A few times on The Picket Line I’ve alluded to various constitutional challenges and other fringe legal theories that some tax protesters use in their battle against the IRS.

These theories are legion, and with a little bit of googling you’ll find a whole bunch of well-made, well-argued sites that will try to convince you that they hold the key to forcing those tax bureaucrats to finally admit that they have never had the legal authority to take one red cent out of your pocket.

I finally found a good FAQ that addresses these many theories and documents how the IRS and the courts have shot them down one-by-one.

The Tax Protester FAQ from Daniel B. Evans tackles dozens of these theories, and cites the legal chapter & verse of why they don’t amount to much of an argument.

I have a love/hate relationship with these sorts of tax protests. I love them because they have the effect of annoying the IRS and occupying its enforcement crew with the task of deciphering ever more creative mountains of balderdash. That and the fact that these things really work — if only in the sense that the IRS certainly loses more revenue from the adherents of these theories than it is able to recover from those it defeats in court.

But I also hate these theories because the people who use them tend to be true believers — with an unfathomably naïve belief that the government could be completely undermined by a novel reading of its own laws by its own personnel. They really believe that one day one of them is going to walk into court and hear the judge say that the income tax was never legal and everyone’s been giving up their money based on some giant misunderstanding that’s finally been successfully pointed out.

It’s only a certain, small, somewhat cruel part of me that takes pleasure in hearing about people who willingly delude themselves with faith-based legal advice and financial planning. The rest of me thinks it’s kind of sad.

The Tax Protester Anti-Blog keeps a running tab of not-quite-clever-enough fringe tax protester legal theories as they get shot down in court. If you’re ever tempted to declare yourself a sovereign citizen or take a “slavery reparations tax credit” or some such — spend some time here first and learn from the mistakes of others.

And now, for a brand new episode of Mr. Cranky-Pants Answers Your Tax Questions:

Dear Mr. Cranky-Pants:

I just read a remarkable article that says that the Internal Revenue Code never defines “income” and so there’s no way of knowing how to pay your income tax.

Furthermore, while the IRS says that I “must file a return or statement with us for any tax you are liable for” if you look through the Internal Revenue Code, just like there’s no definition of “income,” there’s also no section that says anything about who is “liable for” income tax!

The author suggests that I send in my 1040 with the following note: “I cannot supply these data because I do not know whether I received any ‘income’ or not. If you will define the term for me (also under penalty of perjury, naturally) I will be glad to prepare appropriate figures and make due payment.”

What do you think?

―Taxfree in Tulsa

Dear TIT:

I’m surprised at how many people manage to see wisdom in the bizarre flat-earth legalisms of the tax protester club.

Every time one of them comes up with some new flight of fancy about what the laws really mean, eventually someone from the government stands up in court, declares that the law doesn’t mean that at all, and then a judge solemnly agrees and writes a decision about how the tax protester argument is a bunch of hooey and here’s why chapter-and-verse and then — inevitably — the tax protesters move the goalposts and find another reason why everything ought to be the way they say it is and the process repeats.

The powers that be don’t need to emit some incantation of your choosing “under penalty of perjury” you see, because they’re in charge and they’re the ones setting the rules.

For a moment, try to imagine what it all boils down to: the incredible fantasy that one day some enlightened and powerful judges are going to throw all precedent out the window and defund the government that writes their paychecks, saying “those tax protesters are right! Congress failed to dot its ‘i’s and cross its ‘t’s and nobody’s paycheck can be legally taxed. Refunds for everyone!”

Does that sound like the justice system you know?

“But if the government were operating according to its own Constitution and to its own rules…” But, but, but if wishes were rainbows we’d all be living in a psychedelic wonderland.

This endless whining — “I don’t care what the courts say: show me the law under penalty of perrrrjury!” — is how pre-teens argue with their parents about curfew. This isn’t how grown-ups with any understanding about how the world works operate.

Even if the tax protester legalesque incantations weren’t just a bunch of head-in-the-sand codswallop, do you really think the government would just roll over and defund itself in response to a bunch of amateur sophistry? It doesn’t work that way, kids.

The tax protesters, bless their hearts, think that The Law has A Meaning that they have scrupulously divined through their carefully-documented methods, and that once this Meaning is unlocked and shared with the world, the government — this legendary government “of laws, not men” which the scriptures foretell — will be forced to acknowledge it.

Alas, this translation of The Law into the vulgate means diddly over squat because the people who enforce the law don’t take their marching orders from tax protesters but from another class of people who spend their time interpreting The Law and who have actual power and authority within the legal system.

Congress passes tax laws, the IRS administers them, the courts back the IRS up, and tax protesters get their assets gobbled up and get injunctions filed against them and get tossed in jail. Happens all the time. And yet in some Perfect Platonic Tax Protester Universe, the tax protesters aren’t really losing and the government isn’t really winning, because the tax protesters are actually right and the government is actually wrong.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the tax protesters keep getting summarily blown-off in court and every legal apparatus that actually holds the power to interpret and enforce the laws considers the Tax Protester arguments to be unworthy of serious consideration.

This isn’t to say that the tax protesters aren’t a bother to the government, or that they don’t occasionally “win” in the sense that it costs more for the government to go after them than the government hopes to gain from defeating them. To this, I say: “huzzah for the feckless tax protesters!”

But intelligent people should realize that the legal arguments they bundle up with before heading into these mosquito battles are like the snake oils and totems that some modern African warriors use in the belief that these make them invisible to bullets — placebos that may stimulate bravery but that have no actual protective effect.

―Yours sincerely, Mr. Cranky-Pants

John Lopez of No Treason asks a tough question or two of the “Constitutionalist” tax protesters:

What does someone say when they claim that the Constitution doesn’t authorize income taxes, and therefore the IRS is in the wrong for collecting them? They’re saying that if the Constitution in fact authorized income taxes, then you’d be in the wrong for not paying them.…

Because those are the only two choices on the table, here: either government law is in fact the arbiter of right and wrong, or it is not. If it is, then the government of the United States can rightfully pack up every person it wants to into cattle cars and stuff them into the ovens — as long as the paperwork is correct. If government law isn’t the arbiter of right and wrong, then the arguments about what “the law” purports to authorize are meaningless for determining what ought to be done.…

Now, some of the folks in the tax-protest movement admit that their endorsement of government isn’t honest, but claim that it’s merely a means to an end. Most people can’t or won’t understand the moral arguments, they say, so they feel that they need to lie in order to spread their ideas. They don’t call it lying, of course, they call it “making arguments.” But calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so: words do in fact have meanings.…

They’re offering a lie. But their opponents are offering better lies: free stuff on everyone else’s dime. Sure you pay a little in taxes, but Senator Fatbottom’s getting Frogdick County twenty million bucks in Federal grants because of it! What, you wanna get rid of all the things that the government gives you?…

It’s up to you what you want to be: Henry David Thoreau marching to the beat of his own drummer, Bill Clinton eagerly fleecing the masses, or some pitiful myope dropping his shovel and petitioning his masters because they aren’t whipping him according to regulation.

And then I found Bob Black’s essay White Man’s Ghost Dance, which is even more fun to read:

Constitutionalists look upon law as the word-magic of lawyer-necromancers who draw their wizardly powers from grimoires, from books of magic spells they have selfishly withheld from the people. Constitutionalists have extracted from these books — from judicial opinions, from the Constitution, from legal dictionaries, from the Bible, from what-have-you — white magic with which to confound the dark powers of legislation, equity, and common sense. Never mind what words like “Sovereign Citizen” or “Lawful Money” mean — what does “abracadabra” mean? — it’s what they do that counts. Unfortunately, Constitutionalist words don’t do anything but lose court cases and invite sanctions. Constitutionalism is the white man’s version of the Ghost Dance. Believing you are invulnerable to bullets puts you in more, not less, danger of being shot.…

In Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris was slain by his brother Set, and his dismembered pieces were scattered far and wide. But these parts could no more die than could immortal Osiris, although, dispersed and hidden, they were separately impotent. Once his limbs were retrieved and reassembled, mighty Osiris rose from the dead and vanquished the forces of evil. That’s how Constitutionalists regard the Common Law. Now that their treasure-hunt has turned up the missing pieces, all Americans have to do, according to the Oklahoma Freedom Council, is get it all together and “the country would be free overnight.” And they all lived happily ever after.

The tragedy of Constitutionalism is that it hopes to evoke by its magic an idealized imagined earlier version of the very form of society — our own — that was the first to banish magic from the world. With growing commerce came calculation, quantification, and the distinction of “is” from “ought.” Myth is timeless, but when it comes to the performance of contracts, “time is of the essence.” Money is merely a generally accepted medium of exchange, not some sacred “substance”; whether it’s gold, silver, tobacco, or paper is a matter of convenience. Law is any application for the official use of coercion that succeeds. The proprietor or trader is indifferent to whether his invocation of the law against a thief, a trespasser, a business rival, or a communist revolutionary owed its effectiveness to immemorial custom, legislation, the Ten Commandments, or a well-placed bribe. Myth and magic are merely tactics to try on those who believe in them. Judges don’t believe in Constitutionalism and neither do very many other people.

Nor ever will. Constitutionalism combines the worst features of superstition and reality without the attractions of either. Like real law, it’s dull as dirt; unlike real law, it doesn’t work. Like superstition, it’s inconsistent, irrational, obscurantist, and ineffectual, but it entirely lacks the poetry and pageantry that often enliven myth and religion. Very few people espouse belief-systems this complicated and crackbrained unless, as with Catholicism or Mormonism, they grow up in them. We seem to be in prime time, sad to say, for cults both old and new, but not this one. It isn’t even tax-deductible.

I try to follow the news about conscientious tax resistance pretty closely, and when casting my net I often find myself pulling in news about the constitutionalist tax protest movement next door. They’re the folks who say that the U.S. federal income tax is just a bugaboo — it doesn’t really exist as a matter of law, because the laws that purport to authorize it aren’t really laws, or aren’t constitutional, or are reversed by other laws, or don’t apply where and against whom they are thought to apply, or aren’t enforced by the people authorized to enforce them, or… you get the picture.

One of the more prominent champions of this point of view is Irwin Schiff, author of such books as The Great Income Tax Hoax: Why You Can Immediately Stop Paying This Illegally Enforced Tax, who was just convicted on 13 counts “including conspiracy, tax evasion and tax fraud.” This was the third time he’s gone up against the courts and lost.

If you ever come across someone who is trying to peddle this nonsense, I urge you to strike them with the following magnificent clue-by-four: The Dead Ends of Technicalitarianism by Anthony Gregory, from today’s LewRockwell.com. Excerpts:

Drawing on the technicalities of law as the chief tactic of fighting the state has its severe limitations and drawbacks…. Instead of helping to expose the naked emperor or the man behind the curtain, it can lead us to grant undeserved legitimacy to the state. To obsess over the income tax as a supposed violation of statutory law is to give far too much credence to statutory law. The reason income tax is wrong is that it’s theft, not because some legislator back in 1913 failed to dot his i’s and cross his t’s. Moreover, if enough Americans began calling the IRS’s alleged bluff, and stopped filing, the state would simply make the income tax “official” and “properly ratified” in any ways it had presumably failed to do so.

…Liberty is not a mere technicality away. ¶ The state is not about laws on pieces of paper. It is about looting and violence. Its principal methods of funding are theft and counterfeiting, its regular modus operandi is extortion and its most conspicuous projects are assault and murder. Ultimately, finding a technicality that saves Americans from income taxation will prove as effective as finding one that saves foreigners from incoming U.S. missiles. (Can you imagine an Iraqi screaming at the bombing of Baghdad that since the war had not been declared properly, the explosions cannot legally hurt him?)…

Instead of searching for the magic loophole that will swallow up the state and all its oppression, we should devote our time to learning about how the state actually works, its historical and modern relationships with the private and semi-private sectors, and the effects of its domestic and foreign interventions. We should not fool ourselves. The state does not steal our incomes because we have overlooked a confusing regulation or fail to know our case law. The reason we have an income tax is because the politicians in power want an income tax, and have bamboozled the public into believing that taxation is acceptable in the first place. The tax code is confusing and contradictory for all sorts of historical and operational reasons, but it certainly does not contain the final key to our freedom from taxation.

The state is an organization of coercion, a monopoly on aggression, falsely legitimized by its own fiat and sanctified in idolatrous mythology and through lying propaganda. There is no technicality that can curb its inherent conflict with the natural law and individual liberty. It draws actual blood, bankrupts actual companies, bombs actual cities and taxes actual wealth. Its soldiers shoot to kill, its taxmen are equally ruthless. In principle, it is no more bound by a subsection of its tax code than a mobster is bound by his vague promise to protect you. It is for all these reasons that the state must be understood and eventually dismantled wherever and whenever possible. Don’t get too distracted by the fine print and neglect the big picture.

Constitutionalist tax protester Irwin Schiff’s lawyers are trying to convince the court that he’s insane, something his thousands of disciples probably wish they knew before they signed on to his theories.

In my ongoing project of excerpting those sections of Thoreau’s journals in which he discusses politics, economics, civil disobedience and the like, I have just reached the point at which he gave the speech that he published as Slavery in Massachusetts.

He used his journal to write rough drafts of much of the rhetoric he would use for that speech and essay, starting with his reaction to the reenslavement of Thomas Sims in 1851 (see Thoreau’s undated journal entries in April 1851, and his entry for 26 April 1851), and then with the similar case of Anthony Burns in 1854 (see Thoreau’s journal entries for 29 May 1854, 4 June 1854, 9 June 1854, 16 June 1854, 17 June 1854, and 18 June 1854)

While reading these entries, I was reminded of poor, deluded, Constitutionalist tax protester Ed Brown, who is waving a Waco wick at that big matchbook in Washington and getting ready to go out in a blaze of gunfire because, though the judge disagreed, Brown knows there’s no law on the books that requires him to pay taxes. “Show me the law and I’ll pay the taxes”:

The judges and lawyers, all men of expediency, consider not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. They try the merits of the case by a very low and incompetent standard. Pray, is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? It is as impertinent, in important moral and vital questions like this, to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. They persist in being the servants of man, and the worst of men, rather than the servants of God. Sir, the question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, entered into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and last, serve God, — in spite of your own past recreancy or that of your ancestors, — and obey that eternal and only just Constitution which he, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being. Is the Constitution a thing to live by? or die by? No, as long as we are alive we forget it, and when we die we have done with it. At most it is only to swear by. While they are hurrying off Christ to the cross, the ruler decides that he cannot constitutionally interfere to save him.

(I used to just laugh at the weird legal theories of the Constitutionalist tax protesters, but now that I’ve heard the sort of creative Constitution reading practiced by none other than the United States Attorney General, I think the Ed Browns of America are probably as qualified as the next guy to interpret the Highest Law in the Land.)

In last year’s last-minute tax bill, the “frivolous filing” penalty was increased from $500 to $5,000 and expanded to apply not only to “frivolous” arguments made when filing a tax return, but to arguments made at other times, such as when requesting a collection due process hearing, an application for an installment agreement, an offer-in-compromise, or a Taxpayer Assistance Order.

Mostly this is of concern to people making the various constitutionalist tax protester arguments, which the IRS pretty much universally considers to be frivolous.

However, occasionally conscientious tax resisters get caught up in this as well. A good policy to follow if you want to avoid this penalty is to keep your arguments about why you are not paying taxes or should not be required to pay all or some portion of your taxes separate from any official interaction with the IRS concerning your tax return or their attempt to collect from you. In other words, if you do not want to risk getting hit with a penalty, do not write a note on your 1040 form explaining why you’re not including a check and do not request a collection due process hearing to discuss the Nuremberg Principles or anything of that sort.

If you are eager to explain to anyone at the IRS why it is that you’re resisting taxes, why it should be legal to do so, or why you think it is legal to do so, make your arguments separately from any official correspondence concerning your tax returns and make your arguments general ones so that the IRS will not interpret them as legal positions you are taking regarding your particular return. That might not be enough to satisfy them, though, so be aware of the risks if you tilt at that particular windmill.

The IRS position, of course, is that conscientious tax resistance has no legal justification. They spelled this out most explicitly in Revenue Ruling 2005-20.

Today the IRS published a list of many of the arguments it considers “frivolous”. You’ll find most of the constitutionalist tax protester greatest hits listed there.

If you’ve ever been tempted by those “show me the law” tax protester types to actually show them the law, you’ll find it in Title 26 of the U.S. Code.

One provision of a subchapter of a chapter of a subtitle of that title is a definitions section that includes this tidbit:

For purposes of this chapter—

1. State
   The term “State” includes the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.
2. United States
   The term “United States” when used in a geographical sense includes the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.

An individual who is a citizen of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (but not otherwise a citizen of the United States) shall be considered, for purposes of this section, as a citizen of the United States.

To anyone who is neither a tax protester nor a garden variety moron, this indicates that for the purposes of that chapter of the tax code, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the like are treated as if they were states just like Ohio and Alabama. It would be like saying “for the purposes of alphabetizing this Spanish word list, the alphabet includes Ñ and LL” or “for the purposes of counting calories, ‘food’ includes beverages and condiments.”

To a tax protester, however, this section of the law is where the federal government formally admits that for the purposes of the tax code, the word “state” is used perversely only to refer to those U.S. possessions that aren’t states. Ergo, if you live in an actual state, the code doesn’t apply to you.

For an example of such logic at work, see Mark’s comment a few days back.

I remember going through a phase like this early in adolescence. My parents would say “you’re grounded — I don’t want you to take one step out that door” and so I would leave by the window instead, and then get indignant when they punished me further for disobeying. Or, “you are not to eat a single cookie before dinner young man,” so I’d eat two. Genius. And yet: stupid.

But that’s okay, because when you’re a schoolboy, you’ve still got a lot to learn about which forms of cleverness are actually smart and which are just complicated varieties of stupid. I grew up, and left that variety of sophistry behind. I wonder what developmental psychology pathology keeps the tax protesters at it year after year.

It’s one thing when Alberto Gonzales uses such thinking to define torture out of existence — after all, as disingenuous as he is, he at least has actual authority in the legal system — when he manipulates the controls of the machine he’s at least doing so from the driver’s seat. The poor tax protesters, though, come into court armed with their magic spells and wishful thinking and expect to drive the car while crushed under the tires or smashed like a bug in the radiator grill.

Constitutionalist tax protesters Ed and Elaine Brown have been convicted of tax evasion and were recently sentenced to, among other things, five years in prison. Neither was present at the sentencing hearing; instead they “have holed up in their hilltop home in Plainfield, which has a watchtower, concrete walls and the ability to run on wind and solar power. The couple also say they have stockpiled food and other supplies.”

They’ve also said that they will not surrender, and they have a number of armed supporters who have vowed to help them defend their home against government assault.

So the networks are busy photoshopping new text over their Waco Massacre graphics.

It’s especially sad, because the Browns and their friends are planning to martyr themselves over the silliest claptrap the tax protester movement has to offer — stuff that’s so fatuous and inconsistent that I can’t imagine that the Browns themselves really believe it:

Ed and Elaine Brown have agreed, from the beginning, to pay all taxes that they owe. They have sworn in court that if the government simply shows them the law that requires them to pay an “Income Tax,” they would pay all owed taxes with penalties and interest. The government has yet to show the law. The government simply says, “you must pay, because we say so,” and “if you don’t pay, we will throw you in jail and take all that you own.”

(“I told the robber that I’d be happy to hand over my wallet if he’d only show me the gun. But he refused to show me the gun, he just shot me and took my wallet. Now, is that fair?”)

It’s true that Ed and Elaine Brown don’t owe the government a dime, and they shouldn’t be threatened and attacked for failing to pay up. But this isn’t because “there is no law.” Indeed there is a law, and many other laws besides, and if the Browns believe that government laws tell them what their obligations are, then they should have paid up all along.

People have always disagreed about what The Law means, and guess what — The Law comes fully-equipped with a built-in method for resolving such disagreements. The Browns have a disagreement, the built-in method says they’re full of it, that’s that. That’s how The Law works. Thanks for playing. If you don’t like it, stop pretending you love The Law.

If someone walks up to me and says “you’re out” and points at the dugout, I’m under no obligation to slink away in the direction he indicates. But if he’s the umpire and I don’t do what he says, I may be well within my rights but I’m not playing baseball.

Once you’ve decided that The Law is legitimate, you’ve given up the game, even if you challenge the legitimacy of some specific law. If you think you’re the one who gets to decide what is or isn’t The Law, judges be damned, then you don’t really believe in The Law at all and you’d be better off just admitting it.

All this pointless nitpickery over bullshit like whether the 16^th Amendment was properly ratified by the appropriate number of states with identical capitalizations and so forth — it just insults the intelligence. Do the Browns really expect me to believe that they have decided to hole up in their fortress for a great last stand because of some dispute over whether Ohio was properly admitted to the Union in 1803?

Such arguments are embarrassing and absurd, and yet people I respect are falling for them. And some people may get themselves killed over them, and too many people are encouraging them to do so.

A reader writes, in response to my recent rant about Ed and Elaine Brown, “You have said that they have asked to be shown ‘the law’ that makes them a ‘taxpayer.’ To me this is perfectly legitimate.… I don’t find that an exorbitant request. Do you really feel that if there is a law that makes the Browns, or anyone else for that matter, ‘subject to any internal revenue tax,’ that they should not be shown the law?”

Sigh. Some day I will learn just to ignore this stuff. But until then:

The Browns have been shown the law; in fact they’ve had a closer look at it than most people get. It’s a shame they seem to have learned very little about it from their close encounter.

The Browns believe there is no law on the books that makes them liable for federal income tax. The people whose job it is to adjudicate such disputes over the meaning of the law, and who have authority in the legal system to give such adjudications authority, completely disagree. These people also make a whole lot more sense and talk a whole lot less rot (“We are fed up with the Zionist Illuminati!”), which ought to be surprising, since they’re lawyers and work for the government. But that’s where it stands.

The demand to “show me the law” is dishonest, because it implies that there is no such law. There is, but if someone “shows” it to you, you’ll then move the goalposts and say “show me how this law was correctly enacted” or “show me why it applies to me” or what have you, and then if someone takes the bait and does show you those things, you’ll move the goalposts again and argue about the next set of things down the list, ad nauseam.

There’s never any fixed point of legal disagreement that can be settled, so there’s no point in arguing.

A rational person might say: Aha! the legal system is wrong, I am right, therefore I will try to get the legal system to change its mind! Or: the legal system is wrong, I am right, therefore to hell with the legal system! But the Browns and the tax protester set say: the legal system is wrong, I am right, therefore I am the legal system! This is pathological delusions of grandeur and ought not to be humored.

Sheldon Richman at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Daily has been examining Constitutionalist tax protester (“show me the law!”) arguments with appropriate ruthlessness in a series of articles titled Beware Income-Tax Casuistry. Now, in The Flimflam of Income-Tax Denial he responds to his critics. These articles are important because they come from a libertarian, anti-tax, anti-state perspective, and because they are a fairly thorough debunking — if any of the show-me-the-law set are capable of being argued out of their beliefs, reading these articles is probably about the closest they’ll get.

A U.S. federal judge shut down a web site run by a constitutionalist tax protester group that claimed they had one of those magic voodoo charms composed of quasilegal reasoning that would be to the IRS as garlic is to vampires. The judge also ordered the group to turn over “the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Social Security numbers of every person who received materials [from the group] on how to stop paying taxes.”

The judge reasoned that the government could circumvent the First Amendment in this case because the group and its web site were promoting illegal acts: that is, tax evasion. This holds the government to a much looser standard than does the governing set of First Amendment rulings, as far as I can see, but on the other hand, the pendulum has been swinging for some time in favor of more government power, and so this judge may just be leading the target.

In any case, his reasoning set me to wondering, since I’ve grown very attached to one particular web site that regularly promotes illegal tax evasion:

“The First Amendment does not protect speech that incites imminent lawless action,” the judge wrote, citing a 1969 Supreme Court decision.

Because Mr. Schulz and his organization “are not merely advocating, but have gone the extra step in instructing others how to engage in illegal activity and have supplied the means to do so” the judge added, “their speech may be enjoined.”

A couple of short bits:

• The case of Ed & Elaine Brown, constitutionalist tax protesters of the “Show Me The Law!” variety who, after they got showed the law in the forms of fines and a prison term, holed up in their fortress and vowed they’d live free or die, has come to a close. (See The Picket Line, 26 April 2007 for more on the case.) The expected Waco/Ruby Ridge style massacre never happened, with federal marshals choosing to use cunning instead of firepower to bring in their prey. So now the Browns can see what the law looks like up close — it looks a lot like the inside of a room with a locked door that only unlocks from the outside.
• The Solanco News has a short piece on war tax resistance and its justification under the Nuremberg Principles.