Real IRS Scandal Is That It Exists At All

OUR COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED BY CITIZENS SKEPTIC OF BIG, BLOATED, MEDDLING GOVERNMENT

SO HOW DID WE GET HERE?

I'M TOTALLY WITH JOHN TAMNY ON THIS ONE: Bad, reprehensible and obnoxious as the current IRS snooping scandal on conservatives and Tea Partiers is, partisan harassment by the party that's in power has often led to audits and investigations of the other side of the political aisle---its political enemies---for decades. Decades.

This is nothing new. Come on, you know it's true....That doesn't make it right though.
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So what's the real scandal here?

It's that the IRS exists at all in a free country like the United States and that it--the IRS---makes us cower every year in fear of its ever-growing big-brother taxing authority and unenumerated, seized powers to snoop into every aspect of our lives. And it's only going to get worse with Obamacare implementation soon.

While some might call it a scandal,  Tamny calls it business-as-usual. He further adds that we need to abolish the IRS and instigate a national sales tax to pare down government:

Thinking about the IRS non-scandal, it would only be a real story if the partisan IRS weren't investigating its presumed enemies.

As James Bovard put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, a politicized IRS has been the norm since at least the 1930s. To presume otherwise is naïve, so while it's perhaps good politics for President Obama's opponents to be political about the IRS's revolting doings, any righteous indignation seems overdone. Any government entity is going to be political, and because the latter is true, it's hard to assign scandal to what the IRS was doing.

It seems the better answer is to acknowledge what's more of a certainty, that the IRS itself is the scandal. Not asked enough before and after the news about our tax authority is how a nation uniquely founded on skepticism about politicians and government could have ever created something like the IRS.

The Founders created the federal government, then proceeded to grant it very few rights; most of those related to our allowing the feds to protect our right as individuals to live as we want. And while its meaning has been totally perverted in modern times, even the General Welfare clause was written to ensure not an expansive government, but to rein in the political class any time its use of the limited powers granted to it weighed on our rights as individuals.

Back to the IRS, the brilliant concept that is the United States, one founded on the belief that governments by nature are not to be trusted, has allowed for the rise of an entity that allots for itself an obnoxious portion of our paychecks. More hurl inducing is the sad reality that we must prove our income to this unelected tax authority.

The ‘revelation' of a politicized IRS brings new meaning to ‘blinding glimpse of the obvious.' The bigger scandal is that once a year we do our taxes fearful that an accounting error could have us in serious trouble with our nation's tax authority, and more broadly, with the law. That's why we must scrap the income tax code altogether and institute a national sales tax.

Though our federal government's role should be naturally limited so that we as individuals can choose large or small government based on the state we live in, the federal government is empowered to protect us from foreign intruders, coin a currency, and required to protect....

Imagine if we could get rid of the IRS gargantuan bureaucracy AND  Obamacare all at the same time! What a coup that would be....and is it really so far-fetched?  Maybe not.

Read Tamny's entire piece.  Amen brother.

Again, our country was founded on the basic abhorrence and skeptism of Big Government and now we are living in a country where the government is increasingly suspicious of us, private citizens.  This is the real scandal---that we've let this government over-reach happen.  And it's of heroic proportions.

Peggy Noonan: No Ordinary Scandal