|
My father Irwin A. Schiff was born Feb. 23rd 1928, the
8th child and only son of Jewish immigrants, who had crossed the Atlantic
twenty years earlier in search of freedom. As a result of their hope and
courage my father was fortunate to have been born into the freest nation in
the history of the world. But when he passed away on Oct. 16th, 2015 at
the age of 87, a political prisoner of that same nation, legally blind and shackled
to a hospital bed in a guarded room in intensive care, the free nation he was
born into had itself died years earlier.
My father had a life-long love affair with our nation's
founding principals and proudly served his country during the Korean War, for
a while even having the less then honorable distinction of being the lowest
ranking America soldier in Europe. While in college he became exposed
to the principles of Australian economics through the writings of Henry
Hazlitt and Frederick Hayek. He first became active in politics during Barry
Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential bid. His activism intensified during the
Vietnam Era when he led local grass root efforts to resist Yale University's
plans to conduct aid shipments to North Vietnam at a time when that nation
was actively fighting U.S. forces in the south. Later in life he staged an
unsuccessful write in campaign for governor of Connecticut, then eventually
lost the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination
to Harry Brown in 1996.
In 1976 his beliefs in free market economics, limited
government, and strict interpretation of the Constitution led him to write
his first book The Biggest Con: How the Government is
Fleecing You, a blistering indictment of the post
New Deal expansion of government in the United States. The book achieved
accolades in the mainstream conservative world, receiving a stellar review in
the Wall Street Journal, among other mainstream publications.
But my father was most known for his staunch opposition
to the Federal Income Tax, for which the Federal Government labeled him a
"tax protester." But he had no objection to lawful,
reasonable taxation. He was not an anarchist and believed that the
state had an important, but limited role to play in market based
economy. He opposed the Federal Government's illegal and
unconstitutional enforcement and collection of the income tax.
His first book on this topic (he authored six books in total) How Anyone Can
Stop Paying Income Taxes, published in 1982 became a New York Times best
seller. His last, The Federal Mafia; How the Government Illegally Imposes and
Unlawfully collects Income Taxes, the first of
three additions published in 1992, became the only non-fiction, and second
and last book to be banned in America. The only other book being Fanny
Hill; Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, banned for obscenity in 1821 and 1963.
His crusade to force the government to obey the law
earned him three prison sentences, the final one being a fourteen-year
sentence that he began serving ten years ago, at the age of 77.
That sentence turned into a life sentence, as my father failed to survive
until his planned 2017 release date. However in actuality the life sentence
amounted to a death sentence. My father died from skin cancer that went
undiagnosed and untreated while he was in federal custody. The skin
cancer then led to a virulent outbreak of lung cancer that took his life just
more than two months after his initial diagnosis.
The unnecessarily cruel twist in his final years occurred
seven years ago when he reached his 80th birthday. At that point the
government moved him from an extremely low security federal prison camp in
New York State where he was within easy driving distance from family and
friends, to a federal correctional institute, first in Indiana and then in
Texas. This was done specially to give him access to better medical
care. The trade off was that my father was forced to live isolated from
those who loved him. Given that visiting him required long flights, car
rentals, and hotel stays, his visits were few and far between.
Yet while at these supposed superior medical facilities, my father received
virtually no medical care at all, not even for the cataracts that left him
legally blind, until the skin cancer on his head had spread to just about
every organ in his body.
At the time of his diagnosis in early August of this
year, he was given four to six mouths to live. We tried to get him out
of prison on compassionate release so that he could live out the final months
of his life with his family, spending some precious moments with the
grandchildren he had barely known. But he did not live long enough for
the bureaucratic process to be completed. Two months after the process
began, despite the combined help of a sitting Democratic U.S. congresswoman
and a Republican U.S. senator, his petition was still sitting on someone's
desk waiting for yet another signature, even though everyone at the prison
actually wanted him released. Even as my father lay dying in
intensive care, a phone call came in from a lawyer and the Bureau of Prisons
in Washington asking the prison medical representatives for more proof of the
serious nature of my father's condition.
As the cancer consumed him his voice changed, and the
prison phone system no longer recognized it, so he could not even talk with
family members on the phone during his finale month of life. When his
condition deteriorated to the point where he needed to be hospitalized,
government employees blindly following orders kept him shackled to his bed.
This despite the fact that escape was impossible for an 87 year old
terminally ill, legally blind patient who could barley breathe, let alone
walk.
Whether or not you agree with my father's views on the
Federal Income Tax, or the manner by which it is collected, it's hard to
condone the way he was treated by our government. He held his
convictions so sincerely and so passionately that he continued to espouse
them until his dying breath. Like William Wallace in the final scene of
Braveheart, an oppressive government may have succeeded in killing him, but
they did not break his spirit. And that spirit will live on
in his books, his videos, and in his children and grandchildren.
Hopefully his legacy will one day help restore the lost freedoms he died
trying to protect, finally allowing him to rest in peace.
|
|
