Any government that has the power to tax its people directly also has the power to abuse their unalienable rights. This is precisely why our Founding Fathers tried to set up a government where the power to abuse the people would be held in check by a written Constitution. The Framers of our Constitution knew that unless the government was restrained from taxing the people directly, it would eventually begin to violate the unalienable rights that it was created to protect.
As stated in the Declaration of Independence,governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. We the People created the Federal Government and in Article 1 Section 8 we gave our government a list of enumerated powers. Any power or authority not granted to the Federal Government was granted to the states.
With passage was of the 16th and 17th Amendments the Federal Government was able to diminish the power of the states. Before the implementation of the 16th Amendment direct un-apportioned taxes were prohibited by the Constitution and people were citizens of and subjects of their respective states. With the implementation of the 16th Amendment, the people lost their state sovereignty and became subjects of the Federal Government.
The revenue needed to fund the Federal Government was to be assessed to each of the states according to their respective populations. The Founding Fathers did not want the Federal Government to have jurisdiction over “We the People”.
Go to Article 1 Section 9 of the Constitution to see where direct un-apportioned taxes are prohibited. The Federal Income Tax is a direct unapportioned tax. It is rather ironic that Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto included the progressive income tax as a necessary component in his doctrine.
