Laurence Vance summarizes Chodorov’s argument against an income tax of any sort:
Because the Flat Tax is still an income tax, it deserves the scorn heaped upon the income tax by Old Right stalwart Frank Chodorov in his book The Income Tax: Root of All Evil. As explained in this classic work, with an income tax the state says to its citizens: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide. . . . The amount of your earnings that you may retain for yourself is determined by the needs of government, and you have nothing to say about it.”
Though I would probably be comfortable with Peter Schiff and Jeff Miller’s version of a fair tax (consumption tax; then at the very least you would still have the choice to use your income by making purchases as you please; of course the problem is that modern fair tax proposals would mean 30% in the final sale of all new goods and services; quite a stifling proposition), which is the idea of a consumption tax over an income tax (if these were the only choices, and they are not), both flat tax and fair tax advocates suffer a thousand deaths when their ideas are quickly analyzed. Ultimately the goal is to repeal the monstrous 16th amendment.<>
