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Could it be that our ruling elite has effectively transcended hypocrisy? As the aphorism informs us, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; it is the product of a person’s capacity for decent shame, the fig-leaf garment concealing one’s naked corruption.

Shame being a vital precursor to hypocrisy, those who rule us — not only the politicians, but the banksters and image-molders as well — can’t be accused of hypocrisy. This would be a bit like criticizing the fashion sense of somebody who’s color-blind. This doesn’t mean, however, that they should be allowed an indulgence for the evil that they do.

Last week, during a brief digression in the ongoing efforts to socialize the losses suffered by the super-rich kleptocrats at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Congress conducted an authentic Orwellian hate-fest directed at “super-rich” people who had earned their money through legitimate enterprise.

The Fannie/Freddie nomenklatura built huge profits through the government-subsidized generation and “securitization” of bad mortgages and criminally corrupt bookkeeping. Last week’s hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations focused on people who had made large sums of money through honest, productive commercial activity — and then tried to preserve their honest earnings for their posterity by protecting it in bank accounts in Liechtenstein.

Congress and the ruling elite it serves are eagerly stealing everything in sight, through taxes, subsidies, and inflation. But as last week’s Senate hearings-cum-show trial illustrate, they are tuning up the machinery of mass hatred in anticipation of scapegoating authentic capitalists for the ongoing economic collapse.

The fault, we will be told, lies not with our corrupt and incurably profligate government, or the incorrigible official counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve, or the government-subsidized corporatist interests who are their clients — but rather those who greedily insist on keeping what they earn instead of paying their “fair share” in the name of the “common good.”

The calculation here is that a hate campaign of that sort can keep the public from noticing how the phrase “common good” always seems to refer to policies that confer benefits on one particular elite. And it’s quite likely that members of that elite have their own numbered accounts in places like Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Which is probably another reason they’re so eager to go after well-heeled people who aren’t part of their club.

As I have noted before, Liechtenstein, unlike the United States, is a relatively free country. It is presided over with a gentle hand by Prince Hans-Adam II, rather than being ruled by a degenerate fascist oligarchy like the one entrenched in Washington. Hans-Adam II is on record saying that a top tax rate higher than 6% is “tyrannical.” This puts him well ahead of any other political leader I can think of in pursuing the truth, which is that taxation is always and everywhere nothing but officially sanctioned theft.

As would be the case in any civilized country, Liechtenstein’s banking secrecy laws were designed to protect the assets of depositors from the scrutiny of predators serving the ruling class. Many foreign depositors have, in accordance with the sound and commendable laws of that estimable alpine country, set up foundations to protect their earnings from rapacious tax-gatherers in their own afflicted nations.

Unfortunately, a squalid little creature named Heinrich Kieber who had been a clerk at Liechtenstein’s LGT Group, pilfered several CDs worth of data regarding foreign depositors from the United States and Europe. Driven by a variant of the invidious impulses that sixty years ago would have led him to rat out those who protected Jews from the Gestapo, Kieber — as viscous as he is vicious — oozed into the offices of Germany’s BND intelligence service and sold his stolen information for $7.3 million stolen at gunpoint from German taxpayers.

Kieber conducted similar transactions with ruling criminals in London, Paris, Rome, and Washington. His information led to last week’s hearings, chaired by the loathsome Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), who — in the interests of “bipartisanship” — gave a prominent co-starring role to the even more repulsive Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota). Kieber himself, who has been taken into the “witness protection program,” testified by way of a videotaped statement from a secret location.

The target of Comrade Levin’s show trial was the reported $1.5 trillion cached by wealthy Americans in offshore accounts, including those in Liechtenstein, Switzerland’s UBS, and elsewhere. Those banks, Levin complained, had employed “tricks” that made it “impossible for the Internal Revenue Service to follow the money, bring tax cheats to justice, and bring back into the US treasury the tens of billions of dollars owed to Uncle Sam.”

Well, sure: The banks that sought to protect the assets of Jews during WWII employed the same methods to protect the assets of honorable people from the contemporary tax gestapo, who are the true moral heirs of the Nazi officials who sought to seize the assets of persecuted Jews. Impeding the efforts of criminals to steal wealth is not a “crime,” and it’s interesting that Levin didn’t use that word to describe the “tricks” he protested.

And, if I can be permitted a brief digression, Levin‘s statement that the money should be brought “back to the US treasury” in order to pay “the tens of billions of dollars owed to Uncle Sam” is a Marxist lie sandwiched between two crusty slices of chutzpah.

For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll refer to the fraudulent fiat currency issued by the Fed as “money.”

Any quantity of “money” honestly earned does not belong to the Treasury; it belongs to the individual or enterprise that earned it, until he or they decide to spend it for some purpose. Accordingly, that money cannot go “back” to the Treasury, although it can be diverted there to be wasted on corrupt government undertakings of various kinds.

Furthermore, taxes are not “owed” to the federal government; they are seized by the federal government. One “owes” money to another party from whom he has received goods or services pursuant to a legitimate contract. “Contracts” imposed through duress (such as extortion pay-offs) are illegitimate. Those of us who pay taxes do so not because a legitimate contract exists between us and the Regime that extracts our wealth; we do so because of a desire to stay out of prison, or to avoid violent death at the hands of the State’s hired killers.

Levin is a nearly ideal representative of the parasite class. His mind, or what passes for it, is entirely hostage to collectivist assumptions. Just as a dog cannot discern colors, Levin can’t see anything amiss in extending official protection to a foreign criminal (Kieber was convicted of fraud in Liechtenstein) so he can testify against those who have done no injury to persons or property, or in treating foreign bank officers as if they were under Washington’s jurisdiction by demanding that they testify before his committee.

All of this is being done, Levin insists, to bring “tax cheats to justice.” Leaving aside, for the nonce, the fact that the word “justice” when uttered by the likes of Levin is like the word “love” in the mouth of a whore, the cruel fact is that tax avoidance is impossible for anyone who conducts business using the Federal Reserve’s fraudulent scrip.

This brings us to one history-making admission offered last week by Fed Commissar Ben Bernanke beneath the avuncular but relentless cross-examination of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) during Bernanke’s recent congressional testimony.

"Inflation is a tax,” Rep. Paul observed during his colloquy with Bernanke. “And if the Federal Reserve, and you as chairman, have this authority to increase the money supply arbitrarily, you’re probably the biggest taxer in the country.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more that inflation is a tax,” admitted Bernanke, quickly seeking to evade responsibility by saying that “inflation currently is too high.” The criminal syndicate over which Bernanke presides imposes taxation without representation or accountability.

Furthermore, it exports that inflation world-wide, thanks to the fact that the instrument of debt the Fed calls the “dollar” is the world’s reserve currency. This means that nearly everyone who uses the dollar to conduct business is paying the tax called inflation. This is a unique form of withholding, in that the Fed steals an increment of value from each dollar before it ends up in the hands or accounts of private actors in the economy.

Where a government exercises the power to tax through inflation, no other taxes are “necessary,” including the income tax. Furthermore, where governments tax through inflation, no tax evasion is possible, as long as people conduct business in that adulterated currency.

The redoubtable G. Edward Griffin points out that former Fed Chairman Beardsley Ruml admitted that, because of the Fed’s ability to tax via inflation, “Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete” — the title of an essay Ruml published in the January 1946 issue of American Affairs. As Ruml wrote, “given control of a central banking system and an incontrovertible currency [that is, a fiat currency not backed by gold], a sovereign national government is finally free of money worries and need no longer levy taxes for the purpose of providing itself with revenue. All taxation, therefore, should be regarded from the point of view of social and economic consequences.”(Emphasis added.)

Thus, where Washington is concerned, taxation exists purely for the purpose of social manipulation through vulgar redistribution of wealth, not to pay the operating costs of government. And as carried out by the IRS, taxation is an instrument of intimidation and terror used to compel social conformity.

By keeping their money in dollars, or any currency “pegged” to the dollar, so-called “tax cheats” aren’t evading taxes. They, like the rest of us, are being taxed through the Fed’s relentless inflation. Their only hope to evade being taxed by the Fed would be to take the advice offered by Jim Rogers last fall: Get out of dollar-denominated assets entirely.

There are only two ways to acquire wealth: It can be earned through mutually beneficial voluntary action, or it can be stolen through force and fraud. Any effort to acquire wealth that involves any degree of force or fraud is theft.

Senator Levin and his comrades, who are preparing to bail out the politically favored thieves running Fannie and Freddie, spent many taxpayer-funded hours last week dilating upon the supposed iniquity of those “super-rich” Americans who seek to protect what they earn from people whose professional lives are nothing but one prolonged exercise in theft.

It would avail nothing to point out such hypocrisy to Levin and his ilk; they can no more feel honest shame than a chimpanzee can compose a cantata.

The Best of William Norman Grigg