fate which most if not all deserve, along with those in charge who allowed the abuses to continue. All the offenders got were reprimands, admonishments, and reassignments." He laments that "not a single IRS manager was publicly named or even had his salary reduced."

Billingsley emphasizes that the blame for these abuses lies ultimately with "our elected representatives," who are apparently "comfortable with the status quo of the welfare state. For decades," he observes, "they have been busy creating multibilliondollar boondoggles called 'entitlements.' They have kept in place an immoral and incomprehensible tax code that punishes people for working hard. In their quest to wring every possible penny out of the populace, free-spending Republicans and Democrats avert their eyes to all but the worst abuses of their enforcement squads." Billingsley demands that abusive agents be fired and prosecuted, and that the current tax code be replaced by one that is simple and fair. Then he might believe that Congress is "serious about reforming the IRS."

Here's the catch: Reforming the IRS is impossible without first reforming the Congress -- and reforming the Congress is impossible so long as our representatives can bribe their way back into office with internal revenue. This neat little swindle dates back to 1913, when the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments were ratified. The Sixteenth provided for a direct federal income tax, the Seventeenth for direct election of Senators. The effect of both was to increase dramatically the power of the federal government at the expense of the States. The best way to restore the balance of power is to repeal both Amendments. When the power of the federal government to lay direct taxes is once again mitigated by the States, and U.S. Senators again answer to the legislatures that select them -- only then will citizens be safe from a ravenous Leviathan.