The IRS has recently announced that it is looking for “civic minded” individuals to become members of the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (TAP), an advisory committee that listens to taxpayer feedback and gives advice to the IRS on improving its operations. Interestingly, it’s looking for individuals that are willing to dedicate 200-300 hours per year in volunteering for these positions.
Since its creation in 1913, the Internal Revenue Service has been the primary government agency in charge of tax collection for over 100 years. Like any government institution, it has had its fair share of controversies. The most recent being its delaying of tax-exemptions of tea party and conservative-leaning groups.
For too long, the IRS has been a mechanism of mass extortion for the US government. On April 15th, millions of taxpayers must fork over a substantial percentage of the hard-earned income to a government that provides third-rate services at best. If they don’t pay, they face possible fines, persecution, and jail time. That is the coercive nature of a State that views its citizens as mere tax cattle that must be milked every year.
In the same vein, the IRS has given the US a means of revenue generation that has allowed the federal government to expand at unprecedented rates. In the Fiscal Year of 2014, the IRS collected $2.5 trillion from 239 million tax returns. Despite the gargantuan amounts of money that the IRS collects, it is still not enough to finance the federal government’s lavish spending projects, let alone trying to slash its debt.
It’s only natural that the IRS’s power has expanded over the years, despite its failure to generate enough revenue to keep a balanced budget. Government agencies don’t face competition and “government failures” only beget more intervention and funding for said organization. In the bureaucrat’s eyes, their respective department is always underfunded no matter how incompetent it is.
If you want to talk about being “civic minded”, citizens should be up in arms with the IRS’s performance and its very existence. This is no longer a question of streamlining the IRS’s revenue generation or holding it more “accountable”. It must be abolished. Taxes on the fruits of one’s labors have no place in a free society, especially with a government that only uses those funds to finance other coercive policies such as foreign interventionism, the Welfare state, and the Surveillance State.
The US government should go back to the previous model where tariffs and other user fees where use to finance the State’s most basic functions. More importantly, the US government must be scaled back substantially, thus making the IRS’s existence unnecessary. When the State is given the ability to collective mass amounts of money through force, massive amounts of spending and government expansion ensues. It’s as simple as that.
As a “civic-minded” individual, if I had any piece of advice to give to the IRS it would be: ABOLISH YOURSELF.
