Filling in for Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday, conservative columnist Mark Steyn called for completely overhauling how the federal government collects taxes, including requiring judicial approval for certain actions.
First, he suggested that the “internal” moniker of the Internal Revenue Service is misleading.
“One thing that should change, by the way: I’m not just sounding off when I say the IRS should be dissolved,” Steyn said. “For start, it’s name is rubbish. It’s not the ‘Internal’ Revenue Service. Most revenue services around the world, revenue agencies, are actually internal. In Britain it used to be called the Inland Revenue [& Customs] because it referred to income that you brought within the borders of the United Kingdom. And when countries have revenue agencies called ‘inland’ and ‘internal,’ it refers to the fact you bring it within the borders of Sweden or you bring it within the borders of New Zealand. The IRS claims global jurisdiction. It’s one of only five countries. It’s like Somaliland and a couple of others that also do.”
Steyn suggested that calling it the American Revenue Agency would be more fitting, and that judicial approval should be required for punitive acts by that new agency when seeking to levy penalties for unpaid taxes.
“They should disband this agency and they should replace it with the ‘American Revenue Agency,'” Steyn continued. “And they should remove the powers of Lois Lerner or any low-level agent simply to act as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, and require them when they decide they’d like to take a lien on your house or they’d like to freeze your savings, they are required to go to a judge — not a special judge, a regular all-American judge — who will decide whether or not. They should at least be required to do what Eric Holder has to do when he wants to read James Rosen’s emails.”
“That’s the first, most basic reform that is required, because that’s why everybody jumps when they get the IRS: because they know when somebody in Cincinnati calls you and asks for your Facebook posts, that if you don’t send them your Facebook posts, she’s going to be freezing your IRA or taking out a lien on your property,” he continued. “That’s the stage that comes next. So they have to have that power removed from them, and if Republicans can’t get that small, tiny reform just to bring these people within the accepted norms and accepted conventions of a land of laws, then this whole thing is a waste of time.”