COMPASSION: THE BUSINESS END
Government can authorize acts that would normally be crimes

Let’s get this straight. Americans are shocked that their federal government — which gave aid to the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, made a policy of bombing large cities and generally interprets the Constitution to suit itself — uses unfair tactics to collect taxes.

Bitter witnesses in the late ’90s told a Senate committee about their experiences with the Internal Revenue Service. “I used to believe that such things could only happen in a communist-bloc country, or a police state,” says John Colaprete, a restaurateur whose office and home were ransacked by armed IRS agents who held an employee at gunpoint. “I don’t believe that anymore.”

It turned out that charges filed against Colaprete were false, malicious, and so ridiculous on their face that the simplest inquiry should have dispelled them. The bookkeeper who made them later went to prison for embezzling from another employer.

Others, notably small businessmen, told similar stories of having their lives’ work threatened or ruined by hardball IRS tactics, especially surprise confiscations. Some never learned why they were targeted in the first place.

Can you sue the IRS for such tactics? Of course! If, that is, you can afford to pay your own legal expenses, while the IRS’s defense is funded by the taxpayers whose money it takes and whose rights it violates. And if, after years in court, you finally win a judgment, the IRS will simply let those taxpayers pick up the tab.

You may get a consolation prize. You won’t get justice. The agent who waved a gun in your face won’t be held personally responsible to you. He may or may not be disciplined by his superiors, but even if he is, that has nothing to do with you.

As Colaprete says, “The system does not work for the American taxpayer.” The truth is the reverse: The American taxpayer works for the system. 

Then who does the system work for? Obviously, it works for the tens of millions of people who get checks from the government. Most of these people are too delicate or too squeamish to rob other people to enrich themselves, but they will accept the money if the government will take it for them.

You can’t enjoy a fine rack of lamb unless there is someone between you and the pasture who is willing to cut the throats of cute little lambs. And you can’t have that government check unless there is someone who is willing to do whatever it takes to squeeze the money out of taxpayers. Either way, you’d probably prefer not to watch it being done, as long as you can savor the final result.

The IRS is a necessity of a state whose mission is not to protect us from crime, but to facilitate larceny in the name of humanitarian purposes. It’s the business end of liberal compassion. When a histrionic politician feels someone’s pain, some agency will be required to cause someone else’s pain offstage, and in this country that agency happens to be the IRS.

The government, in other words, no longer serves the common good and hardly pretends to. It ministers to innumerable special interests by means of its limitless taxing power.

This means that government has become a weapon some citizens can (and do) wield against others. Few people are total cynics about it; most will accept the benefits only as long as they are suitably disguised and the whole system is loftily legitimated as “the democratic process.”

Government is the great buffer of conscience. It removes personal responsibility for robbing and killing. It can authorize acts that would normally be crimes: Counterfeiting becomes “inflation” under its auspices. And by the same token, it can criminalize acts that would otherwise be free. Smoking is now a guilty act, while an abortionist is a good citizen. Spending money you have earned (if the government claims it and wants to give it to someone else) can land you in prison.

The great French reactionary Joseph de Maistre celebrated the hangman as the pivot of civilized society. In the same spirit, we should hail the marauding IRS agent as the true essence of the liberal state.