I am so sick of codling these lunatics. Look, there are three great frauds in this world, so basic that every child should be taught they are scams, right along with their ABC’s. The three great frauds are; one, that you can defy the laws of physics, two that you can get rich with no money down, and three, that you don’t have to pay taxes. And there is a fourth law that says you can always get rich selling some lunatic mental defective that there is a secret way to make one of these scams actually work. Give it up, people! All of these scams are based on the presumption that you are smarter than everybody else in the entire world, while the very first thing proven when you fall for one of these scams is that you are, in fact, dumber than almost everybody else in the world. That is why, even though I know almost nothing about Ed and Elaine Brown, I can say with absolute assurance, they are nuts.
Ed and Elaine Brown are hold up on their Lebanon, New Hampshire mountain top home, in defiance of a Federal court order that they pay $1.9 million in back taxes on her income as a dentist earned between 1996 and 2003, and pay a $215,890 fine, and surrender for a 63 month prison sentence. The Federal Sheriffs have cut the Browns out of the power grid by disconnecting their electricity and out of the communications grid by cutting their telephone lines.
But the Browns aren’t worried. They have solar panels on the roof, and windmills on the lawn, and backup generators, and wi-fi internet connections. Elaine Brown told a press conference that, "Either we walk out of here, free. Or we die." You see the Browns are convinced that the federal Internal Revenue Service is a plot by the Freemasons to conquer America and take over the world. No, really, that’s what they believe. I told you they were nuts. I guess those darn Freemasons just didn’t count on the internet...and wi-fi,
Free is a big word with these folks. They want freedom for everybody; Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of action. They just don’t want to pay for it. Oh, they are willing to die for freedom, or kill for it. They will even pay for freedom in blood, their blood or better yet your blood or my blood; they just don’t want to pay cash money for it.
Their arguments are that income taxes defy the constitution, even though the 16th amendment to the Constitution reads, in its totality, "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, without regard to any census or enumeration." Seems pretty clear to me; you might even call it obvious. Hell, the amendment does not even discuss the right to tax the population because even the anti-tax lunatics of 1907, when the amendment was first passed by the congress, didn’t argue that the government lacked that right. All the 16th Amendment did was to clearly authorize an "income" tax.
Still the lunatics since have argued that the 16th was not properly ratified, even though Congress voted to certify the ratification on February 3, 1913. It there was a problem, don’t you think the shyster lawyers and lunatic fringe would have brought that up at the time? Well, they did, and nobody took them seriously then, either. Hell, the constitution even specifically grants Congress the power to levy taxes in Article I, section 8, clause 1 ...but forget the logical detailed arguments. How the hell do these lunatics think the every jackass with a "Why Taxes are Illegal" book under his arm was winning any arguments in court. That may also be why the anti-tax nuts seemed a lot less reasonable during the cold war, or World War Two, or World War One, or the Civil War.
And this is why I started out calling these idiots, mental defectives. You would have to be pathologically selfish with an inferiority complex as big as all outdoors to think that after one hundred years only a handful of clever "Patriots" have stumbled upon the "truth" about the constitution. Any way you slice this load of baloney, these people are nuts. And quite frankly, I am sick and tired of treating these idiots as if they were merely mistaken.
They are not mistaken. They are nuts.