Accurate Perceptions of the IRS

In a previous article, I wrote about juries acquitting perpetrators of bald-faced tax evasion because they exhibit believable convictions that supporting the parasitic institution government has become is immoral.  The IRS' own publication on the issue of taxpayers who point out the immorality of collecting taxes to be spent in ways that violate the taxpayers' religious beliefs does not mention a single jury decision.

The document consists of 27 examples of the legal system protecting the government's right to your money.  The first mention of a jury is one that acquitted, but it is immediately followed by a similar case in which the jury convicted.

All of the other seven mentions of jury decisions are convictions, in favor of the IRS.  Nobody likes to admit their mistakes, but wouldn't it be wise to keep a healthy record of the mistakes that a government bureaucracy makes?  In fact, shouldn't that be one of the functions of the IRS?  The website, irs.gov, contains five documents with the words "jury acquitted" and 52 with the words "jury convicted".  The Internet itself contains about 85,000 (according to Google) pages with IRS and "jury convicted" in them, and about 25,000 with IRS and "jury acquitted".

So why is the ratio of convictions to acquittals on the Internet so much lower than it is on the IRS site?  Perhaps a clue can be found in the case of the Rutherfords, who may have suffered from a jury whose judgment was compromised by a fear of audits.  Bullies only retain their power as long as they continue being bullies.  If they wish to have power some other way, they must learn to cooperate instead of intimidate.

It's also interesting to note that the IRS first suggests that it's Ok for the court to interpret the law for the jury, even though later, on the same page!, they explain that the Supreme Court said it is NOT OK.  Search for occurrences of "Cheek" in that IRS publication.

The popular perception of the IRS as more like a ring of thugs than a helpful "Accounts Receivable" department of the government appears to be quite accurate.  This perception should, and will eventually translate into jury decisions, and that explains why out of the 178 cases mentioned in the IRS publication, jury decisions are mentioned only seven times.  Prohibition was repealed because of popular demand, and the pressure against the government brought by juries who refused to honor the law.

The 16th amendment will go the same way, along with the cushion it offers to the federal government as it overspends.  The income tax is only a cushion because it dampens the effect of borrowing money.  The federal government spends at least 1/5 of the income tax revenue on interest on the national debt.

Another good reason to expect the 16th amendment to either be repealed, or, more accurately and honestly, recognized as having never been ratified, is the state constitutions that barred some of the allegedly ratifying states from actually ratifying it.

A Subjugated Government

We have a constitution that defines a government that has been subjugated to serve us.  We are living under a subjugated government, but it is subjugated not to us, but to what seems to be a conglomeration of corporations, most notably a collection of international central banks.  When the colonies found themselves living under an intolerable government, they had already formed their own governments, and found it convenient to put these local governments to use in throwing off the more distant imperial British government.  We have that too, but we have not yet begun our tea parties.

The Boston Tea Party happened because colonists who opted not to import the tea from British ships found that Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the tea to be returned to Britain.  Rather than accept the burden of taxes that was being forced upon them, they broke the law that protected the property of the British merchant who was shipping tea to the colonies, which was, in fact, one of the very first corporations that paved the way for the modern corporation, the East India Company.  When the law is oppressive enough, people will start breaking it, and their choice of what to break is often not very precise.

What saved the colonists from anarchy and chaos was the twin social principles of the common law and existing local government, which I would prefer to call customs.  All we have to do is refuse to obey the laws we feel are doing the most damage to our country.  In my opinion, there are two. 

The first is legal tender.  Breaking the law of legal tender means that courts can require that the defendant restore value to the plaintiff in some form other than Federal Reserve Notes.  This, of course, is a great hurdle because of the incestuous relationship between our court systems and our federal government.  I'm sure there are courts where it can start, but even better, if the defendant and plaintiff can at least agree that the legal tender laws are screwing up our country (Audit the Fed!), they may both be willing to go to arbitration, where I believe legal tender no longer applies.

The second is the income tax.  People break this maybe-a-law all the time ("maybe-a-law" after studying Aaron Russo's documentaries about the fact that the federal government has never produced a law that requires a free citizen to pay taxes, and that the passage of the 16th amendment seems to have been "deemed" rather than real).  When the public begins acquitting perpetrators of bald-faced tax evasion because they exhibit believable convictions that supporting the parasitic institution government has become is immoral, the ball will really get rolling.  The IRS will get nasty, and perhaps nasty enough to... I don't know... get itself shrunk?  Maybe government contractors will find a way to do productive work, having seen the writing on the wall all these years, and finding that the Federal Reserve Notes they've been collecting are no longer doing them much good.

I cannot advocate tax evasion, because that is against the law, but I can predict that it will happen more, and that as it happens more, it will provide this country with a good opportunity to heal from all of the wounds it has suffered under the federal government.

IRS Form CO69

This is a proposal, and it may need to be undertaken by the public and supported by juries before it is honored by our governments.  I have written this proposal for the federal government, but it should be relatively easy to adapt it to state and local governments.  This is Conscientious Objector Form 69, a standard mechanism through which taxpayers can avoid paying for programs to which they have conscientious objections.

Because I have children and believe that our federal government will take me away from them if I lead the way in using this form, I can't do it.  I think it's a great idea, and I'm looking for information on how the brave citizens who use it can prepare for the attack on them from the IRS that may result from filing form CO69.

The form consists of the following seven fields.  You may use more than one form.

Line 1, Source: Enter the document from the government that you used for your amounts.

Line 2, Explanation: If the revenue department of your country offers a code for explanations, you can use the code.  Otherwise, enter an explanation of how you used the source document to gather the amounts entered in the next three fields

Line 3, Total Expense: Enter the total of what the government spent, according to the source document listed in Line 1.

Line 4, Unsupported Expense: Enter the total spent by the department, branch, or program which you do not support, according to the source document listed in Line 1.

Line 5, Unsupported Percentage: Divide Line 4 by Line 3 and multiply by 100.

Line 6, Your Total Tax: Enter your Total Tax (line 60 on the 2010 form 1040)

Line 7, Tax Credit: Divide Line 6 by 100 and then multiply by Line 5

On tax return (Line 71 of your 1040), you would include the sum of all the Line 7 amounts from your various form CO69, and you'd have to add a note indicating the credits are from form CO69, and attach that form to your return.

Running a batch file on your IIS 6 server

You'll probably run into the same problem I did:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0046'  
Permission denied  
/<file>.asp, line <line>

MS discusses it a little here, but they say to make sure the windows account have access to all the files necessary to execute the code without identifying what files those are.  The ultimate solution that worked for me, after giving IUSR and IIS_WPG and NETWORK SERVICE access to everything I could think of, was to give IUSR and NETWORK SERVICE access to cmd.exe.  I don't have time to mess with it, but I suspect that IUSR hands the task off to NETWORK SERVICE and doesn't need permission on all the other items.  Maybe I'll play with it later to figure it out.

Resolving your PHP, MSSQL, msdblib, FreeTDS headache on Linux

The last thing I searched for was "Adaptive Server connection failed" because I kept getting that without ever telling it that I was trying to make an "Adaptive Server" connection.

James K. Lowden explains this in http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/freetds/2008q2/023506.html:  When FreeTDS is unable to find whatever you entered as the "$Servername" parameter to mssql_connect in the freetds.conf file (which I found in /usr/local/freetds/etc - as in "--with-mssql=/usr/local/freetds" from my PHP configuration string), it falls back to it's default settings, which happen to include TDS Version 5.0.  Apparently, that TDS version isn't supported by SQL Server 2005 (unless it was something else that caused my connection to consistently report "unable to connect").

Since I had already added a [TDS] section to my freetds.conf file, my Servername is now "TDS".  Here's the code that gives me a workable connection:

$con = mssql_connect('TDS','user','password')
    or die('Could not connect to the server!');
echo "con: "; print_r($con);
// Select a database:
mssql_select_db('Database')
    or die('Could not select a database.');

// Example query: (TOP 10 equal LIMIT 0,10 in MySQL)
$SQL = ...

I hope this helps someone out there.  It took me about 4 hours to figure it out.

Paypal and the Government

Paypal recently sent me an update to their privacy policy.  It states:

Federal and state laws allow you to restrict the sharing of your personal information in certain instances. However, these laws also state that you cannot restrict other types of sharing.

I have the right to restrict the sharing of any and all of my personal information because that is a basic human right.  If you disagree, then I can write you off as a slavish fool, so you might was well quit reading now.  How I restrict it and what that costs me is a different matter.

What I think Paypal means is that the laws require Paypal to provide tools that its members can use to prevent Paypal from sharing certain information.  They don't want to say it that way because it makes the implication too obvious: Paypal will share whatever it can without your permission as long as it isn't legally required to get your permission or provide you with a way to revoke that permission, which they may as well assume (since they aren't barred from so assuming by the federal and state laws).

Or perhaps the people (shall we call them people?  Yes, we shall) who wrote this have simply fallen prey to the idiot trap that is set up by oppressive authorities from bad parents to pimps to drug suppliers (both legal and illegal) to foolish police and horrible politicians.  That trap creates a sense of foreboding for all behaviors which have not been expressly permitted by whoever rules you.  The trap gives you the feeling that you can't do something new and unique unless you check with the authorities first.  The trap slowly but surely kills off those cultures that are aggressive enough to violate the wishes of authorities, leaving only cultures that encourage childlike dependence on authorities.  Slaves, in other words. 

The sad thing is that there is a tremendous amount of beauty in such cultures, and we lose it because oppressive authorities continue to set this trap wherever they can.  We can do something about this.  When someone tells me "It isn't done that way," I laugh at them.  If they are puzzled enough at my reaction, I will explain that using the fact that "it isn't done that way" as a reason not to do it that way is a recipe for stagnation.  It's the kind of basic instinct (like herding, a specific example of this kind of reasoning) that the human brain developed to overcome.  We have big brains because they enable us to overcome basic instincts when there is a (recognized) possibility  of a better outcome.

We can also encourage and champion experimentation, marvel at the bravery and innovation of anyone who expresses freedom by simply being different.  I have done my best to teach my children that "weird" is a compliment.  When people ask "Why change it if it works?" the simple answer is the same answer we have for bothering to get up in the morning.  It's fun.  Sometimes, it's a change for the better, and if you never change it, you'll never know.  Thomas Edison, Lewis Carrol, Einstein, Nietzsche, and even Beverly Cleary and Dr. Seuss understood this.

I don't think Paypal really will do everything against their customers' privacy that they are legally allowed to.  I think they have some writers who have fallen into and continue promulgating a horrible and subtle trap that has been destroying beauty for millenia.  I'm doing my part to expose it.

Reinvestment plan sparks FOMC debate

As investors, we encourage what we anticipate, even government stupidity. As humans, we discourage stupidity. As quasi-government agents, they ought to be more intelligent about seeing how every action they take blossoms into a new problem. As members of the ruling class, they probably do, and new problems mean a bigger role for them - at least until the masses catch on. But with enough TV and terrorism out there, they can prolong such a day of reckoning. Hopefully not indefinitely.

I think our best bet is to get in tight with our state legislature and start working on nullification of most federal regulation, especially the tax code, legal tender, and the central bank charter. One of the states will get this right first, and that will be a watershed moment.