Your right to work and contract
- According to the Declaration of Independence, the purpose of a government instituted among men is to secure certain Creator-endowed unalienable rights.
- According to the U.S. Constitution preamble, the government secures the blessing of liberty.
- According to the Supreme Court the power to tax is the power to destroy.
Example: Taxing (destroying) unalienable rights IS NOT securing unalienable rights. The 16th Amendment did not destroy your right to your wages. But you can voluntarily waive your rights by submitting to legalities that you don’t understand. Voluntary servitude is constitutional.
The Received-Law-of-the-Land
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law, Book 1 “Rights of Persons” (First Edition, Claredon Press, Oxford, 1769) explains our rights as they existed in the received law-of-the-land when the 13 original states wrote their constitutions.
“And these may be reduced to three principal or primary articles ; the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty ; and the right of private property : because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man’s natural free will, but by an infringment or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.”
Labor is property
If you want to know if labor is private property to be preserved inviolate, you can find the answer in the U.S. Supreme Court case Butcher’s Union v. Crescent City 111 U.S. 746 (1884):
“The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. … to hinder his strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.”
What the Supreme Court says is your most sacred property, “the original foundation of all other property” — where, according to Blackstone quoted above, there “is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man’s natural free will”.
Also in the Supreme Court’s Butcher’s Union case, cited above:
“These inherent rights have never been more happily expressed than in the Declaration of Independence, the evangel of liberty to the people: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident’ – words so plain that their truth is recognized upon their mere statement – ‘that all men are endowed’ – not by the edicts of Emperors or the decrees of Parliament, or acts of Congress, but by their Creator with certain inalienable rights – that is, rights which cannot be bartered away, or given away, or taken away…and to secure these – not grant them but secure them – ‘governments are instituted among men’…”
The U.S. Supreme Court in Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915):
“Included in the right of personal liberty and the right of private property — partaking of the nature of each — is the right to make contracts for the acquisition of property. Chief among such contracts is that of personal employment, by which labor and other services are exchanged for money or other forms of property. If this right be struck down or arbitrarily interfered with, there is a substantial impairment of liberty in the long-established constitutional sense. The right is as essential to the laborer as to the capitalist, to the poor as to the rich; for the vast majority of persons have no other honest way to begin to acquire property, save by working for money.”
I added bold emphasis to the above quoted “or arbitrarily interfered with” to give you a hint that the W-4 and I-9 are NOT arbitrary. If read correctly, it might apply only to very specific “persons or other entities” that are not you.
US Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 US 390, gave us a partial definition of liberty at page 399:
The term Liberty “… denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, to establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his/her own conscience… the established doctrine is that this liberty may not be interfered with under the guise of protecting public interest, by legislative action which is arbitrary or without reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the state to effect.”
More information is available in my article The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy. And my Constitutional Taxation Study.
WHO IS LIABLE FOR INCOME TAX?
In his book Judicial Tyranny and Your Income Tax, tax attorney Jeffrey Dickstein included the transcript of the tax trial US v. Carl Beery, Case A87-43CR Vol. III transcript. On page 296 of the book, you will read where the IRS claims, in court, that “an individual is somebody with a social security number.”
SO WHAT IS TAXABLE?
The contract for labor is a contract for the sale of property. Labor is your most sacred property.
Supreme Court, Adair v. United States, 208 US 161, 172 (1908):
“In our opinion, that section, in the particular mentioned, is an invasion of the personal liberty, as well as of the right of property, guaranteed by that Amendment. Such liberty and right embraces the right to make contracts for the purchase of the labor of others and equally the right to make contracts for the sale of one’s own labor; each right, however; being subject to the fundamental condition that no contract, whatever its subject matter, can be sustained which the law, upon reasonable grounds, forbids as inconsistent with the public interests or as hurtful to the public order or as detrimental to the common good. This court has said that, “in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may, at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”
“Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 197 U. S. 29, and authorities there cited. Without stopping to consider what would have been the rights of the railroad company under the Fifth Amendment had it been indicted under the act of Congress, it is sufficient in this case to say that, as agent of the railroad company and as such responsible for the conduct of the business of one of its departments, it was the defendant Adair’s right — and that right inhered in his personal liberty, and was also a right of property — to serve his employer as best he could, so long as he did nothing that was reasonably forbidden by law as injurious to the public interests. It was the right of the defendant to prescribe the terms upon which the services of Coppage would be accepted, and it was the right of Coppage to become or not, [208 U. S. Page 173] as he chose, an employee of the railroad company upon the terms offered to him. Mr. Cooley, in his treatise on Torts, p. 278, well says:
“It is a part of every man’s civil rights that he be left at liberty to refuse business relations with any person whomsoever, whether the refusal rests upon reason, or is the result of whim, caprice, prejudice or malice. With his reasons neither the public nor third persons have any legal concern. It is also his right to have business relations with anyone with whom he can make contracts, and if he is wrongfully deprived of this right by others, he is entitled to redress.””
[end of Adair quote]
• U.S. Supreme Court in Spreckels Sugar Ref. Co. v. Mclain, 192 US 397, 24 S.Ct 382 (1904): “the citizen is exempt from taxation, unless the same is imposed by clear and unequivocal language”.
• Long v. Ramussen, 281 F 236, 238 (1922):
“The revenue laws are a code or system in regulation of tax assessment and collection. They relate to taxpayers, and not to non-taxpayers. The later are without their scope. No procedure is prescribed for non-taxpayers, and no attempt is made to annul any of their rights and remedies in due course of law. With them Congress does not assume to deal, and they are neither of the subject nor of the object of the revenue law.” Reaffirmed in Gerth v. US, 132 F Supp 894 (1955) and in Economy Heating Co. v. US, 470 F.2d 585 (1972)
• Regal Drug Co v. Wardell, 260 U.S. 386: “Congress may not, under the taxing power, assert a power not delegated to it by the Constitution.”
• Taxation Key, West 53 – The legislature cannot name something to be a taxable privilege unless it is first a privilege.
• Taxation Key, West 933 – The Right to receive income or earnings is a right belonging to every person and realization and receipts of income is therefore not a “privilege that can be taxed”.
Proverbs 13:11 Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathers by labor shall increase.
Warning: The US government does not believe that you own your most sacred property. The US government has an official policy published in 1933 one month after they seized our gold coins. This is published in Senate Document 43 of 1933:
“The ultimate ownership of all property is in the State; individual so-called “ownership” is only by virtue of Government, i.e. law, amounting to mere user; and use must be in accordance with law, and subordinate to the necessities of the State. The fact that citizens, at a given time, may prefer specie to currency, or vice versa, can not prevent Congress from enacting those laws which it deems necessary to the maintenance of a proper monetary system. If the law makes specie and currency equivalent for purposes of payment, a failure to pay a given sum in specie, according to contract, cannot possibly beget an obligation to pay a greater sum in legal-tender notes, whatever premium men may choose to five for gold, when forced to obtain it for a specific purpose, or when impelled by a spirit of speculation, or by a distrust of Government. (Brown v. Welch, supra.)”
Here is the Black’s Law Dictionary definition of Legal Owner
