None of these people claim they are smarter than the IRS, or will be harassed by any agents, because they filed properly and hide nothing.
Actually, the part I put in bold is not entirely correct. Even with the IRS rules, the filing requirement is for "taxable income" to be above a certain amount, below which there is no filing requirement. So not all "filed properly", as you put it, because not all were required to do so. This leads to one of the arguments made by those who have fought the IRS in court before juries, like attorney Tom Cryer of Shreveport, LA, who argues that he does not have enough of the particular kind of wages, or income, which are undefined in terms that meet with a 16th Amendment definition of income which is taxable.
One of the biggest problems facing those who take an anti-tax stance, and who challenge the maze of legal tax verbiage by Congress, the Treasury and the IRS, is that that cases will ultimately be decided by a jury (or a judge, should a right to a jury trial be waived). That is an enormous risk for anyone to take, given that it may not matter whether you are correct or not, because your fate is ultimately in the hands of the jury and the courts -- and societal perceptions. And perception is everything. If you don't believe that, ask the average person on the street if the money from their credit account came from other people's deposits. Ask them what happens to their money when they deposit it with a "bank", and whether it is even theirs or not. Ask them about the Federal Reserve, and what part of the government they believe it comes from. Ask the average person -
who will be the average juror - about a whole host of things WHICH ARE NOT IN DISPUTE, and see what they say.
So attorney Tom Cryer happens to successfully defend himself in federal court, while Irwin Schiff, Peter Schiff's father, is unsuccessful, and ends up convicted by a jury of his so-called peers. For most:
You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with ENTRENCHED POWER.
Anyone who makes a vocal stink ends up targeted. Bullied. Examples are made, and since you really are beating a hornet's nest, your chances of getting stung are massive. It's not a question of being right - or the law. It is no different, in principle, than Rosa Parks' chances of getting away with not giving up her seat on the bus when commanded. It's a question of power, normalcy bias, status quo, and general perceptions, which includes whatever mealy-mouthed government worshiping cowards declare to was moral, fair, or just, or right, simply because it's the way the law or government somehow works. That kind of of cowardly normalcy thinking is what got millions of Jews and others rounded up and gassed.
Which brings us, of course, to that stinking, rotten cancerous portion of the population - that tyrannous would-be majority, as prophetically described by Alexander Fraser Tytler, which majority "
...discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."
And that's your jury of peers as well, and good luck with that as well.
