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 Journalcolumn
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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