The Government's Worst Face

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/sunday-review/the-governments-worst-
face.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

By SAM TANENHAUS

THE reported targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of opponents of
conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status has led some to
revisit the long history of presidents, or their administrations, using
tax regulations to punish enemies. Some have drawn comparisons with the
crimes of Watergate, when President Richard M. Nixon loosed the I.R.S. on
an array of Democrats (including potential challengers to his re-election
in 1972). Another example, parallel to the current episode, came in 1961,
when President John F. Kennedy, alarmed by the growing strength of right-
wing groups, �asked the director of audits at the I.R.S. to gather
intelligence on organizations receiving tax exemptions,� as Rick Perlstein
wrote in �Before the Storm,� his 2001 history of Barry M. Goldwater�s 1964
presidential campaign.

There is no evidence as yet that President Obama ordered ideological
targeting of this kind, and in his news conference last week he called the
abuses, if real, �contrary to our traditions.�

In any event, the impulse to uncover a top-down operation misses a larger
point. The conspiracy talk of the moment reflects the broader unease many
Americans, left and right, feel not just toward the I.R.S. but toward the
federal government and the outsize part it plays in our daily lives. At
times it can seem an abstract, distant force, bent on its own
aggrandizement, often at the expense of individual citizens.

It is in this light that the report released last week by the Treasury
Department�s inspector general is best understood. As deplorable as the
steps taken by I.R.S. officers seem to have been � involving, as a Wall
Street Journal editorial put it, �aggressive and burdensome questionnaires
as part of the process of applying for tax-exempt status� � the report
indicates that, whatever motives may have driven the wrongdoers, their
modus operandi was not to violate established procedures but to execute
them with excessive zeal. Rather than secretly sabotaging the targeted
groups, they seem to have ensnared them in dense thickets of red tape. It
is a frustration many of us have experienced when dealing with government
agencies, above all the I.R.S., which not only takes our money but then
also makes us mail the check to an address we need a map to locate.

With its colossal size and tentacular reach, 100,000 employees working in
more than 1,000 offices across the country, the I.R.S. is �the largest
law-enforcement agency in the nation,� a character remarks in David Foster
Wallace�s satirical novel �The Pale King,� a best seller when it was
published in 2011.

Largely set in an imagined regional I.R.S. office in Peoria, Ill. � it
could easily stand in for the Cincinnati office where the current abuses
occurred � �The Pale King� explores the bewildering minutiae of the tax
code and those who enforce it while also capturing the hostility toward
the agency that runs through much of American thinking.

AS one character, an I.R.S. officer, explains, �We�re the government, its
worst face � the rapacious creditor, the stern parent.� The menace comes
in the day-to-day workings of a bureaucracy that functions far from view,
accountable only to itself. This is an argument conservatives have made
for many years, dating back as far as the political theories of James
Burnham, whose 1941 book �The Managerial Revolution� was an early classic
on an emerging new governing class, the �bureaucratic elite.�

�The firmest representatives of the New Deal are not Roosevelt or the
other conspicuous �New Deal politicians,� � Mr. Burnham wrote, but the
often faceless people who drafted its regulatory policies, the �younger
group of administrators, experts, technicians, bureaucrats who have been
finding places throughout the state apparatus.� It is a description
easily applied to the I.R.S. functionaries now under investigation.

It was conservatives who, seizing on this argument, first depicted the
I.R.S. as a symbol of the overweening state, acting against the nation�s
founding principles of �limited government,� taxation its blunt instrument
of oppression. It is a belief many of today�s activists share.

Jenny Beth Martin, an organizer of the Tea Party Patriots, one of the
groups that possibly came under special scrutiny by the I.R.S., is also an
author of a book, �Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution,�
that dates America�s decline to 1913, the year the 16th Amendment was
ratified, authorizing Congress to impose a federal income tax � an
inspiration for the nationwide Tax Day rallies that gave momentum to the
Tea Party movement in 2009-10. At the time those protests seemed fresh
and, directed at both parties, not especially partisan. But in fact, they
echoed the admonitions of conservatives like Goldwater, who asserted in
1960 that �taxation currently infringes on our freedom,� and Newt
Gingrich, who 25 years later mockingly characterized Bob Dole, then the
Senate majority leader, as �the tax collector for the welfare state.�

And the roots of this equation of �big government� and oppressive taxes go
back even further, to the 1950s and the beginnings of the modern
conservative movement.

One of its first heroes was Gov. J. Bracken Lee, a Utah Republican who was
an avowed critic of all forms of federal taxation. Like today�s
insurgents, he denounced the 16th Amendment, saying it legalized �theft
money� and subjected citizens to �the will of the central government.� In
1956, Lee led the drive for a third-party challenge to President Dwight D.
Eisenhower and found a candidate in T. Coleman Andrews, who mounted his
campaign with a convert�s zeal: he had been Eisenhower�s internal revenue
commissioner before quitting and running on a platform calling for the
repeal of the income tax. Mr. Andrews�s supporters included the
libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, later a mentor to Ron Paul, who has
said both the I.R.S. and the Federal Reserve should be abolished.

In this view, the I.R.S. is by definition an alien and �rogue� agency, not
to be trusted even when it plays by the rules. A case like the present
one, in which those rules have been twisted for what appear to be
ideological purposes, is bound to provoke intense indignation, directed
not merely at the I.R.S. but at the larger agenda it appears to be
serving. As one of Mr. Wallace�s I.R.S. agents notes of �TPs,� the novel�s
shorthand for taxpayers, �They hate the government � we�re just the most
convenient incarnation of what they hate.�



--
Barack Obama, reelected by the dumbest voters in the history of the United
States of America.

Eric Holder, racist black murdering United States Attorney General, still
has his job.

Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact to
improper vetting of Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obama, a confirmed
felon using SSAN 042-68-4425, belonging to a dead man.

Obama ignored the brutal killing of an American diplomat in Benghazi, then
relieved American military officers who attempted to prevent said murder
in order to cover up his own ineptness.

Obama continues his goal of disarming America while ObamaCare increases
insurance premiums 200% and leaves millions without health care.

Obama helped bankrupt Illinois. Democrat run Chicago closes 54 public
schools.

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[JerryD(upstateNY)]

Leroy N. Soetoro" wrote..... http://www.nytimes.com<<<<<<<


Another article from the far left.
You and "suzeeq" make a good pair.
Just keep drinking that Kool Aid and everything will be fine.

--
JerryD(upstateNY)