Hot on the heels of my last post about "America: Freedom to Facism" as if by magic a court ruling shows up that lets a man off who has been refusing to file and tax return and pay his "taxes". Apparently they failed to show that his income was actually taxable, which was one of the main points of AF2F - that employment wages are basically straight barter - you give your time and the employer gives renumeration for what that time is worth.

Okay, so there could be some profit in the wages for time equation - maybe if you're a CEO making say $50M a year it could be argued you salary was inflated and your time wouldn't be worth $50M to you. But just how you'd ever show that I don't know. You could also argue that most people are drastically underpaid for their time, so what is that - a loss that you can write off against other taxable income (such as stock market profits).

So I'm actually guessing that an IRS argument would go like "your tax free allowance is basically what we think you're entitled for your time, everything else in excess is profit for your time and incentive for you to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for money". But that hardly seems right since everyone gets the same allowance so it is saying that an unskilled worker's time is the same value as a highly skilled one (say a doctor, teacher or rocket scientist). Economically that makes no sense to me... but then again I expect they just decided any other way of taxing wages as income is unworkable and more regressive so they just stuck with what they figured was easiest to enforce (or not as the case may be!).

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