[Colin]

The whole federal income tax and 16th amendment certainly make for an interesting discussion, and the validity of whether the 16th amendment was ever correctly ratified is certainly part of the debate.

I'll give my views on it before I get to the real heart of the matter.

The original constitution stated that the only taxes that were allowed were a direct apportioned tax (i.e. every person pays the same amount) and indirect taxes.

The rational of the direct apportioned tax is that the government is beholden to each American citizen equally, so no one person should have to pay more than any other to their government for its upkeep. The government is the slave of the people not the other way around.

Indirect taxes are everything from tax on cigarettes to tax on gasoline. You don't have to pay them if you don't want to. If you don't smoke you don't pay the cigarette tax. If you ride a bike and never use a car you don't have to pay the tax on gasoline. A person can decide which of these taxes they pay by what they spend their money on.

The 16th amendment introduced a direct unapproportioned tax (i.e. each person pays a different amount depending on what their income is). The Supreme Court in numerous rules from 1913 to 1923 repeatedly states that the 16th amendment adds no new powers of taxation. A direct unapproportioned tax is the opposite of a direct approptioned tax. You can't have both at the same time. The Supreme Court ruled that the direct approportioned tax stands and the unapproptioned is not allowed.

Lower court rulings have repeatedly contradicted these Supreme Court rulings and this is what gets most tax protestors in hot water.

Instead of asking if the federal income tax is law or not, what you really need to ask is why goes the government need to collect income tax in the first place?

How did the country get by without an income tax from 1776 to 1913? Quite well it seems.

Why the need for an income tax?

The same year the 16th amendment was being introduced, congress handed over the government's right to create currency to a private institution called the Federal Reserve System, which is owned and operated by the world's largest private banks.

The Fed lends money to the government, and the government must pay back interest on the money that it has borrowed.

Before 1913 the government could create its own money and didn't have to pay interest to anyone.

How does the government pay the interest on the money it borrows from the Fed? Income tax.

And if you think that your income tax is being used to fund schools, build roads, and all the other things you expect your tax money to be paying for you would be sorely mistaken.

Local property taxes are used primarily to fund local education. Gasoline tax pays for road infastructure.

Your income tax pays for the interest on the debt the government owes to a private corporation, of which the real owners are never know.

The Federal Reserve is the United State's fourth central bank. You can probably already guess that things did not go well for the first three versions.

The current and on-going devaluation of the US dollar, primarily due to its nature as a fiat currency, and the fractional reserve banking system, will lead to an inevitable conclusion.

If you are looking for an historical precedent then the rise and fall of the Roman empire is a good place to start. It took the Roman empire 500 years to destroy its currency. The US dollar has achieved half of the fall the Roman currency went through in only 100 years.