Still struggling with stupid, eh?
Senator Norris Brown (R-Nebraska), a member of the United States Senate from 1907 to 1913, was the author of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, also known as the Income Tax Amendment.
From about 1880 until the 16th Amendment was purportedly ratified in 1913, the income tax issue was hot in America. The 16th Amendment was an attempt to solve the problem of the unequal distribution of taxes. Before 1913 wage-earners paid a higher percentage of the nation’s taxes than the wealthy did under the tariff system.
Back then, there were no entitlement programs (like welfare) and mostly what the government provided the Citizens was protection. The wealthy, with more property to protect, received more benefit from government as compared to wage-earners who had a lesser need of protection. It was a raw deal for wage-earners.
The goal of the Income Tax Amendment was to strike down the Supreme Court’s Pollock Rule (Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust Co., 158 U.S. 601 [1895]) whereby the collection of an income tax became constitutionally very difficult and politically impossible. The Pollock Rule had converted an income tax on the net income of businesses and investments from an indirect tax into a direct tax required to be apportioned by the Constitution.
Senator Brown’s intent in drafting the 16th Amendment can be determined from congressional debates and from an article he wrote entitled: Shall the Income Tax Amendment be Ratified (Senate Document No. 705, 61 Congress, 1910). This article also appeared in Editorial Review, April, 1910. Brown maintained that the Pollock Rule was unjust, inequitable, and politically impossible.
In his article, Senator Brown never referred to the taxation of people. He only referred to taxing incomes. In addition, he specifically stated what the Amendment intended to tax:
“If the income arises from an investment in lands, it should be taxed; if it arises from investments in manufacturing enterprises, in railroads, in banks, in newspapers, in the mercantile business, or in steamship lines, it should be taxed. Why should an income arising from an investment in State or municipal bonds not be taxed? [For a discussion on the state and municipal bond issue see the book Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?] Why should the holder of these securities enjoy his income free from any contribution to assist this Government, which protects him and his property no less than it protects other people owning another class of property? Why should he escape and other people be compelled to pay?”
Notice the actual vocabulary used as well as the theme of his writing. He does not suggest taxation on the working class, or its wages, but rather on the profits gained from proprietary investments such as property.
In the late 1800s and up until the alleged passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, the people of this country demanded their legislators levy an income tax on accumulated wealth. This was because families such as the Phipps, Dupont, Camegies, Rockefellers and the Morgans and ever growing numbers of corporate empires were virtually untaxed and and began controlling national politics with their vast and ever-increasing fortunes. By reading the Congressional Record, House and Senate documents, newspapers, magazines, law journal articles of the time and the writings of the people who were intimately involved in the development of the 16th Amendment, we will find that the intent was to tax the annual profit from incorporated businesses and the net annual income from personal property.
Wages and salaries from labor were never considered income within the original meaning and intent of the 16th Amendment.
On April 28, 1909, Senator Brown stated on the Senate floor, “It is the theory of the friends of the income-tax proposition that property should be taxed and not individuals.” Congressional Record, pg. 1570. Senator Brown goes on to argue that the ratification of the 16th Amendment will act to sustain the nation and its sovereignty by reinvesting in its security. Senator Brown intended that the 16th Amendment protect the people’s property and promote prosperity for the entire nation.
The totality of Senator Brown’s argument focused on the very items that were at issue in the Pollock Case. The entire purpose of the Income Tax Amendment was to bring tax relief to those who earned wages and paid a greater proportion of their earnings in taxes under the tariff system (tax on consumption) and to place a greater tax burden on the accumulated wealth and investments of the country by way of an income tax. Tax relief for wage-earners was Brown’s Agenda.
Problem is, it appears the 16th Amendment was NEVER ratified. Just another part of the fraud. Just like the Oregon Revised Stautues when I dug into those, it turns out they were signed into law by a Governor who had been dead for at least four months before he signed them. Had a little problem about that a few years back. LOL! Had to post-facto the entire code into existence like 60 -80 years later as I recall. That's like MAJOR fraud in the united States.
As Murray Rothbard put it in The Origins Of The Federal Reserve,
“For this intellectual shell game, the cartelists needed the support of the nation’s intellectuals, the class of professional opinion-molders in society. The Morgans needed a smokescreen of ideology, setting forth the rationale and the apologetics for the New Order. Again, fortunately for them, the intellectuals were ready and eager for the new alliance. The enormous growth of intellectuals, academics, social scientists, technocrats, engineers, social workers, physicians, and occupational “guilds” of all types in the late nineteenth century led most of these groups to organize for a far greater share of the pie than they could possibly achieve on the free market. These intellectuals needed the State to license, restrict, and cartelize their occupations, so as to raise the incomes for the fortunate people already in these fields. In return for their serving as apologists for the new statism, the State was prepared to offer not only cartelized occupations, but also ever-increasing and cushier jobs in the bureaucracy to plan and propagandize for the newly statized society. And the intellectuals were ready for it, having learned in graduate schools in Germany the glories of statism and organicist socialism, of a harmonious “middle way” between dog-eat-dog laissez-faire on the one hand and proletarian Marxism on the other. Instead, big government, staffed by intellectuals and technocrats, steered by big business and aided by unions organizing a subservient labor force, would impose a cooperative commonwealth for the alleged benefit of all."
AI
