Irwin Schiff, RIP

Irwin Schiff,  R.I.P.

1928-2015

by

Eric Paul Nolte

When decent people hear some authority justify his bad actions by saying, "We were just following orders," they will probably feel at least a little stab of horror rippling through their guts, like an echo of those many Nazis who were just obeying their orders to carry out the Jewish Holocaust. But to be Jewish, and a victim of some horror today, and then to hear these terrible words as a justification, is even more unforgivable.

Irwin Schiff, the eighth and last child of a Polish Jew who immigrated to America in the early twentieth century, died on 16 October 2015, of skin cancer that had metastasized to his whole body.

He was 87 years old, barely able to breath, blind, totally incapacitated. Yet the authorities hand-cuffed him to his bed frame. For months the family had been requesting that he be granted a compassionate release from jail so that he could die at home with his family around him. In the very week he died, after multiple appeals, the authorities demanded still further proof that his health was grave enough to warrant a compassionate early release.

Irwin Schiff's "crime" was that he challenged the American tax code and published books that attacked the legitimacy of the income tax. Prosecuted by the IRS, Schiff was sentenced to 14 years in jail. Given his rapidly declining health and his scheduled release in July, 2017, this meant that he was condemned to serving a death sentence. This is a man of great personal and intellectual integrity who served his country as a soldier during the Korean War. 

One of his books, The Federal Mafia, was actually banned by a court in Nevada, as if it were 1963, and the volume in question were Lady Chatterley's Lover or Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, or, as in Germany after the war, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (which was then banned by the German censors.) The government authorities deemed Irwin Schiff's ideas a public threat requiring censorship. 

Now, the point should be made that censorship is an asinine belief. Why? In a free market of ideas, the craziest ideas are eventually self-exterminating because crazy ideas slam up against the wall of reality, like the belief that one can fly by jumping off a tall building and flapping one's arms. By contrast, the better ideas are viable because they must be consistent with reality. So I say to the worst bigots and bastards, go ahead and preach your vile, stupid nonsense openly and in public--because in a free market of ideas, the presence of these craziest notions will only make the better ideas shine even more brightly by comparison.

Here I shall not argue the merits of Irwin Schiff's case against the legitimacy of the income tax. If you have been following my blog, you will already know that I believe the IRS should be dismantled. I believe that they display the moral timbre, if not quite the ocean of blood, of the Nazi SS or the Soviet KGB. But none of this matters here. In my humble opinion, as I've written elsewhere, taxation is not the price of civilization. The price of civilization is the protection of the sacred rights of all individuals to their own life, liberty, and property. But none of this is exactly the issue here. 

The point here is that this poor man, Irwin Schiff, was essentially put away as a political prisoner for espousing and practicing an idea that offended the authorities, and he died, chained to his bed. The authorities could not be moved to release this blind, helpless man. 

The family continued to plead for his release in his last hours, but they were denied because, as the authorities explained, they were just following orders, and were forbidden to display a dram of humanity or moral autonomy. Think of Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority.

We can do better than this, we can make the world a better place. For starters, we could dismantle the IRS and stop this reprehensible tyranny.

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2015.1123

Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

by 

Eric Paul Nolte

The New Yorker style cartoon says, "My desire to remain well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane."

Well, then, there is also the fact that the "news" would seem to be largely a matter of one's point of view. What is news?  And what shall we make of it? As it stands, the "news" is produced mostly by crony big businesses who comb the world high and low for every little thing that will arouse our fear, outrage, disgust, and our despair, while ignoring every evidence of the inspiring, the creative, and the amazing! 

Of these inspiring and astonishing wonderments, there is so much of it that one can truly argue that we live in an age of unprecedented opportunity, even in the face of the government's dreadful drag of collectivist insanity!

What?! We have a hundred thousand pages of government regulations, issued by unelected bureaucrats who wield life and death control over our actions, dictating the details of damn near everything that anybody can hope to do in the world.  How can I say that ours remains a realm of unprecedented opportunity?  

Because this opinion is the result of my observation of the arithmetic of the matter.  I don't disagree with the idea that government is profoundly destructive, but follow the math here. 

Start with the addition of the amazing creativity of entrepreneurs and inventors.  Their passion to create new ideas infuses the world with their astonishing new stuff. Subtract from this sum the destruction created by the dead hand of government, whose terrible interventions of the righteous, socialist, egalitarian destroyers, greatly slow the stream of invention and creativity.  I won't attempt to document every step of the positive case here, but it should suffice to ask you to compare the worlds of 1980 and 2015.

Do I need to invoke anything more than the advent of the world wide web, the internet, cell phones, and email?  I didn't even try hard to name things that have led to this radical transformation of the quality of our lives.  The difference is dramatic and profound.  

Government produces nothing that is not financed by its coercive takings from the citizens.  Everything government does is made possible by the wealth they take from the citizens by force, through taxation.  

At best, government succeeds when it creates the stable atmosphere in which the creative elements can bring their products to market, restrains the predators in our midst, negotiates the disputes among the well-intentioned, and repels the attacks of foreign invaders.  These are the functions of a legitimate government, in essence: the protection of life, liberty, and property--the protection of the individual rights of all its citizens. The civil order, and ours is arguably the most generous population in the history of the world, should take care of that small percentage of the population that is truly hapless, helpless, and deserving of our charity.    

Now think of how dramatically greater all this progress since 1980 might have been, absent the dead foot of government control, as opposed to the "invisible hand" in Adam Smith's formulation of how the successful pursuit of selfish interest must necessarily benefit the greater good.

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2015.1017