If you haven’t been participating in FFF’s new webinar series, you’re missing a valuable and enjoyable intellectual treat. The webinar is conducted by FFF vice president Sheldon Richman. The first webinar was on the economy and the second one was on Frederic Bastiat’s great book Economic Harmonies.
The next webinar will be held on Wednesday, June 19, at 7-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Participation is limited to 24 participants. To make a reservation for the webinar, email Bart Frazier at bfrazier@fff.org.
The theme of Sheldon’s upcoming webinar will be the federal income tax, which, as everyone knows, is in the news owing to the IRS-Tea Party scandal. While most everyone else is talking about how to reform the IRS or “rein it in,” Sheldon will be talking about how the only real solution is to abolish both the IRS and the income tax.
All participants in the webinar will be entitled to receive a print version of FFF’s book Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax, which is one of the three books authored by Sheldon for FFF. The book includes a preface by Jacob Hornberger, an introduction by Northwood University economics professor and former FFF vice president of academic affairs Richard M. Ebeling, and a foreword by George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams.
By the way, we are also pleased to announce that we now have an eBook version of Your Money or Your Life, via Kindle, iTunes, and NOOK.
Your Money or Your Life is an absolutely great book and is required reading for anyone who is interested in achieving a free society. Modern-day Americans have long been inculcated with the notion that the federal income tax is a permanent and essential part of a free society. But nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that the income tax is antithetical to the principles of a free society. Our American ancestors understood that, which is why Americans lived without an income tax (and a welfare-warfare state) for more than a century. Sheldon and FFF take people’s vision to a higher level: If you want a free society, focus on repeal, not reform.
In his introduction to the book, Richard Ebeling writes:
It has been said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Since the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, the U.S. government has had one of the most destructive of those taxing powers in its hands. It is time to take it away. It is time to deny government the right to intrude into our lives and investigate how we earn and spend our income, while at the same time intimidating tens of millions of people into becoming obedient tax slaves through the threat of confiscation and imprisonment. The future of freedom depends upon our total victory over this monster taxing and spending state.
In his foreword to the book, Walter Williams states:
Your Money or Your Life sounds like a threat from a highwayman, but it is not; it is the perennial threat offered, through its Internal Revenue Service agents, by the United States Congress. Sheldon Richman does a yeoman’s job in showing that. He shepherds the reader through the twisted history of lies and deceit that preceded and followed the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment and hence the implementation of direct taxation that the Framers of the Constitution feared so much. Most tax critics focus their criticism of our tax code on its wastefulness, complexity, and social engineering, and on the size of the government take. While their criticism has unquestionable merit, Richman rightly and adroitly focuses on the more important moral issues the income tax raises and how it stands the Constitution’s Framers’ vision of a just society on its head.
As Sheldon puts it in Your Money or Your Life,
There’s no sense blaming the IRS for its disdainful attitude toward taxpayers. That would be like holding a bird responsible for eating worms: that’s what it was born to do!… There is one way—and only one way — to respect taxpayers’ rights: repeal all income taxes and the outrageous spending that requires them.
Buy this book, for yourself and your friends! Better yet, sign up for Sheldon’s income-tax webinar (by emailing Bart Frazier at bfrazier@fff.org) on June 19 and get it for free.
