news@oliven.UUCP (news account) (11/01/84)
[] >Some receint articles on this network is the first that I have ever heard >that the USA once existed without the personal income tax. Talk about >selective education! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This should not come as a great surprise to us. Of all of the special interest groups depending on the federal handout, teachers are probably the most organized. They would view as high heresy the suggestion that free enterprise can teach children more, faster, and better than a giant socialist style bureaucracy can.(there are alternatives to the present 'taxes are the only way' view of things) This powerful special interest industry must rewrite the history books. To expect them to do anything else is hoplessly naive. danw
edhall@randvax.UUCP (Ed Hall) (11/03/84)
I suppose that neither of you have taken a college-level history course. I certainly remember seeing the inception of the income tax mentioned in my HIST 201B text and hearing it discussed in class. (And this was at a publicly-funded university!) Then again, it didn't seem like such a big thing, though I suppose some of the priests of self-interest, one-issue politics think it must be the most signifigant event of the millenium. You know the ones I mean: the ones who claim that the government ``steals at gunpoint'' their hard-earned private property. Or ones who claim that public teachers have a conspiracy with the government to cover up this larceny. I think these people should put aside their childish hatred of authority and spend a few years studying the history they claim to be so mis-informed of. After they understand some of the reasons our society and our government are the way they are--something besides the simplistic polemics found in a libertarian tract-- they'll be in a much better position to criticize the status quo, and to *do* something about it. -Ed Hall decvax!randvax!edhall
david@fisher.UUCP (David Rubin) (11/09/84)
College level?? My high school course certainly discussed the matter. There was a constitutional amendment involved for the federal government (somewhere between 1910 and 1920, I believe), though most of the states (at least in the north) had resorted to income taxes during the Civil War. David Rubin