We Have Met The Enemy And It's The IRS

During the late 1920's and early 1930's the most feared and reviled organization wasn't the Mob, though the Mob had a reputation for ruthlessness. During the Cold War the KGB and GRU weren't all that concerned with the FBI or the CIA. Today, one of the most feared organizations isn't the NSA.

Which organization was it that garnered fear in the hearts and minds of mobsters, Soviet moles, and the average American citizen alike?

The Internal Revenue Service.

Think I'm kidding?

Today the IRS is yet another rogue agency that believes itself to be outside the law, beholden to no one and nothing, including the Constitution. It can ruin the innocent and guilty alike with the stroke of a pen, and the IRS doesn't discriminate between the two. It has little oversight but it can become the tool of whoever is in power, being used to damage or destroy political opponents.

It's corrupt nature has been exposed before during hearings detailing its abuses of honest American citizens, their families, and their businesses. Then Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) was one of the inquisitors who delved into the institutional abuses and exposed them to the American public. One might think that the IRS would have learned its lesson, and it did. Unfortunately it learned the wrong one, becoming even more out of control and capricious.

One of the latest outrages is its use of civil forfeiture laws and creative interpretation of the law in order seize the assets of small businesses that even the IRS admits have done no wrong.

So why does it continue to do so?

Because it can. It appears it has a pass from Attorney General Eric Holder, which means it will do what it damn well pleases because it knows no one is going to stop them. What the IRS has become is a government sanctioned crime organization, no different than the mob of old. Even IRS insiders like William Henck, an attorney in the IRS Office Of Chief Counsel, calls the agency for which he worked for over 26 years a corrupt organization fraught with misconduct. Writes Henck:

IRS executives are confident in their lack of accountability because the decision makers in Washington will not hold them accountable. Ordinary people understand that misconduct and corruption in the national tax collection agency are a critical problem. They also understand the difference between right and wrong. Ordinary people, however, are not running things.

Henck's observations of the operation of this corruption-laden organization should have had the media frothing at the mouth. But all he got in response was the sound of crickets. Apparently the media had no problems with the IRS's blatant flouting of the law and its willingness to use its power to destroy anyone with the temerity to challenge it.

All this means to me that it is time not just to investigate the IRS, but to abolish it outright. I see that as the only safe means of routing out the corruption that pervades that agency.

Note: I had left out a link to the post that covered Henck's experiences due to an oversight on my part.