Talk:Tax protester/Archive 4

message: 1. Dear Mr. Dale R. Eastman or User at IP address 4.158.201.8: Regarding your questions to me personally at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Tax_Honesty_Movement, thank you for your comments.
2. Yes, speaking of your being busy with other things, I am pretty much in the same position right now. Because I do lots of tax stuff, this is the busiest time of year for me, until Monday, April 17th (because April 15th falls on a Saturday this year). I can’t promise you that I will be able to get to your tax commentary in any meaningful way.
3. Also, if we ever do have time for this, I would say that rather than posting material on your web site, a much more efficient method of communication – one that I suspect would result in a lot more people reading what we have to say -- would be to talk about it here at Talk:Tax protester.
4. Regarding your comments, yes, I guess I am a big city lawyer. For what it’s worth, I did drive a truck in my first job many years ago (it was only a delivery van, not a big truck, but whatever).
===Formal legal analysis versus incorrect idiosyncratic interpretation===
5. I can tell you at this point, that you are the umpteenth tax protester or "tax honesty movement" member to review these statutes, regs, and court decisions. Both your analysis and your conclusions are incorrect as a matter of law. That’s nothing against you personally. Part of it is that you’re not trained to do legal analysis and part of it is your overall approach.
6. I have briefly reviewed the material at your web site. Many of the cases you cite, especially Eisner v. Macomber, Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., and the Merchants' Bank case, have been exhaustively covered by other tax protesters over the years. Unfortunately, the so-called "analysis" that tax protesters apply in studying these cases is not a correct formal legal analysis.
7. In your web site you instead apply an "idiosyncratic interpretation" to what are essentially very technical legal texts. To analyze law properly, you must instead use principles of formal legal analysis used to study not only tax law but contract law, property law, criminal law, tort law, and all other areas of American law. Formal legal analysis cannot be “learned” merely by studying the texts of one, or five, or even a hundred court decisions.
====How to learn to perform formal legal analysis====
8. You cannot learn formal legal analysis merely by studying the statutes and regulations you discuss on your web site. Learning to do formal legal analysis cannot be done in the way you have tried to do it. You learn to perform legal analysis by becoming a lawyer.
9. The process of just getting into law school in the first place is a rigorous winnowing that few people can withstand. You first have to graduate from an accredited college or university with at least a bachelor’s degree. Then, you have to apply to a law school and sit for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Many college graduates simply do not have the college grades or the LSAT scores to be accepted by a law school.
10. Once you are accepted and enter law school, you gradually learn to perform correct legal analysis not by having a professor "lecture" as a professor would in high school or college, and not primarily by reading a "textbook." Instead you go through a rigorous, formal process using two methods: the Socratic method and the case method. Law school in the United States is akin to a military boot camp -- for the mind. However, instead of lasting about six weeks, law school lasts three years.
11. Further, many law schools are very competitive. Many law schools have what is called "grade deflation." That is, if you were an A student in college, you will usually end up being a C or a B minus student in law school. Even if you graduated from college in the top of your class, law school can be a rude awakening. If there are three hundred people in your first year class, you are essentially competing with nearly three hundred clones of yourself, in terms of ability to perform. Your competition is not merely college students, not merely college graduates, but instead college graduates who have been accepted into law school. Most people simply cannot make the cut.
12. A further hurdle is that some law schools deliberately "flunk out" a large number of law students after the end of the first year. So some people don’t make it – even after having gone this far.
13. The law students who do make it gradually learn to perform correct legal analysis in part by studying literally thousands of court decisions (and statutes and other legal materials) of all kinds – not just tax law decisions – in a very intense, rigorous academic atmosphere. They start with old English cases (our law originally comes from something called English common law) with archaic and very technical language. They study contracts, property, torts, criminal law, constitutional law, legal research and writing, civil procedure, evidence, principal and agent, corporations and partnerships, trusts and wills, marital property rights, employment law, secured transactions, and on and on. A doctor of jurisprudence degree requires about 88 to 97 semester hours of law, depending on the law school – and this is AFTER four years of college, AFTER graduating from college, AFTER having taken the LSAT, and AFTER having been accepted for admission to law school.
14. And AFTER having gone through all this for three years after college and AFTER HAVING earned a doctor of jurisprudence degree, you are still not finished. You still have to sit for the bar examination – often a two or three day affair, administered under the supervision of the highest court in your state (usually called the state Supreme Court). If you pass the bar examination, you are finally licensed by the state Supreme Court as an attorney – and THEN you can start legally advising other people about what the law is and how it applies. Only then are you legally qualified to advise other people about what the constitution, the statutes, the regs, the treaties, the court decisions and other legal materials really mean and how they should be interpreted.
15. With all due respect, the method of "analysis" you use on your web site – this idiosyncratic interpretation -- does not conform to the rules of legal analysis. This means that not only are your conclusions incorrect as a matter of law, your method of "reasoning" is also incorrect as a matter of law. Using your method of interpretation, you would fail the first semester of law school. The rules cannot be learned in a day or a month or a year of reading actual statutes, regs, and court decisions in the way you obviously have been reading them.
16. However, that is not to say that you would actually use your method of reasoning if you actually were in law school. If you actually were in law school, you would quickly learn to spot the errors in the "analytical" method you use on your web site -- and you would I suspect learn to do it right.
====Idiosyncratic interpretation results in lack of credibility====
17. Some of these court decisions you talk about on your web site are what legal scholars call "leading cases" in the world of tax law. In particular, most tax lawyers can remember some leading cases after studying them in law school. You lose credibility right off the bat by analyzing these leading cases incorrectly on your web site, and by rendering incorrect conclusions about what the cases stand for. Because you lose credibility when you post an incorrect conclusion about a leading case, you immediately lose credibility on the internet.
18. You will notice that I have not addressed any of the material on your web site specifically. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will have time after tax season dies down a bit to provide an example for you of how to correctly interpret one of the cases you discuss on your web site.
===Wikipedia treatment of the article on the "tax honesty movement"===
19. Regarding the article on the Tax Honesty Movement, the article needs some clean up from a Wikipedia standpoint. My personal vote was to delete the article because I argue that whatever parts of the article can comply with Wikipedia’s rules can be presented more cogently in the article on tax protesters. It’s not necessarily a big deal whether the article stays or is deleted. My personal vote was for deletion, not a vote for suppressing basic information to the effect that so-called tax honesty movement exists. However, if anyone tries to mislead people into thinking that the tax honesty movement is not a continuation of and part of the tax protester movement, they violate Wikipedia rules. If anyone tries to use a Wikipedia article to try to persuade people that that the tax laws are being "misapplied," etc., etc. (and it matters not what specific words they use to try to hide what they are doing), then they are violating Wikipedia policies, rules, guidelines, etc. Wikipedia is not a cyberspace soapbox. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
20. If the Wikipedia community decides that the article stays, the article’s content is like the content of any other article: it’s subject to the Wikipedia rules including Neutral Point of View and Verifiability. If the article is deleted, the information on the tax honesty movement is already covered at Tax protester. Either way, proponents of the tax honesty movement who contribute text to a Wikipedia article will be subject to having their material edited or deleted the same as anyone else. This is an encyclopedia.
21. Well, it's 12:50 am on a Monday morning where I am. I have to go to work in the morning! Thanks for your interest. Famspear 05:51, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Dale Eastman and the "Tax Honesty Movement"

message: 19. Regarding the article on the Tax Honesty Movement, the article needs some clean up from a Wikipedia standpoint. My personal vote was to delete the article because I argue that whatever parts of the article can comply with Wikipedia’s rules can be presented more cogently in the article on tax protesters. It’s not necessarily a big deal whether the article stays or is deleted. My personal vote was for deletion, not a vote for suppressing basic information to the effect that so-called tax honesty movement exists. However, if anyone tries to mislead people into thinking that the tax honesty movement is not a continuation of and part of the tax protester movement, they violate Wikipedia rules. If anyone tries to use a Wikipedia article to try to persuade people that that the tax laws are being "misapplied," etc., etc. (and it matters not what specific words they use to try to hide what they are doing), then they are violating Wikipedia policies, rules, guidelines, etc. Wikipedia is not a cyberspace soapbox. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
20. If the Wikipedia community decides that the article stays, the article’s content is like the content of any other article: it’s subject to the Wikipedia rules including Neutral Point of View and Verifiability. If the article is deleted, the information on the tax honesty movement is already covered at Tax protester. Either way, proponents of the tax honesty movement who contribute text to a Wikipedia article will be subject to having their material edited or deleted the same as anyone else. This is an encyclopedia.
21. Well, it's 12:50 am on a Monday morning where I am. I have to go to work in the morning! Thanks for your interest. Famspear 05:51, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikipedia treatment of the article on the "tax honesty movement"

message: This article is rather lengthy, and should actually be broken down some. I propose having a single "overview" article on tax protesters with links to two sub-articles, one on tax protester history (covering the famous tax protesters, the adoption of the "Tax Honesty Movement" sobriquet, and the cons and scams) and one on tax protester arguments. Thoughts? bd2412 T 14:32, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like a good idea! If BD2412 handles the mechanics of breaking the current article down into "sub-articles," I would certainly try to expand on both the proposed "history" sub-article and the proposed "arguments" sub-article. I "sub-mit" to everyone that having the two sub-articles would allow Wikipedia to do more justice to both "sub-topics." I would be glad to dive into the writing of the "sub-stance" of these sub-articles some time later this spring (right now I am partially "sub-merged" in the flood of tax season work). Well, now I'm running out of ideas for words with a "sub-prefix" (can you tell tax season is driving me crazy?)! Yours, Famspear 18:38, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The basic split is done - but all three articles now look a bit rough. I didn't move links over yet, that needs to be done as well (some may be moved, others simply copied). bd2412 T 19:14, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subdividing out this article. 

message: It'd be nice if someone could find some information on similar issues in other countries, or generalise the introduction better - the article is really only about Tax Protesters in the States as it stands.  I'm sure similar behaviour has occured elsewhere (Australia, for instance)WilyD 13:30, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Be bold... if you have some contributions or can find the facts about other countries then by all means add them... Drew1369 16:00, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: US-Centric