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On Fri, 23 Jul 1999, Mighty Xerxes wrote:
> Do you have a citation to support your assertion?
In a narrow technical sense, he might be correct. Oddly enough, most of the US Fed Gov's influence is derived from Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which has a clause that reads:
The reast of that section deals with infrastructure: raising armies and warfighting, militias, the post office, coinage, etc. Curiously, there is no mention of taxing the populace.
So, unless you are interacting directly with the Fed as an employee or beneficiary of Federal $$$, a counterfeiter, or the member of an invading army, the Fed has only two excuses for interacting with you in any way whatsoever, including taxation.
Spending on military activities in FY98 was 42.9% of the Federal budget. Presumably the rest was needed for regulating interstate commerce. :-/ Looking at this from the abstract, the government's claim on the author's cash doesn't look much better than his own (except, of course, he's the one who earned it).
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