Paying taxes is a civic duty, please refer to your constitution for verification. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the 16th Amendment. - The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States. General Welfare BTW means "The concern of the government for the health, peace, morality, and safety of its citizens." .. which has caused a huge disagreement as to it's exact meaning for over 150 years, that disagreement was finally settled In United States v. Butler, 56 S. Ct. 312, 297 U.S. 1, 80 L. Ed. 477 (1936), where the court adopted Hamilton's interpretation (Hamilton maintained that the clause granted Congress the power to spend without limitation for the general welfare of the nation.) of the General Welfare Clause, which gave Congress broad powers to spend federal money. It also established that determination of the general welfare would be left to the discretion of Congress. Shame you don't understand something so simple.
So basically the court decided that government could do illegal things that 'the people' could not do individually or collectively. What would you expect from FDR's packed court?
Your history is failing you yet again, the make up of the 1936 Supreme Court that decided United States v. Butler was as follows; Charles Evans Hughes (Chief Justice) - Republican Willis Van Devanter - Republican James Clark McReynolds - Democrat Louis Brandeis - Republican George Sutherland - Republican Pierce Butler - Democrat Harlan F. Stone - Republican Owen Roberts - Republican Benjamin N. Cardozo - Democrat I make that a 6 to 3 Supreme Court in favour of Republican bias. and again if you actually read and understood your own constitution there is nothing "illegal" in collecting taxes as it plainly states in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the 16th Amendment .. or do you only support the parts of the Constitution that suit you?
Really . .your history knowledge is certainly lacking, or is it more you ignore it. Jefferson in a 1785 letter to James Madison, Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Thomas Paine was also a vocal advocate of the progressive income tax. The country passed a progressive estate tax in 1797 Even George Washington, who Conservatives are happy to cherry pick quotes from, such as the taxes are inconvenient and unpleasant. .. it readds very differently when the whole passage is reproduced - To facilitate to them the performance of their duty, it is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant; that the intrinsic embarrassment, inseparable from the selection of the proper objects (which is always a choice of difficulties), ought to be a decisive motive for a candid construction of the conduct of the government in making it, and for a spirit of acquiescence in the measures for obtaining revenue, which the public exigencies may at any time dictate. - In other words: its always going to be a pain to pay taxes, but to promote the common good, we need them so we can raise revenue and do the things the public needs done.
I guess you wilfully ignored the other quotes, after all selective choosing is a Conservative trait, and again show your limited knowledge of your own history. The first Income tax in the United States was implemented with the Revenue Act of 1861 by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. In 1895 the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. federal income tax on interest income, dividend income and rental income was unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., because it was a direct tax. The Pollock decision was overruled by the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1913, and by subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions including Graves v. New York ex rel. O'Keefe and South Carolina v. Baker. The Act, motivated by the need to fund the Civil War, imposed an income tax to be "levied, collected, and paid, upon the annual income of every person residing in the United States, whether such income is derived from any kind of property, or from any profession, trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere, or from any other source whatever [ . . . .]"
