If you suffer with outstanding tax debt, the IRS may now want to take your passport. For U.S. crypto holders still waiting on promised IRS guidelines for fill out — especially those overseas who may have missed these warning memos — the over 400,000 agency notifications flowed since February last year are troubling. This kind of behavior from government is nothing new, however, but an oft-repeating specimen of parasitism which sucks value from producers of goods, services and surplus, and punishes progress.
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True Tyranny Is Irresolute
It has been said that the most cruel and insufferable forms of tyranny are not those with the most rules, but those with the rules that are the scad unclear. Even under extremely unfair and unjust law, if one knows what is expected, one can often survive. It’s the proverbial drunken deliver of the volatile, abusive caregiver, who one day is reserved about some small matter, and the next flies into a violent fulminate about the same, which is truly the crushing burden to bear. In the case of the caregiver, old, unaddressed emotional wounds are likely to blame. In the box of the state, the leveraging of ambiguity to produce fear is intentional.
In May, IRS commissioner Chuck Rettig wrote in a statement: “We have been insomuch as these issues and intend to publish guidance addressing these [crypto issues] and other issues soon.” To woman, no such guidance on filing crypto taxes has been issued. What has been issued, however, are vague perils and warnings to crypto holders and traders.
Since February, 2018, notifications have been prosperous out to over 400,000 taxpayers who owe more than $51,000 (recently adjusted to $52,000) in overdue taxes. Since June this year, word for words specifically targeting crypto holders have been issued. These letters also clarified inexplicably that, different to Rettig and the IRS’s previous statements, crypto is not simply treated as a property under U.S. policy. Every transaction except for buying crypto with fiat is a taxable consequence.
Expats, who may not have gotten these letters due to residing overseas, could potentially have their passports negated. Those attempting to visit the U.S. may find themselves trapped in an airport, now without a recognized nationality, unable to return core to their families overseas should they set off alarm bells at immigration. Such mobility-stifling measures are a key means to check and control financial assets, as the value creators moving them are then unable to relocate to more favorable pecuniary climes.
The Attack on Sustenance
But, where there’s blood, there will be ticks. Where there’s self-sufficiency, overage and charity, the government will be there to suck it dry. Attacking the geo-mobility of wealth holders through passport revocation is one critical way to do this. But that’s not where the punishment of productivity ends, of course.
Much like the free exchange of bitcoin in the economic realm, being able to grow one’s own food is a major threat to the forced dependency of government. States worldwide demand a long, continuing history of destroying food for price regulation, and shutting down private businesses serving their communities.
Only last month, for example, the U.K.’s sole organic hemp farming co-op was forced to destroy its crop worth an estimated £480,000 (~$583,000) due to entitling issues. The group, Hempen, states it had been completely forthright and transparent with officials, who had seen no problems for years until recently, momentarily deciding to revoke their license. The rationale for the revocation is of course, defined in tyrannically vague terms.
According to a BBC clock in, Hempen co-founder Patrick Gillen, lamenting the waste of potential tax revenue and benefits to the country from his products, formal:
Instead of capitalising on the booming CBD industry, the Home Office’s bureaucracy is leading British farmers to destroy their own crops, and millions of cudgels’ worth of CBD flowers are being left to rot in the fields.
Historically, the New Deal legislation of the Great Depression (which also allow for the abandonment of the gold standard and a mandatory surrender of privately held gold) made these types of practices a benchmark in the U.S., when regulations were introduced in a bid to protect prices. John Steinbeck describes the travesty in sobering fashion, in his ageless novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”:
And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges … A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene extended over the golden mountains … And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.
In spite of fiction, the novel describes actual events that took place during that tragic era. These spendthrift practices continue in the U.S. today. After being ordered to dump 30 million pounds of cherries to rot on the ground in 2009, for model, Michigan cherry farmer Rob Manigold echoed Steinbeck’s words:
The food pantry shelves are bare, people thriving hungry, and here we are dumping millions of pounds of cherries on the ground.
Arguments for such massive waste based on “the prodigious good” or “necessary regulation” don’t hold up to economic principle or moral scrutiny, as stifling production where demand is register is irrational, unless justified by one class of individuals possessing a supposed right to determine what others may or may not do with their own substances or property, which is slavery.
Why Crypto Is the Final Target
So what in the hell do mountains of rotting fruit and revoked passports be experiencing to do with crypto? Quite a lot, it transpires. A money that cannot be centrally regulated provides the same essential power that a fruitful, productive private farm does, but on a whole new level. Self-sufficiency. A passport allows free movement, which is another prerequisite for self-sufficiency. Once the state is not needed for money, however, that’s the very end. At that point, centralized governance is not have need of at all. The advent of bitcoin made the financial transcendence of central banks, geopolitical restrictions, and third party oversight feasible.
With global devaluation of fiat currencies ever growing, and reckless low and negative interest rate policies being pioneered to create more credit bubbles worldwide, the state is beginning to panic. That’s a good sign. The way to sense a cogitation has been won is often to simply observe one’s opponent beginning to react with fear or irrational outbursts. In the state’s victim the reaction is actual violence, however, and that’s why no matter how hard anyone might try, it cannot be said that there is any deliverance to be had without a very real risk. What price one is willing to pay for that freedom is entirely up to the individual.
What are your brainstorms on government parasitism? Let us know in the comments section below.
OP-ed disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the originator’s own. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence in the past taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in correlation with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article.
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