Just Answer the Question >>

When I talk about taxes, I often get complicated as to its ins and outs, but I was recently made aware of an emerging documentary about the IRS Tax Code by a modern day muckraker who carries a camera and a microphone. He emphatically asserted to me his wish to make this think piece on the American tax system as impartial as possible, interviewing both Neal Boortz and Noam Chomsky. But he commented that a sizable majority of this documentary’s supporters were in fact Conservatives. That is a sharp uptick from “Sicko” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” and it got me thinking as to why.

I mean, seriously…I hate to pay taxes, as do most Americans, and I know in my heart of hearts that it is a necessity to finance the “proper activities of federal government,” such as dams, die-cast coins, and standing armies. But looking at the history of the US during the most expansive industrial years of our past, we were not a nation that taxed income, but primarily imports, excise taxes, and other forms of revenue. It was in 1862 that Abraham Lincoln established the IRS (going by a different name) to raise revenue for the war effort. It was the “Progressive Republican” William Howard Taft and a Democrat ruled Congress and Senate who passed the 16th Amendment, targeting all income in a broad stroke. It was actually later court decisions that redefined income beyond rent on property to pretty much everything you own. Many have argued that long before this amendment, income was something seen as rent on land.

Beyond Commissioner vs. Glenshaw, was all this really a continual growth based upon maximizing liberty, individual sovereignty, and enterprise, or was the spread based on political desire? We have taxation, and something of a distant cousin to representation. Yet it seems a saucy irony that the pervasion of such a vast and hungry institution exists based on our nation’s collective greed to have happiness delivered, not pursued. And yet it still charges into our living rooms under the banner of “the greater good.” Thereafter, Taft, Wilson, Hoover (Progressive/Volunteer Republican) and FDR built this into a social engineering tiller jettisoned into mainstream acceptance on the shoulders of two World Wars as a buttress to the New Deal behemoth. Given that the Tax Code slogged from the swamps of early American Socialism, Marxism, and retrofit America to the specifications of philosophers like Nietzsche, Sorel, William James, and a generation of elites who believed that individualism was dead and “experimentation” was politically chic, we know where our tax code came from, and for that matter where it is probably headed, obviously founded in a belief that modernity would trump the tribalism and scattered interests of the Old Republic for a bold new experiment. A “New Republic.”

The name of the documentary is “An Inconvenient Tax,” and I know why more Republicans would join its viewer ranks. Liberals bristle even on the suggestion of rethinking Fannie Mae, the IRS, The US Dept. of Education, Social Security, as though we were trying to tear back a scab. They assume the dogmatisms of these establishments, pure and infallible, were a natural extension of the Constitution, the will of the Founders, and beguile themselves into thinking as though they are absolutely critical for the existence of our civilization. Any correct thinking person must accept these as immutable truths of government; it has always been thus, and thus will always be. Democrats have welded this taxing body into our mind’s expectations like the Rock of Gibraltar, and they will balk at anything that impugns their experimental flagship from eras past. Good scam, I must confess.

For all the prominent reasons, Joe the Plumber (whom I support 100% and who will support me 39%) became a face of democracy and individualism, a rallying symbol that the inaptly-named Democrats hate with an oozing venom; “who the hell is this MAN/INDIVIDUAL/UNWASHED UNIT OF PRODUCTION to question our perfect and glorious system!!?” In the ensuing weeks of the question heard ‘round the world, Joe was vilified, smeared, and ripped to shreds by a media that still has yet to demonstrate the same vetting for the Obamessiah. Bear in mind, this is the same tolerant ilk that promulgated gang raping Sarah Palin in standup comedy; the Visagothic shriek of the American Left. How dare that Joe?

The Tax Code’s milieu of spreading the wealth for the collective good characterizes the foibles, nuances, and sensitivities of Democrats in its galaxy prevaricating directives. Our Tax Code, a hated and inbred son, resembles a well-meaning father who wishes to abscond his own genetic flaws. Overhauling it, reforming it, and for that matter questioning, or even thinking about it, are all equally grievous to Liberals. After decades of established orthodoxy, modern Progressives cling to taxes even more so than any stalwart Conservative could ever cling to a passé modality of old tradition.

The question itself… the doubt… the burning and lingering thought.

The Left’s anger doesn’t start with the alternatives; the screaming outrage begins as early as the incipient question. This question Conservatives welcome and Liberals fear. Evidently, “don’t ask, don’t tell” has been applied to taxation, but unlike ROTC, I’m betting that Columbia University will still let congressmen on campus.

“An Inconvenient Tax” will, in my opinion, attract more conservatives on account of la cuestión palpitante that it evokes in the minds of Liberals who are aware of their culpability in historically unpopular tax policy, as well as the overwhelmingly popular tandem remedies like “flat” and “fair,” which would successfully throw back to the days prior to the baneful existence of the IRS. On taxes (as well as Social Security), the provocative force of impact to the Left lies not only in the proposed overhauls, but ignites at the mere fact of the question itself. A documentary like “An Inconvenient Tax” is such a question.

So Joe, listen to the Internet Left and stop asking the big questions. To paraphrase one such blogger:

Sit down and shut the f#@% up. >>