Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life, a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious.
By Mark Steyn
Speaking at Ohio State University
earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those
paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some
separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling
testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who
insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue
Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned
about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about
this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd,
because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think
he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s
wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read
about it in the Associated Press. There is a “president of the United States”
and a “government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial
similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles
and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with
Jay-Z, and guests on the Pimp with a Limp show, and the other audits
you, bugs your telephone line, and leaks your confidential tax records. But
they’re two completely separate sinister entities. So it’s preposterous to
describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn’t have given Nixon the time of day.
If you believe this, there’s a
shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April
last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a
group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have
been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of
so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts
beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her
Wall Street Journal column thus:
Try this thought experiment: You
decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so
you engage in your democratic right to send a check.
Several days later, President Barack
Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by
name. . . . The message from the man who controls the
Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and
the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that
money.
Miss Strassel wrote that on April
26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot,
was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he
was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest
workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of
his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never
previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being
publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that
triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s
biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were
going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United
States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers
won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did
to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor
who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal
and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott
to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even
though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.
A year after he was named to the
Obama Dishonor Roll, the feds have found nothing on Mr. VanderSloot, but they
have caused him to rack up 80 grand in legal bills. This is what IRS defenders
(of whom there are more than there ought to be) mean when they assure us that
the system worked: Yes, some rich guy had to blow through the best part of six
figures fending off the bureaucrats, but it’s not like his body was found in a
trunk at the airport or anything, if you know what I mean, Kimmy baby.
Mr. VanderSloot is big enough, just
about, to see off the most powerful government on the planet. Most of those
who’ve caught the eye of the IRS share nothing in common with him other than
his political preferences. They’re nobodies — ordinary American citizens guilty
of no crime except that of disagreeing with the ruling party. Yet they were
asked, under “penalty of perjury,” to disclose the names of books they were
reading and provide the names and addresses of relatives who might be planning
to run for public office — a kind of pre-enemies list. Is that banana-republic
enough for you yet? Not apparently for Juan Williams, fired from NPR for
thought crime a couple of years ago, but who was nevertheless energetically
defending the IRS exertions on Fox News on Thursday evening.
Left-wing groups had their 501(c)(4)
applications approved in weeks, right-wing groups were delayed for months and
years and ordered to cough up everything from donor lists to Facebook posts,
and those right-wing groups that were approved had their IRS files leaked to
left-wing groups like ProPublica. The agency’s commissioner, a slippery weasel
called Steven Miller, conceded before Congress that this was “horrible customer
service” — which it was in the sense that your call is important to him and may
be monitored by George Soros for quality control.
A civil “civil service” requires
small government. Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life a
bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious. The U.S. tax code ought to be an
abomination to any free society, but the American people have become reconciled
to it because of a complex web of so-called exemptions that massively empower
the vast shadow state of the permanent bureaucracy. Under a simple tax system,
your income is a legitimate tax issue. Under the IRS, everything is a
legitimate tax issue: The books you read, the friends you recommend them to.
There are no correct answers, only approved answers. Drew Ryun applied for
permanent non-profit status for a group called “Media Trackers” in July 2011.
Fifteen months later, he’d heard nothing. So he applied again under the
eco-friendly name of “Greenhouse Solutions,” and was approved in three weeks.
The president and the IRS
commissioner are unable to name any individual who took the decision to target
only conservative groups. It just kinda sorta happened, and, once it had, it
growed like Topsy. But the lady who headed that office, Sarah Hall Ingram, is
now in charge of the IRS office for Obamacare. Many countries around the world
have introduced government health systems since 1945, but, as I wrote here last
year, “only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of
16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy
merits a fine.” So now not only are your books and Facebook posts legitimate
tax issues but so is your hernia, and your prostate, and your erectile
dysfunction. Next time round, the IRS will be able to leak your incontinence
pads to George Soros.
Big Government is erecting a
panopticon state — one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s
great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store.
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