The income tax amendment to the Constitution, its sixteenth, radically diminished property rights in America. Income earned from labor was no longer a working person’s property as Rick Lynch explains. By 1913, private property had been under attack for a long time, as Tom Bethell explains in his excellent book The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages. Our society’s intellectual and political leaders undermined respect for property, downgraded its importance and spread new doctrines that produced support for the income tax, enough support to pass an amendment to the Constitution that directly contradicted much of the spirit and content of that document.
What were our leaders of that time saying in favor of the income tax? It’s instructive to examine their arguments because our current leaders in many fields are constantly pushing doctrines that may be and often are as destructive as the sixteenth amendment of the Constitution has been. Here is a single series of quotations from a single article published in the New York Times on February 8, 1910. I leave it to you, the reader, to see through the fallacies and hidden objectionable assumptions contained in these arguments. The governor who made these remarks at least did understand that the income tax was a property tax because he said “An income tax is a tax which is sure to reach all classes of property, real and personal.”
“GOV. FORT UPHOLDS THE INCOME TAX
“Urges New Jersey Legislature to Approve Proposed Sixteenth Amendment
“RELIEVING BURDEN ON POOR
“Real Estate taxes, He Says, Are Out of All Proportion to Other Taxes — The Income Tax Just
“…it is vital to the safety and security of the republic in time of need, and is without danger in the power conferred.
“An income tax is the most just and equitable tax that can be levied. It imposes the exactions of Government upon the citizen in proportion to his ability to bear it, and upon the basis of the wealth which, under the laws of the country, he has been able to accumulate. Men should contribute to the needs of the State as God has prospered them.
“The United States should possess the unquestioned power to tax incomes. It may not be necessary to use the power but if emergency should arise which requires it the right to tax should exist.”
8:35 am on March 25, 2017
