User talk:Peter Reilly

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[edit] Tax protesters and the way they think

Dear Peter Reilly: Thanks for your comments. In this particular case, I'll post this comment on both my talk page and your talk page. If I post on your talk page, you receive a little message on your screen, basically a link that takes you to the message on your talk page. Also, if you sign all your messages on talk pages with four little "tildes" the program inserts your Wikipedia signature, time and date.

To respond to your comments about tax protesters, yes, it's interesting that a few of the tax protesters have read some of the actual statutes and cases.

I see that you’re a CPA. I am also a CPA, and an attorney. I’ve studied court decisions involving tax protesters for years. Many protesters seem to share certain characteristics. The vast majority appear to be not formally trained in taxation or law or accounting generally. The more they try to get into taxation and develop their own methods of "interpretation," the farther from reality they seem to get -- for at least two reasons, in my opinion: first, they aren't familiar with the intricacies of law and accounting (or with the fact that it takes years of intense training to develop sufficient knowledge), and they substitute their own rag-tag "reasoning" methods – apparently picked up from simply reading the tax protester literature. Second, tax protesters as a group almost by definition have a strong psychological antipathy toward -- really a hatred of -- the tax system, which I argue greatly impairs their ability to perform analysis. Many protesters nevertheless try to explain away their inability to win as a gigantic "conspiracy" by evil legislators, prosecutors, law professors, judges, lawyers, accountants, etc., etc. Some are even delusional to the point they believe that some fellow tax protester, somewhere, is actually successful with a crazy theory. Self-delusion is almost a sine qua non for tax protesters. A detailed psychological analysis of tax protesters as a group is beyond the scope of this comment. However, it is this inability to use -- indeed, an unfamiliarity with – legal and accounting concepts that is a hallmark of the vast majority of tax protesters I have studied. Many are educated people -- they're just in over their heads in fields in which they lack skills.

Another problem for tax protesters in my opinion is that many are intellectually lazy. They don’t bother to actually check things outside the tax protester web sites. I'm talking about, for example, phantom "quotes" from statutes and court decisions -- quotes that aren't really there. Many tax protesters have not studied the actual statutes, regs, case law, etc. Even here in the pages of Wikipedia, you can find things like, for example, a tax protester saying that the "Internal Revenue Service" is not mentioned anywhere in the Internal Revenue Code, when as you know the Internal Revenue Code is actually riddled with specific references to the "Internal Revenue Service,” as are many non-tax Federal statutes. You would think a person would at least bother to actually check something like that before making a ridiculous statement. What many of these people may not realize is that their web sites are full of false materials. And the people who create the false materials, phony quotes, etc., either don’t realize or don’t care that the falsehoods are easy to expose. There are lots of experts who have studied the actual legal materials, and experts recognize it quickly if somebody sticks in a phony quote from a famous case. Further, in the age of the internet, even non-experts have the ability to find some of these materials and expose the phonies.

But what about accurate quotes? You mentioned the accurate quotes that are “wildly out of context.” Yep, in my opinion that’s a result (in part) of the intellectual laziness and the lack of legal and accounting skills. What these people apparently don’t realize is that law (not just tax law, but law generally) is so much more technical than they realize – they cannot develop legal reasoning ability merely by reading one actual case, or ten cases, or even a hundred actual statutes or cases. My sense is that the tax protesters, virtually without exception, have no idea what they’re getting into – for the simple reason that they don’t have the mental tools (unrelated to the subject of taxation itself) needed to analyze the materials. Much of what tax protesters do is something like reading magazine articles on brain surgery and then thinking you can understand brain surgery better than people who have been formally trained for years as physicians and have actually performed brain surgery. It is literally on that level.

For an example of some of this, see the heading “Sources for an alternate viewpoint” at Talk:Income_tax/Removed_text. The material you see there was copied and pasted by a tax protester a while back from some tax protest web site somewhere. Over the past few months I have been gradually inserting my own commentaries, exposing the materials. As you can see, many of the exposed materials include the kinds of accurate quotes you were talking about – quotes that are taken totally out of context without any awareness of the rules of legal analysis. Yours, Famspear 03:53, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Roni Lynn Deutch

Hey, it's me again. Wow it's been a while since I've been here! Your input could be valuable regarding the article Roni Lynn Deutch at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Roni_Lynn_Deutch

(if you're interested).

My personal view is that the article is pretty much an advertisement, even if the article wasn't put there by Ms. Deutch herself -- but you may have a different perspective. Yours, Famspear 20:04, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] James Batchelder

I did? Where? Thursday, 2006-11-02 T 22:35 UTC