The Tollkeepers on the Road to Serfdom

By D.W. MacKenzie

Elected Federal officials can be voted out of office. But the entrenched army of empowered, unelected Federal bureaucrats remains to wield its power, and the Internal Revenue Service bureaucrats are some of the worst. Six years ago I published an article in The Freeman on the incompatibility of the tax code and liberty, and the threat to liberty continues unabated.

Friedrich Hayek described the process by which bureaucratic empowerment and discretion extirpates personal liberty and democracy as “the road to serfdom.” He warned us all that socialism requires bureaucratization. In the socialist state bureaucrats would become the new aristocracy and its citizens would take on the role of serf. My article argued that similar dangers existed with increasing the powers of the IRS bureaucracy, and that democracy could not be relied upon to hold it in check. Recent abuses validate this fear. Any agency without restraint and accountability is a threat to personal freedom and should be abolished.

I have published critiques of the US government and politicians without IRS reprisal, including some that targeted tax policy and the IRS specifically. The types of concerns I raised regarding IRS authority were spelled out by Hayek in his classic The Road to Serfdom. Scholars from Jeff Sachs to Gordon Tullock have claimed that Hayek’s warnings about abuse in social democracy were overstated. After all, many Western nations have large public budgets and extensive regulations without suffering the dire results that Hayek predicted.

The current IRS scandal has renewed concerns regarding abuse of IRS power. One flagrant example from the last election was the partisan use of the IRS as a political weapon. The IRS has a history of political abuse. Hoover, FDR, JFK, and Richard Nixon all used the IRS against enemies, long before Clinton or Obama. In the wake of recent scandals, some politicians are now investigating the IRS. IRS officials, like Douglas Shulman, Lois Lerner, and Holly Paz, in their appearances before Congress, have exhibited the arrogance of an entitled aristocrat instead of the public servants that they are.

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