Our Threatened Freedom

Are Taxes Wiping You Out

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 61-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 061

Dictation Name: Vol. E - Part 09 - Are Taxes Wiping You Out

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Are taxes wiping you out? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

More than a few Americans are becoming irritated and angry over the high cost of local, county, state and federal government. Many of us who do not favor the tax revolt can still understand the anger that leads men to refuse to pay taxes and go to prison, in some cases.

Consider the problem of a small landowner in Utah. Dean Francine leased out his property for oil production. His gross receipts in 1980 were 789 dollars in royalties. Then, the federal government collected a windfall profits tax. The result was that Francine’s net income from his oil was two dollars and forty-five cents. In disgust he sent the remaining two dollars and forty-five cents to the federal government, stating, the federal government may as well have it all. In one area after another, taxes are becoming confiscatory.

In 75% of all deaths, the family loses the house, farm or business because of the inheritance tax. Very plainly the federal government is in the business of robbing widows and orphans.

Very early in our history, a U.S. Supreme Court justice stated that the power to tax is the power to destroy. This is precisely is what taxation has become in our day. It makes very little difference which party or administration is in power, the cost of civil government and our taxes go up and up. For most of us, our biggest dependent is the federal government, and also our greediest dependent.

In terms of this, it is interesting to reread the Declaration of Independence. What the colonists said in that document was that the British crown, instead of being the defender of their liberties, had become their major enemy. In fact, the Declaration says that the crown was engaged in a conspiracy to suppress and destroy American liberties.

Bernard Bailyn, in ‘The Origin of American Politics’, stated that the leaders of the American colonies believed that there was a deliberate design or conspiracy on the part of the British Crown to reduce or to blot out their liberties. It was this conviction that led to the War of Independence. Men had come to distrust the normal political process, and resorted to armed resistance.

Today we have a similar cynicism about politics. Rightly or wrongly, millions of Americans believe that the modern state is interested in its own power, not in the people. People on the right and the left are at odds on many things, but they are agreed in seeing the federal and state’s governments as a kind of conspiracy against the people. High taxes and pork barrel federal policies tend to confirm this popular opinion. If the federal and state governments want to restore any degree of stability to the national scene, they must stop this tax spiral, and the resulting destruction of the people.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.