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Most Americans have come to the basic libertarian insight that the federal government — the major embodiment of the State in the U.S. — has grown monstrously large. Throughout the land, we hear the cry for government to “get off our back.” Yet the government’s swollen budgets expand at a rapid rate, regardless of party or of the rhetoric of each Administration. Its ever-growing number of bureaucrats foist petty and great tyrannies upon us, even as they eat out our substance. The government is everywhere: controlling, regulating, cartelizing, subsidizing, repressing, spying, and outlawing. In the name of “defense,” the government is registering young men, probably will soon be drafting them, and is feverishly building up fearsome weapons of mass destruction that could easily destroy the human race. This military might is being used to intervene everywhere around the world, as the U.S. attempts to mold every other nation in its own image. Government is piling up ever higher deficits, which crowd out private investment, cripple productivity and economic growth, and channel the savings of the public into wasteful government boondoggles.How then can we do it? How can we get rid of Big Government?

It is all too clear how not to do it: urging piddling piecemeal cuts of individual budget items. Let the Office for the Study of the Sex Life of the Moth be cut by 5 percent, and TV is bombarded with images of weeping bureaucrats, scientists, and moths — all warning that the pursuit of knowledge, national security, and the moth population will all vanish if the cut is not restored.

No, the way to get rid of Big Government is to cut off its water: to slash drastically at its source, and let the bureaucrats rearrange whatever trickle might remain. And that water rests on one mighty and crucial source: the justly and widely hated income tax. The income tax, personal, corporate, and social security (which, of course, acts like an income tax and is in no sense “insurance”) amounted in fiscal 1980 to over 90 percent of federal government revenue.

The income tax is not a permanent part of the American heritage; it was imposed during the Civil War, declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and then enshrined in the 16th Amendment in 1913. The income tax has become particularly beloved by the federal government because its rates can be adjusted to soak different groups, because with the withholding provision revenues can be extracted smoothly, and because it alone of all taxes imposes a fearsome and runaway Inquisition over all aspects of our lives, our incomes and our spending.

The I.R.S. has virtually unlimited power to inspect, spy and snoop — to tell us how much we are forced to pay, and to require us to keep the records and fill out the forms to smooth the path for our own pockets to be picked. While all taxation is theft, no taxation permits such absolute despotism over us all as the income tax.

The income tax, then, is the root of the malignant tree of Big Government. Lay the axe to that root, abolish the income tax, repeal the 16th Amendment, and the tree of tyranny will wither and die. America will take a great leap to reclaim the ideal of liberty, of ultra-minimal government, on which this country was founded.

Murray N. Rothbard
March, 1982