One must pause and think carefully about the implications of this piece, and what it tells us about the consequences of using our franchise to place people like Barry Soetoro in power and of the overwhelming dominance of the media, academia, K-12 education, and the entertainment industries by those who support him and his ideology.
Kevin Graham wrote:The IRS Was Dead Right To Scrutinize Tea Party
Lost in the latest political scandal is a simple fact: The Internal Revenue Service was acting in the public interest when it opted to train its auditing power on the Tea Party and affiliated groups.
In castigating government as the root of all evil while portraying taxation as a form of tyranny, the Tea Party is no less than a mass celebration of the evasion of the basic responsibilities of American citizenship.
Translation: The Tea Party and everyone within it are guilty of thoughtcrime. Diss the Lord of Hosts, the state, or criticize its vast beneficent ministrations, and our Lord and God will send his archangel, the IRS, to bind the tares that they may be burned.
Yet more solid evidence that Kevin Graham is, as David Horowitz has observed, "a totalitarian screaming to get out" in virtually every aspect of his political philosophy and worldview.
Go ahead and read the article above and look at its main thesis. Open dissent or criticism of the kinds and levels of taxation presently in operation are indicative of criminal and perhaps even traitorous intentions and punitive legal fishing expeditions by vastly powerful, rogue government agencies with the power to destroy are legitimate responses to the use of the first amendment to dissent from government policy and behavior.
No probable cause or known intent to engage in criminal activities is required. All that is necessary is that one be a conservative or Austrian libertarian and one can be audited, harassed, legally stalked, and considered a potential criminal by nothing more than association with a political philosophy, a philosophy, by the way, that grounds the founding of the nation and its key founding documents.
Kevin has really torn off his mask this time (as has the author of this piece of intellectual Stalinism), and should not be allowed to put it back on again and prance around as a "liberal."
Let's take a look at some salient points made by our little statist drone, Peter Goodman, and see perhaps why he's a soul mate of Ronald McGraham:
Common sense alone tells you that people drawn to its ranks may feel extra temptation to find ways to limit what they surrender to the rogue federal bureaucrats who have supposedly seized the nation.
Whatever "common sense" may be, there is no logical reason to make such an assumption, let alone the slightest historical or empirical basis, and the internal psychological and emotional states of government bureaucrats cannot be used, at least in a free society, to launch legal witch hunts against ideological opponents.
Clearly, for Mr. Goodman, political differences are prima facie evidence of criminality, and should be punished even before any evidence of criminal activity, let alone intent, has been seen. Forget probably cause. Forget innocent until proven guilty. Forget equality under the law. Conservatives, for Goodman, as for Kevin and his kind, are the new Kulaks, the new Jews, the new running dog bourgeoisie.
But let's get back to the primary act at issue here: The IRS -- an agency loved by no one and responsible for stocking the Treasury with federal tax proceeds, due under the law --
This is a true, servile statist drone at work, folks, and magnificent in its moral and intellectual obscenity. The United States tax code is the single most powerful and sophisticated tool of social engineering available to the political class, and this is what the Tea Party (and both modern conservatives and libertarians together) object to, whether "by law" or not. The tax code is used to pick winners and losers in the economy, compel behavior favored by the state and its dependents, reward friends and punish enemies. A very powerful argument can be made that, although all this is "by law" in a pen and ink sense, much of what the tax code does and encourages is, in essence, perfectly lawless, and extraconstitutional (as is the IRS itself).
Now, pay close attention to this, and keep your old, dog-eared copy of 1984 close by as we go through the following:
Like any institution, the agency has limited resources at its disposal. The notion that everyone ought to be treated the same, with auditing powers sprayed around like a lawn sprinkler, is ridiculous. Cops concentrate patrols in high-crime areas. And while we properly decry racial profiling and odious tactics like New York City's Stop and Frisk campaign -- through which people are subject to police pat-downs for no other reason than their being black and male -- no one would criticize the police for keeping an eye on people who are openly encouraging criminal behavior.
Which gets us back to the Tea Party. Here is a group that has made no effort to hide its contempt for the very institution of taxation. This is what it says on the website of the Cincinnati Tea Party: "Individuals need to have a direct connection between their efforts and the fruits of their labor. This is the magical spark that has led the United States from a loosely conglomerated political experiment into the most exceptional, strongest and most powerful nation on earth. Too many taxes and regulations ultimately serve to snuff out that spark."
Got that? Get the innuendo? Pick up on the yellow journalistic suggestion? Intellectually and politically, organized, politically active conservatism is a "high crime area." Association with the Tea Party, and, by extension, reading National Review, American Spectator, or Commentary, or associating with groups like the Hoover Institution or the CATO institute (among the organizations the Clinton-era IRS audited and harassed in the 90s) is tantamount to "openly encouraging criminal behavior."
Predictably, Goodman has no idea what he's talking about as to the actual political philosophy that animates the Tea Party (classic liberalism, or modern conservatism/libertarianism). Contempt for taxation qua taxation is an extreme libertarian anarchist view, not conservative. Either that, or Goodman's just setting up a flaming strawman, a standard tactic of the polemic screed.
The rest of this intellectual pornography takes a strong stomach indeed to plow through while absorbing the heavy blows of insult to one's intelligence present in every sentence, but no reason for any further analysis, as the screed speaks for itself.
Drones of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your personal integrity.
