The Great IRS Hoax

Christopher M. Hansen

For the last four months, I have tried to read this book. I tried, even, to adhere to Hansen's challenge for this book: to read chapters two through six, which is the core of Hansen's argument that the IRS has no right to take your money. But, after two hundred eighty-three pages of some of the worst writing I have ever encountered, I simply gave up. (I should mention that after two hundred eighty-three pages, the beginning of chapter three was nowhere in sight.)

Hansen, as you might expect from the title of the book and the opening paragraph of this review, is one of those folks who's going to stand up and tell you not to take it any more. A rather excellent standpoint, it must be noted. But while the self-published The Great IRS Hoax has all the pitfalls of the self-published The Law That Never Was to contend with, it also heaps on other deficiencies that demarcate the line between The Law That Never Was being boring and repetitious, but tolerable, and The Great IRS Hoax being boring, repetitious, and intolerable.

First, I remarked in the review of The Law That Never Was about the use of multiple exclamation points in a chapter heading, and the amateurism and schoolyard bullying it conveys. Hansen takes amateurism and schoolyard bullying to a whole other level here, including using the IRS' seal at the bottom of every page, and adding a disclaimer that's so transparently specious as to insult the intelligence of his readers; if the court system comes after this guy, the crap in the disclaimer certainly isn't going to stop them (even if you don't assume that the IRS and the courts are corrupt, in which case nothing will stop them, as Hansen obviously does). By the time you've read through page four, you should have a basic idea of where this book is going. It gets worse throughout; he uses the time-tested and completely unworthy convention of renaming things the way he'd like them to be (e.g., the "Socialist Security Number") in order to ridicule those things, and sounds like a six year old saying "nah-nah-nee-foo-foo" instead of a reasoned, intelligent human being setting forth an argument and inviting debate.

Second, while Benson pulls religion into it in his forewords and afterwords, Hansen is obviously a zealot, and he's not afraid to let anyone know it. In fact, of the two hundred eighty-three pages I read, fully half of them are preachifying, bible quoting, and talking about how this material is only useful to Christians, because after all, all the rest of us loonies are already going to hell. Hansen says, "The only thing that educating and empowering ungrateful atheists and blasphemers accomplishes is to make them more vain." Once you've gotten past the atrocious grammar in that sentence, mull the idea here. Christians are not only the only ones getting into heaven, they're the only ones who should be exempt from the government's biggest fraud!

The worst part about all this is once you get past the bullying, the spelling errors, the amateurism, the typos, the hatefulness, the endless annoying repetition, the offensiveness, the grammatical errors, and the nausea that all these traits in this book are sure to raise in you, there's a core of excellent information here. A good editor could whip this into a manuscript, probably no more than a quarter of its present length, that would hold its own with any of the (very few) books on tax protest that were actually published by someone other than the authors. Hansen obviously knows his legalese, and is more than willing to translate for us (well, at least for his fellow Christians, even if, in an amazing leap in logic, the book's disclaimer states that it's only for Hansen and his family, even if other passages in the book state otherwise). He obviously knows the tax code well, and points us to all the places we need to go to find all the gaping holes that makes the loopholes tax preparers try to get us to jump through look like the eyes of various needles. And those holes most definitely exist; Hansen points them out and discusses them at length. His arguments, when he's talking legalese, are persuasive and comprehensive. There is very much here to like, if you can wade through the thousands upon thousands of words of swine here for every word that resembles a pearl.

The problem is, I simply couldn't do it. After two hundred eighty-three pages, I'd had more than enough of being told what a horrible person I was for not gouging out my eyes and devoting my blind life to a sheep nailed to a cross, that I deserved everything the IRS threw at me, that all the women I know should not be allowed to work and should be happy to become mindless machines pumping out babies to consume even more resources than the festering mass of humanity on this planet already does, that the Bible is the only true lawbook, that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation, and so many other pieces of sheer prejudice and creedism that it boggles the mind to imagine that no one's yet tried to assassinate this idiot. But then, since Hansen is so throughly convinced of the rightness of his filth, and the filth his followers so blindly and stupidly believe, that was most likely his intention; weed out the undesirables like me so I'll never find out his secrets.

Well, Chris, it worked.