Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (7 page)

There it is again. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” For Jefferson, this immortal phrase held up the freedom of the individual and self-determination, the opportunity to be whatever you can make of yourself. Respecting your liberty was the first duty of government, and in 1776 it was a radical concept. These were “unalienable rights,” rights that we Americans were free to pursue unbound by government roadblocks. MLK invoked the phrase in 1963 to redeem “a promissory note”: freedom from unequal treatment under the law, from government-imposed discrimination, and the promise of a “color-blind society.”

Now the real promise is a guaranteed “right” to bigger government? Ellis was reacting to what he describes as the “libertarian” distrust bubbling up from the grass roots circa 2009. Tea party activists were expressing, in no uncertain terms, that government had gotten too big, that it was too involved in everything from big bank bailouts to redesigning our access to health-care services. In 2009, this protest movement, just like the original Boston Tea Party in 1773, seemed to be taking on a life of its own, and progressive advocates for more government oversight of your life didn’t like it. Not one bit.

This was the same meme of the times coming from Democrats (and many establishment Republicans as well): There was something slightly dangerous about the new surge of liberty-mindedness emerging through the grass roots. And it wasn’t just academics who were expressing concern. Right after Tax Day in 2009, Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod told CBS’s
Face the Nation
that the tea party represented “an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.”
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Message received.

This is the “progressive” mind-set:
Freedom, as a governing philosophy, is just old-fashioned, past its use-by date. Anachronistic. Today, we know better. The right people, the smart, good people, can be trusted to get government right. They just need our trust, our money, and more power. Old superstitions and a libertarian skepticism of centralized power are getting in the way of progress.

A
WESOME
A
UTHORITY

This “shut up and trust us” narrative was picked up by Barack Obama again in a speech on May 5, 2013. His commencement address to the graduating students of Ohio State University scolds those of us who would question his grand vision:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices are also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

Few dispute the president’s way with words. But sometimes you have to break things down to get at their meaning. As a rule, you always know to pitch all of the words that come before the inevitable “but.” Just disregard them. Erase the qualifying words from your mind to get at his point: “We have never been a people who place all of our faith in government to solve our problems; we shouldn’t want to.
But
we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either.”

We don’t think the government is the source of all our problems.

If government is not the problem, it must be part of the solution, right? I am reminded of the famous command from Captain James T. Kirk to the starship
Enterprise
’s chief engineer: “Scotty, I need more power.”

It’s all part of a better, bigger plan.

“The founders trusted us with this awesome authority,” continues the most powerful man in the world in his commencement address at Ohio State. “We should trust ourselves with it, too.”

Did the founders entrust us with
awesome authority
? Do we trust one man, any man, in this case a man named Barack Obama, with
awesome authority
? Should we? Would we have wanted to trust that man if his name was George W. Bush? Or Ronald Reagan?

I think the founders entrusted us with
awesome responsibility
, the responsibility of freedom, not
awesome authority
in someone else’s hands. I think people should live their own lives and pursue their own happiness free from too much government meddling.

Since 2009, I have been part of a rapidly growing community of folks who agree with me that freedom works; they have been stepping out from across the ideological spectrum. They are worried that the federal government is out of control. That it is becoming all about them, not us.

And it took Lois Lerner to prove us right, and “Them” wrong. Again.

Y
OU
A
RE
THE
T
ARGET

Lerner, of course, was the Internal Revenue Service director in charge of tax-exempt organizations, who would infamously plead the Fifth during her testimony before the House Oversight Committee on May 22, 2013.

On May 10, just five days after Obama’s “awesome authority” speech, Lerner dropped the bombshell admission that put her in the hot seat before Congress. Speaking at an American Bar Association conference, she used an audience question to “apologize” for the inappropriate targeting of conservative and libertarian activist groups prior to the presidential election of 2012. Innocent mistakes were made, she concedes. But it wasn’t her fault. She threw “our line people in Cincinnati” under the bus for their “not so fine” targeting of tea partiers. “Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list,” she said. “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.”

It was later discovered that the question from the ABA audience was actually planted, virtually word for word, by Lerner.
⁶
The confession was an extraordinarily clumsy attempt at damage control. She wanted to get ahead of the news cycle before the inspector general released a scathing report on the IRS’s extraordinary practice of singling out and targeting tea party groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax status in the two years leading up to the 2012 elections.

Activist bureaucrats in an agency of the federal government singling out citizens, based on their political ideology, and effectively impinging upon their political speech. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“The other thing that happened was they also, in some cases, sat around for a while,” Lerner continued to her ABA audience of tax professionals. “They also sent some letters out that were far too broad, asking questions of these organizations that weren’t really necessary for the type of application. In some cases you probably read that they asked for contributor names. That’s not appropriate, not usual. . . .”

It was always “they” who were in the wrong. Not “we,” or “I.”

America would soon discover that nonprofit organization applications that contained the phrases “tea party,” “government spending,” “government debt,” “taxes,” “patriots,” and “9/12” were isolated from other applications and subjected to extra paperwork and inquiries, delaying some approvals by as much as 1,138 days.
⁷
Your citizen group’s application would have been flagged if you had stated in the IRS application your desire to “make America a better place to live.” Targeted groups were instructed to disclose hundreds of pages of private information, including the names of volunteers, donors, and even relatives of volunteers; résumés for each governing group member; printouts of websites and social media contents; and book reports of the clubs’ suggested reading materials. Even the content of members’ prayers were scrutinized.
⁸

According to National Public Radio, of the conservative and libertarian groups requesting tax exempt status in 2012–2013, only 46 percent were approved, with many more never receiving a response from the IRS. In contrast, 100 percent of progressive groups were approved. Additionally, the IRS asked conservative groups an average of 14.9 questions about their applications, but progressive groups were asked only 4.7 questions.
⁹

Karen Kenney of the San Fernando Valley (CA) Patriots testified before the House Ways and Means Committee about her experience being targeted by the IRS, that her application for 501(c)(4) status was ignored for two years. Suddenly the IRS demanded an enormous amount of information, including personal information about employees and donors and transcriptions of meetings and candidate forums, allowing them only twenty days to comply.
¹⁰

Dianne Belsom of the Laurens County (SC) Tea Party testified that she was told that she would receive information on her application for 501(c)(4) status within ninety days. More than a year later, she had still heard nothing. Once an election year rolled around, they started bombarding her with requests for information similar to the kinds listed above. After filing all requested information, the IRS asked for more, including repetition of previous requests. At the time of her testimony, her application had been pending for more than three years with no sign of resolution.
¹¹

Toby Marie Walker of the Waco (TX) Tea Party said that the total number of documents requested from their group by the IRS would have filled “a U-Haul truck of about 20 feet.”
¹²

P
OLITICAL
S
UPPRESSION?

Why so many questions, so many forms? One clue might come from an unrelated article regarding the tax treatment of certain nonprofit university activities. The IRS was cracking down. How? According to a Bloomberg article from November 2011:

Lois Lerner, the IRS’s director of tax-exempt organizations who is overseeing the investigation, says many schools are rethinking how and what they report to the government. Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a “behavior changer.”
¹³

What behavior was the IRS trying to change with regards to citizen groups wanting to make America a better place to live? Maybe the thick questionnaires and intrusive inquiries served a particular purpose? Maybe the IRS intended to change behavior? Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the IRS effectively suppressed “get-out-the-vote” activity by tea partiers in 2012:

The Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise. The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that, had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5–8.5 million votes, compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.
¹⁴

The targeting of tea partiers and groups that sought to “make America a better place to live” mattered. Their political activity was suppressed and their First Amendment right to speak and assemble effectively taken from them. Bureaucrats buried them under mountains of questions. Attorney General Eric Holder has promised, in a different context that happened to accrue to President Obama’s political advantage in the 2012 campaign, to “not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right.”

Incredibly, Lerner originally maintained that these out-of-control line workers in the agency’s Cincinnati office, one of the agency’s largest and most significant branch offices, “didn’t do this because of any political bias. They did it because they were working together. This was a streamlined way for them to refer to the cases. They didn’t have the appropriate level of sensitivity about how this might appear to others and it was just wrong.” It was just an innocent mistake made by low-level civil servants—“line staff” based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Except that it wasn’t innocent. And it wasn’t limited to low-level staff at the Cincinnati office. The targeting and intimidation of tea party groups started right before the 2010 elections and continued, despite knowledge of the practice by supervisors, all the way up the chain of command, right to the desk of IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, an Obama political appointee.

When summoned to address this issue before the House Oversight Committee, Lerner said, “I have done nothing wrong,” before promptly clamming up and refusing to answer any questions on the subject. The Obama administration clammed up as well. President Obama’s qualified outrage acknowledged even less than Lerner did in her first admission. Obama apparatchik David Axelrod argued that the “vast” size of the federal government makes it impossible for the president to know what is going on beneath him in the executive branch. Democrats quickly went into attack mode, trashing the inspector general and accusing the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Darrell Issa, of a “partisan witch hunt.”

In Washington’s parlance, this is called “spinning.”

So what happened to the promise of a better world under the benevolent hand of big government? If you really do believe in the “awesome authority” of the state, wouldn’t you be the first in line demanding accountability from those who abused power? The whole spectacle felt more like the actions of a Third World junta, not the executive branch of the United States government.

A H
ISTORY
OF
A
BUSE

Needless to say, this is not the first time agents at the IRS have picked winners and losers for the benefit of a sitting president, or for the benefit of a zealous bureaucrat. In 1963, having determined that Martin Luther King was “the most dangerous Negro” in America, J. Edgar Hoover set out to destroy him. One of the more powerful tools at the FBI’s disposal was the IRS, and the agency’s access to confidential data, particularly the donor list of MLK’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The FBI “hoped to use the IRS’s list of SCLC donors to send them phony SCLC letters warning that the organization was being investigated for tax fraud. This, they hoped, would dry up the funding of King’s group and thereby neutralize it.”
¹⁵
King and the SCLS were both audited by the IRS at Hoover’s behest.
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