Perhaps the only commendable thing newly installed Economic Dictator (and Barton Fink look-alike) Tim Geithner has done in a public career otherwise devoted to serving the Power Elite was to “cheat” on his taxes.

Given that taxation is theft, “cheating” the taxman is bit like refusing to disclose every hidden pocket of household wealth to an armed robber.

Unless they’re sick unto death with some form of collectivist psychosis, Americans submit to taxation for the same reason they would pay off any other irresistibly powerful extortionist.

At some point in any conversation about taxes someone, acting with smugly misplaced confidence in the power of clich, will deploy Justice Holmes’ dictum about taxes being “the price we pay for civilization.”

Actually, taxes are the price extracted from us by those determined to undermine civilization, which is built on the peaceful, mutually enriching exchange of knowledge, goods, services, sound traditions, and culture among people of goodwill.

As Justice Holmes would have understood, had he not been a blinkered positivist and deranged militarist, taxation is what fuels the forces of barbarism — the Warmakers, empire-builders, and practitioners of public plunder in all of its malignant varieties.

The “civilizing” deeds of such people are measured by the graveyards they have filled, the prisons and gallows they have built, and the number of names listed in the obscene war memorials they erect in their own honor, if that word applies. All of these depredations are made possible by taxation.

By way of contrast, all of the genuinely civilized functions of life — those that take place in families, churches, the marketplace, and private associations of shared interest — require not a farthing in taxes.

Tacitus famously lamented the work of imperialists who make a desert and call it “peace.” In the same fashion, tax-fed Kleptocrats impose systems of official plunder, corruption, and violence and call it “civilization.”

As a young man at Kissinger Associates (KA), Geithner was deeply involved in brokering the kind of “civilized” deals the Power Elite thrives on. Among other things, Kissinger’s influence-peddling operation helped arrange the Iraq War: It promoted the U.S. taxpayer-subsidized Iraqi arms build-up while simultaneously representing the state-owned Kuwaiti Petroleum Corporation.

Kleptocrat as Imperial Proconsul: L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in occupied Iraq, makes his rounds under the watchful eyes of his Blackwater Praetorian Guard.

One of Geithner’s associates at that enigmatic firm was L. Paul Bremer, who went on to become the imperial proconsul in “liberated” Iraq following the second Gulf War. Bremer has followed a pretty conventional Kleptocratic career arc: He ended up presiding over the “reconstruction” of a country whose demolition he and his KA comrades had helped to arrange.

This proved to be immensely profitable to Geithner’s kleptocratic cronies, who were in a position to benefit from no-bid, “cost-plus” contracts and the other lucrative scams that proliferated during the festive orgy of official corruption called the “reconstruction” of Iraq. Oh, sure: Iraq itself was left — and remains today — a wrecked and ruined land. But at least the Lords of Plunder made out pretty well.

Geithner is pursuing a career trajectory similar to Bremer’s, albeit in a slightly different field. In the years leading up to his coronation as Treasury Secretary, Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This means he was a member in good standing in the world’s most important criminal syndicate, the Federal Reserve System. It also means he spent a good part of his public career abetting the destruction of the economy he now has been given dictatorial powers to “save.”

The Fed’s loose money and credit policies created the inflationary boom and led to the ongoing economic bust. Since the bust began, Geithner’s chief priority has been to pillage the earnings of poor and middle-class Americans on behalf of the super-wealthy and politically connected. His first service of that kind came early last summer, when he helped devise a $29 billion taxpayer-backed bailout of the mortally wounded Bear Stearns investment house.

At the time, both Geithner and the Capo of his criminal order, Ben Bernanke, insisted that with that bailout the investment markets had been stabilized, and the economic downturn had been arrested. That was seven months and at least $3 trillion (and probably as much as $8 trillion) in taxpayer-backed bailouts ago.

During that time, Congress enacted a measure giving the Treasury Secretary — acting in collusion with the Fed Chairman — unlimited and unaccountable power to appropriate “bailout” funds, and disburse them as he sees fit, without congressional review or accountability of any kind.

The power of economic “reconstruction” has thus been vested in two of the chief demolitionists of the world economy, one of whom, Mr. Geithner, belongs to an ber-secret clique of central bankers and Keynesian socialists called the Group of 30. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, this group isn’t composed of the kind of people whose sleep is troubled by concerns about the impact of their machinations on the civilized affairs of Main Street.

Given his vita and associations, there’s every reason to believe that Geithner will use the means at his disposal to siphon the wealth that remains in our economy into the hands of the international Plunderbund. Perhaps the only genuinely interesting question left is this: What will parasites of his kind do once they have killed their host?

The Best of William Norman Grigg