How Thieves and Terrorists "Apologize" to their Victims

by Will Grigg
Jul. 01, 2013

Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has is stolen.” The truth of Nietzsche’s axiom is embodied by the band of thieves and terrorists called the Internal Revenue Service.

Public outrage over recent revelations of IRS corruption and abuse has prompted Nina Olson, who is employed by the agency as its “National Taxpayer Advocate,” to suggest that the agency should make “apology payments” of $1,000 to taxpayers who have been mistreated. If adopted on, Olson’s plan would cap payments at a total of $1 million a year. This would mean that 1,000 of the tens of millions of people abused by the IRS would receive an insultingly trivial sum as compensation for their mistreatment.

To understand the magnitude of the insult offered by Olson’s proposal, consider a recently publicized IRS conference that took place in Atlanta in 2008. The cost of that single event was $2.4 million – more than twice the amount proposed by the IRS to buy off public outrage over their profligacy, corruption, and state-sponsored terrorism. The IRS whistleblowers who reported that event to The Hill Newspaper, who remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, describe the event as an example of the agency’s “culture of excess.”