Bookselling Is Not a Federal Crime

I first saw this in the Times, but since that link's going to be pay-per-view before you know it, I'll point you at the AccountingWeb item about Irwin Schiff's insanity plea. Schiff's the author of The Federal Mafia, which basically claims the government has no constitutional authority to demand income taxes at all. A federal district court ruled that he not only had to stop selling the book, but turn over the names of everyone who had bought it from him as well. Schiff's appeal is currently being heard by the Ninth Circuit, and his shrink is saying he suffers from delusions about being the only man alive who can interpret the tax code.

But Schiff's girlfriend, Cindy Nuen, said in an e-mail sent to his thousands of supporters that the defense is the only way for Schiff to escape fraud penalties. That’s because, she wrote, his lawyers are "scared" to tell judges that "the income tax law is meritless and frivolous."

Somehow that seems like a stupid thing to say in writing when it could easily end up in the hands of Schiff's prosecutors or the judges. But whatever you think about that, I think it's pretty clear that when the government starts trying to ban the publication of books attacking its laws (no matter how flimsy the logic of the attack), not to mention trying to round up the names of people who buy books it doesn't want read, things are seriously out of whack.