That’s the subtitle of Frank Chodorov’s classic, The Income Tax: Root of All Evil. Among the evils that he discusses are:
- Enabling government to put its hands in everyone’s pockets.
- Drawing the public’s allegiance away from its local governments to Washington, D.C.
- Causing citizens to have less control over faraway federal representatives.
- Making citizens subject to the whims of federal politicians.
- Causing state governments to lose their autonomy.
- Causing state governments to become subservient to Washington, not their citizens.
- Enabling the federal government to bribe and threaten state governments, forcing them to bend to its will.
- All of this was the final nail in the coffin of federalism and the establishment of centralized, monopolistic government.
- Turned Americans into slaves of the state. As Chodorov wrote, the income tax amendment effectively said: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own. We will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, but not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide . . . . The amount of your earnings that you may retain for yourself is determined by the needs of the government, and you have nothing to say about it.”
