Time: Fri Oct 17 04:59:23 1997
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Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 04:56:39 -0700
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: IRS: Form Follows Function (fwd)

<snip>
>
>Topic: IRS
>
>www.FreeRepublic.com
>
>Form Follows Function ****
>
>Wall Street Journal
>October 16, 1997 Editorial
>
>Not to be used for commercial purposes
>
>              Review & Outlook
>              Form Follows Function
>
>              Jolted by the image of tax collectors testifying
>              behind screens like so many members of the Cosa
>              Nostra, the nation's politicians are now racing to
>              reform the Internal Revenue Service. The acting IRS
>              Commissioner issued an apology. Before the
>              President took off on his Latin trade junket, he
>              dropped a limp list of fixes that are supposed to
>              make the agency friendlier. He called for a
>              private-sector board to oversee the tax agency.
>              Republicans, and Democratic colleagues such as Bob
>              Kerrey of Nebraska, want wider reform. They want
>              outsiders to run the place.
>
>              Let's not kid ourselves. This problem isn't going
>              away with the installation of extra phone
>              lines--the President's proposal. Nor is it about
>              getting CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to provide
>              the agency with "better governance." Nor is it
>              about a "Taxpayer Bill of Rights" (Ways and Means
>              Chairman Bill Archer). Nor is this about putting
>              "new people in charge who will hold the IRS's feet
>              to the fire" (Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio).
>
>              No. Here we'll commit that big 1990s faux pas of
>              being "ideological" and say that this is one public
>              problem we can't "reform" ourselves out of. The IRS
>              outrage is the outrage of big government
>              bureaucracy itself. Form follows function. This is
>              what they do.
>
>              Government bureaucrats, even nasty IRS agents, want
>              to survive like everyone else. In the long run,
>              therefore, they will do whatever they can to keep
>              their jobs and even expand them. And they will
>              subvert any efforts to widen accountability or
>              improve governance and therefore efficiency because
>              those efforts threaten their budget, their labor
>              force, their existence. Economist James Buchanan
>              won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for explaining all this.
>              Since World War II the tax arena has provided a
>              nice example of the Buchanan dynamic at work.
>
>              Back in the 1950s, the famous King Commission
>              uncovered terrible corruption at the Bureau of
>              Internal Revenue. Treasury officials went to jail.
>              The nation reeled and our politicians put through a
>              famous de-politicizing reform. They went so far as
>              to change the agency's name to something that, at
>              the time, must have sounded more
>              user-friendly--Internal Revenue Service.
>
>              Yet the 1950s reforms didn't stop John Kennedy from
>              finding ways to use the agency to torture political
>              opponents. Richard Nixon himself was audited
>              numerous years in a row before becoming President,
>              a fact that probably goes a long way toward
>              explaining a lot of his bizarre White House
>              behavior. Watergate brought another round of
>              "depoliticization," when Washington made it a
>              felony for the White House to order an audit. All
>              the while, though, the welfare state was spreading
>              and, by definition, expanding the agency's mandate.
>
>              In the Clinton era IRS enforcement has had a
>              different tone. Perhaps some agents have broken the
>              law in an effort to help the President or his
>              party. Others more likely just guessed what might
>              please their masters. It has somehow come to pass,
>              in any event, that supposedly independent agents
>              concluded it was right and necessary for them to
>              investigate "conservative" organizations from the
>              Heritage Foundation, to Jack Kemp's Tax Commission,
>              to the National Rifle Association. The NRA learned
>              of its audit about two weeks after Mr. Clinton
>              publicly dumped on it. Al Gore's favorite Buddhist
>              Temple has said nothing about attracting the
>              agency's normally hair-trigger curiosity.
>
>              Ultimately, though, we suspect that the best
>              explanation for what the IRS has become is that its
>              job is to feed the fattest government in the
>              history of the world. The politicians want the
>              money to do whatever they imagine constitutes the
>              public good, and the IRS goes out and gets it for
>              them. The combination has turned field agents into
>              tiny but powerful Terminators who mindlessly blast
>              taxpayers in a desperate drive to meet quotas and
>              improve collections.
>
>              Thus the unfortunate targeting of small businesses
>              over the issue of payroll taxes, a targeting so
>              intense that the National Federation of Independent
>              Businesses has made tax reform its number one goal
>              for 1998. And thus the targeting of those among the
>              working poor who get caught in the tangle of social
>              engineering known as the Earned Income Tax Credit.
>
>              So yes, probably Clinton-inspired abuse causes some
>              of the trouble. But big government, the kind the
>              Clintons stand for, is the greater cause of
>              creating a voracious IRS. In the early 1950s, the
>              time the IRS got its new name, local, state and
>              federal tax receipts were around 23% of GDP. Now,
>              well into what is supposed to be an era of
>              globalization and government downsizing, that
>              figure is over 30%, and total government commands
>              about 40% of GDP.
>
>              The IRS and its sister agencies on the state level
>              are the machines that reap that giant harvest. Any
>              reform that doesn't make government smaller won't
>              stall their progress.
>
>              Copyright ) 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All
>              Rights Reserved.
>
<snip>

===========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell, Sui Juris      : Counselor at Law, federal witness 01
B.A.: Political Science, UCLA;   M.S.: Public Administration, U.C.Irvine 02
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_____________________________________: Law is authority in written words 09
As agents of the Most High, we came here to establish justice.  We shall 10
not leave, until our mission is accomplished and justice reigns eternal. 11
======================================================================== 12
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