Let Them Eat Tax Forms

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TAX TIME MAKES ONE NOSTALGIC FOR THE DAYS WHEN we had a government. I mean way back, before U.S. Senators started resigning to go in search of productive employment. I mean long ago, when citizens sent off their tax forms marked "sealed with a kiss," knowing Uncle Sam would use the money to right wrongs, build bridges and comfort the widows and orphans. But has anyone seen Uncle Sam recently? There is a rumor that the Nixon team took out the old gent two decades ago. They found him rattling around in a back office, raving about health care and housing and a few spanking-new pieces of infrastructure to plop down somewhere -- and they quietly sealed the door. It was a coup of sorts: the death of government and its replacement by the IRS.

Face it, there isn't much evidence of government anymore other than the IRS. Europe still has governments, or so we are told -- veritable busybodies of them, providing child care and free hospital care. We never expected all that here, just a few parades and space launches and water we could drink. But our space program is a galaxy-wide embarrassment. Our regulatory agencies are so feeble that factories burn down with the workers still in them and even the President has taken a hallucinogenic sleeping pill blithely approved by the FDA. Infrastructure is a thing of the past. As for the widows and orphans, they can be found massing around the Dumpsters, searching for viable crusts. Too bad 1040 forms aren't edible. Too bad we can't use them to patch up our bridges.

I speak from the middle-class, middle-aged point of view, of course: too young for Medicare, too old for Head Start, too rich for food stamps, too poor to be invited up to Kennebunkport for a spin on the President's powerboat. If we hate incumbents, it's because we no longer know what they're incumbing over. For most of us, government at the federal level is an increasingly mythical enterprise: a media show in which a bunch of fellows, possibly former stars of Rogaine commercials, are paid to bounce checks and spit at one another on TV. The only thing left that really works is the inexorable IRS.

There is the federal prison system, I grant you that: surely the vastest low-income housing program the world has ever seen, eating up $1.4 billion of federal spending. But the prisons can be regarded as a mere extension of the IRS: Who would pay their taxes if the alternative were not the sadistic embrace of the federal pen? Some of our more disillusioned citizens, the kind who keep talk-radio buzzing, have already concluded that what we have going here is a giant extortion system: Send us money, the IRS demands every April, or be prepared to spend a lengthy sabbatical locked up with a serial killer who has devoted the past 10 years to working out.

All right, there was the gulf war, surely a spectacular display of government-in-action, offering days of suspenseful viewing. But the war may have been little more than a public relations effort on the part of the IRS. Think about it: 20% of federal spending goes to defense, for which a more appropriate term is protection. No protection racket has ever worked without some kind of a credible threat. Isn't it true that as soon as Saddam Hussein was beaten back and the U.S.S.R. became the pitifully hungry C.I.S., the Pentagon produced a new list of international bullies?