The Right to Privacy, or "Who Knows Ya, Baby?"

Mac Johnson wrote an article published earlier this week at Human Events.com that I recommend you read. It's titled, "The NSA Can't Invade Our Privacy--It's Under IRS Occupation Already," and you can find it at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21831.

If you strip away all the hyperbole, Mr Johnson's central point is this: you're wasting your time getting hysterical about the possibility of the National Security Agency listening to your international phone calls, because very few of the tens of millions of phone calls made every day will ever actually be listened to (and you can reduce the chance further by avoiding terms like "ammonium nitrate" and "glorious martyrdom" when you talk to someone in, say, Pakistan). The real threat to your privacy, Mr Johnson points out, is already here, already in your informational face every day, and you don't even think about it.

He refers, of course, to the much-maligned Internal Revenue Service - the agency charged with collecting our income taxes here in the United States.

His point, which I'd never fully considered before, is that you have NO privacy from the information-seeking of the IRS, which is perfectly legal. Every dime you earn is reported by your employer, your bank, your broker, and everyone else. to the IRS, which then compares that information to the data you submit yourself, and has the legal authority to impose draconian penalties if you have made a mistake, however innocent. He notes that "Through the IRS, the government wants to know where I work, how much I am paid, how much money I owe on my house, and whether I received or gave cash gifts to family or friends. They must be told who lives with me, what my relationship to them is, and whether we had any major medical bills (and for what, as well as to whom the bill was paid, and when). I must tell the IRS if I sold stock, when I sold it, when I bought it, and how much money I made or lost in the process. I must account for all my property, to show that I did not keep that part of my income paid to other governments as property taxes and fees."

He goes on for several more paragraphs, but you get the idea. Forget the NSA - they're amateurs at the art of extracting information from the unaware and unwilling. For real, and totally legal threats to your privacy, nobody can beat the IRS.

Now, don't get me wrong. As I've written often enough in this space, I don't mind paying taxes. Our governments at all levels need to get the money to operate somehow, and the principle of sharing in the cost of the services the government provides isn't objectionable. I don't like paying my property taxes any more than anyone else, but I realize they pay for the police and fire protection on which I rely, and for the wonderful public libraries I patronize. I grit my teeth when I pay my income tax every April 15th, but I know that the armed services that protect my family and the whole array of government services I expect have to be paid for somehow.

No, there's nothing wrong with paying taxes per se. My problems with the system are these:

1. It proceeds from the supposition that you will cheat. The IRS collects every bit of information available about your life and earnings so that it can compare it to what you report. Your government doesn't trust you to report your income honestly.

2. Our tax system has drifted far from its true purpose, which is to generate revenue for the operation of the government and the provision of essential services of common concern. Instead, it is used as a means of social and economic engineering, to reward or punish various individuals and groups or to manipulate the larger economy.

3. Congress has a vested interest in using the tax code to do the things listed in #2. They'll never enact true tax reform, because it removes one of their major sources of power.

4. You don't have any voice (other than your vote) in how your taxes are spent. Hundreds of billions of our dollars have been spent on our misadventure in Iraq, to no evident purpose.

and finally,

5. When the government uses the tax code for social and economic engineering, it's usually without a full appreciation of the fact that the benefits bestowed in one area must be made up from another. When a particular industry gets a tax benefit, the government loses income which must be made up from one of three sources: spending reductions (not likely), increased taxes on other taxpayers (real people like you and I), or increased borrowing (which reduces the amount of money available to be borrowed by...yes...real people like you and I).

Okay, I've drifted from my original point, which is that Mr Johnson is right about the intrusiveness of the IRS's data collection and mining activities, and our lack of realization that it's going on. Taxes are a necessary evil. Unfairness is not.

And we are, for the reasons I began to outline above, unlikely ever to have a truly fair tax system.

Have a good day. Big Brother will, after all, know whether you do or not.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo