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By Root 677 0

government problems. The War Finance Corporation, for example, was founded during World War I “to provide funds for various munitions enterprises.”23 After the war, the War Finance Corporation turned into an agricultural cooperative financing tool, which exported agricultural products to Europe. It died in 1925. In 1932 it was brought back to life again to bail out railroads and other bankrupt companies during the Great Depression. It was laid to rest in the 1950s due to scandals, but was yet again revived and combined with the Small Business Administration. Do you see how the government uses war to grow in size and scope surreptitiously?

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And lastly, we come to the ultimate theft and restriction of property: The government’s withholding of income taxes. The withholding practice was not implemented until World War II: A seemingly new custom wholly unsupported by our Founding Fathers whatsoever. In an effort to raise funds for the war effort, Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1942 which imposed a “Victory Tax” on income, which was to be withheld by the employer and paid directly to the government. Gradually, this practice increased in scope to constitute the present system of income taxation in America.

There are several evils inherent in this practice. First, by allowing the government to seize property directly and send the taxpayer back any surplus, it portrays the government as a beneficent caretaker. Second, it deprives the taxpayer of the use of his money for a period of time; that is money that could have flowed into investments and generated a return while the government was holding on to it. Finally, it enables the government to increase in size, as it would be infinitely more difficult to wrest tax dollars from the taxpayers themselves than secreting them away from their employer. And it was all made possible because of war.

Constitutionally and philosophically, withholding taxes presumes that we exist to serve the government. In an historic irony, the idea of withholding income taxes was proposed as a short-term war-financing measure by a young Treasury Department clerk named Milton Friedman. That would be the future Nobel Laureate who championed the free market and who would one day condemn the extension to peacetime of his wartime-only proposal with his sharp and witty tongue: “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.” Too late, professor.

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“The Purse Is Now Open”

When the government does not comply with its own laws, it is rewarded with more power. When it overspends its budget, it is rewarded with a bigger budget. Furthermore, “most of the defense budget increase has little to do with winning the war on terrorism,” observed an Independent Institute defense analyst, Ivan Eland. In war, the government’s bank account (filled with your tax dollars) flies open to the joy of an interconnected web of governmental and quasi-governmental actors: The president, the Defense Department, defense contractors, and elected officials.

Consider the size of the Defense Department’s budget, and more importantly, the government’s justification for the size of that budget. When President Bush signed the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2004, everybody knew the price tag was big, but nobody understood how big. At $401.3 billion, President Bush attempted to legitimize the 42 percent rise in budget by claiming it was for the security of the American people. He vowed the government “will do whatever it takes to keep our nation strong, to keep the peace, and to keep the American people secure.” Perhaps, but in any event, unborn taxpayers are picking up the bill. How about keeping us free—free to make our own choices, free from debt, free from Big Government?

And the $401.3 billion price tag was not even the whole of it. Hidden elsewhere in the nation’s budget were allocations to other departments that constituted defense spending. The Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Veterans