Ron Collins
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Otherwise the mainstream narrative of ‘civilization’ and its virtues falls apart.

It is the hand-over-heart sanctimony of people who equate “I pay my taxes” with “and to the Republic for which it stands” that so grates on me. They assure me that those hypothetical few hundred dollars a year seized from my meager livelihood somehow would better legitimize my right to be a free man in the country of my birth. And they never even address at all what it means that along with the assets seized, comes a continuing lifelong demand that I explain my fiscal activities to their bureaucratic satisfaction, and that those details become matters of permanent public record.

It is even more the obligation to submit to official espionage and intrusion, than anything to do with some amount of money, which outrages my notions of personal liberty. I am not beholden to government, it does not grant or dispense my rights to me, my duties as a citizen have nothing to do with any obligations to bureaucratic requirements, and I will not voluntarily throw the details of my life open to official scrutiny and approval (or disapproval) just for the sake of feeling vindicated to make faux-patriotic pronouncements.

And on that, what I have seen over a lifetime is that this “compliance” has little to do with the actual paying out of money from one’s pocket to fund the activities of government. I see instead that these people so duty-bound to “comply” will utilize every loophole, dodge, cookbookery and outright fraud in order to actually pay little or nothing themselves. I’ve had people brag to me about this exemption and that trick and some other little-known technique for paying nothing at all, while being “in compliance” by making a public record of their sleights-of-hand with their receipts and recordkeeping, so much that I take the entire exercise as a colossal fraud.

Accountants and tax-preparers make their living not by helping people “pay their taxes” but by helping them NOT pay any taxes. The entire concept of business management from the storefront to the skyscraper is based on NOT paying taxes. It is held out as a foolish bit of mismanagement and little else, to end up paying taxes when there are so many ways to tweak and game the system to avoid them. I just personally want nothing to do with such a gargantuan shell game, which amounts to trading my privacy in exchange for being able to commit some form of fraud in order to keep what I have earned and government has not earned.

My policy, since the day I served notice in 1999 to IRS over the phone that my terms from that day forward were that they shall charge me with a crime, or else leave me alone in perpetuity, has never, EVER been carried out by means of any concealment or falsification of records on my part. I have declined to participate in this protection scam right out in the open, have made zero attempt to operate under false names or fake titles or cooked books. If I am a tax-avoider, and I am, I am an honest tax-avoider: the door stands wide open and has for nearly twenty years, for some bureaucrat to decide to make an example of a guy living on twelve grand a year who prefers to keep what he has earned and keep his private business private.

I told them “bring it on” then, and as much as re-state that by writing things like this on a steady basis. I would welcome it in an odd way, because finally I would have a chance to state openly and for the record that my life was never any government’s business to meddle in. If some judge feels a need to lock me up at ten times the expense (at least) relative to what I might allegedly owe, then I have said “so be it” from the beginning.

I won’t pay a fee to live in my own country, nor will I be charged for the right to make an honest living and mind my own business. Nor will I allow any details of my private affairs to be made public record merely as a self-preserving expedient. If that is what “compliance” consists of, then I refuse outright, and openly, and honestly, to comply. It was never any obligation I agreed to be bound by to begin with.

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    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s