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would be more proof of the uh the criminal nature of uh of what they did but I want to uh spend the rest of the podcast on a a lawsuit I just found out about this today that Roger Veer filed uh not a lawsuit but it's a motion because he's been charged with tax evasion Roger ve is one of the earliest Bitcoin Pioneers you know I've heard him referred to as Bitcoin Jesus so he was in you know early on like around when I could have got in right way back right so he bought a bunch of Bitcoin and and and I didn't so he made a lot of money and and I missed out on that I guess but anyway but he expatriated he left the United States right years ago but when he left he still had large unrealized gains on his Bitcoin because he got in so early but when he left the Bitcoin Market wasn't nearly as as liquid as it is now and so you know if he would have sold his Bitcoin he might have crashed the market and and he lays that out in his uh in his motion but the IRS wanted him to pay the exit tax and and so the the dispute and the tax evasion charges have to do with evading the exit tax and so his motion and a a good part of his motion is that the charges need to be dismissed because the exit tax is unconstitutional and that's what I want to talk about because he's 100% right it is unconstitutional it's amazing that nobody has challenged it and I'm I am happy that he's doing that I mean in fact this will be a a great accomplishment of Bitcoin maybe one of the only real accomplishments is if we can end up getting rid of the excise tax I mean the exit tax because of of Bitcoin now first of all there there several reasons I think that the tax is unconstitutional but on a fundamental level if we're a free country if Americans are free everybody should be free to leave you want to leave the country get out right I mean this is not a prison there shouldn't be an exit tax to leave you want to leave go right that's that's what Freedom means you're free to stay and you're free to leave you shouldn't have to pay a ransom to get out right like this is a giant prison and we have to bribe the guards otherwise we can't get out so the very concept of having to pay a tax to renounce for citizenship is is abhorent to the very nature of the country of fre freedom of our individual liberties that the constitution is supposed to secure so for that reason alone I I I think that it's it's not constitutional uh for the government to try to tax you to leave because if they're allowed to impose an exit tax there's no limit to how high that tax could be and in which case they can effectively make it impossible to leave right if the tax were high enough nobody could get out right so if if that's the case you you can't even have the ability to put a tax on expatriation because that means you could prevent expatriation and you know that would obviously be immoral illegal uh so there's that but the other issue and I've talked about it uh on the podcast a lot has to do with the apportionment Clause of the Constitution the exit tax is not an income tax because you have no income the exit tax is a property tax the way the exit tax works you are supposed to calculate the value of all of your property your real estate your stocks your privately held businesses you're supposed to figure out what all that's worth you're supposed to then compare what it's currently Worth to your basis right what you what you paid to acquire it and whatever the difference is that that gain the the uh the exit tax wants you to assume that you actually realized that gain that you that you sold all those assets and you actually got that money and then they want you to pretend that that's income and then pay taxes on your pretend income on those pretend gains now clearly that's not income income isn't what you pretend to earn income is what you've actually earned unrealized appreciation is not income right that's not what the 16th Amendment authorized look and I've got pointed this out Congress cannot Define what income is that's why the Internal Revenue code doesn't Define income it defines gross income but it doesn't Define income right if you say it's gross income is all income okay well what's income well we we we don't we didn't put it in the code because they can't Define it in the code because they can't change the Constitution with legislation the court has decided what income means for the purpose of a direct tax not being abortion and it is realize gains right it is a gain that you must derive by actually realizing it you have to earn money or sell something for a higher price than you paid for it and get more money right I paid a million dollars I sold it for two million I have an extra million cash that's my game that they can tax if I buy something for a million and I haven't sold it and potentially if I did sell it I could get 2 million but I haven't sold it I haven't derived the gain yet so I it's not subject to an income tax if you tax the property before it's sold it's a property tax right so if you put a tax on the property that somebody owns if they expatriate that is a property tax property taxes are still subject to the rule of apportionment like if the purpose of the 16th Amendment was to get rid of the requirement to apportion direct taxes it would have said so it would have just said we the the the requirement to abortion direct taxes is hereby repealed and they could have referenced the two places in the Constitution the only thing that the constitution says twice and there's only one thing that they say twice and that's that direct taxes have to be abortion so the fact that they repeated it shows you how important it was they they really wanted everybody to know that direct taxes had to be a portioned so they put it in there twice right nothing else is in there twice but the requirement that direct taxes be a portioned so if the purpose of the 16th Amendment was to give the government the power to Levy all direct taxes without apportionment they would have done that but they didn't do that they specifically said that they could tax income without regard to apportionment but just income that means every other direct tax is still subject to the requirement that it be apportioned and again apportionment means that each state has to pay uh the a a proportion of the tax that's in proportion to its percentage of the population which is obviously impossible when it comes to expatriation because we don't know what states people are going to expatriate from it it would be impossible to ever apportion uh a exit tax which is why they can't have an exit tax right there's no constitutional way to justify an exit tax so they are challenging this and I hope that you know they argue it correctly I may reach out to these lawyers just to give them uh you know you know some extra information in case they don't have it I think I have a lot of knowledge thanks to my father and the years I I spent with him on understanding uh direct taxes and the Constitutional requirements surrounding them and income and the legal meaning of income and all that and so you know maybe I have a little bit to add but this is a big case this is an important case that Roger ve really needs to win because if he wins it then we eliminate the exit tax and that is a big deal because then everybody is free to leave if they want to which means the government has to treat us a lot better if they know we can leave especially uh you know the the the entrepreneurs the the wealthy people that would be subject to this tax uh if if they could leave they might leave unless we lower taxes which is what we should do but we need a smaller government you know the whole idea uh that you know somebody should have to pay this tax if they leave I mean first of all you only pay taxes because you're a citizen and you're enjoying the Privileges of being an American citizen once you decide you don't want to be a citizen anymore and you leave the country why should should be responsible for paying the taxes anymore right you're going to pay the taxes or wherever you move to you shouldn't have to pay the taxes of the country you left pay the taxes of the country that you that you move into right because now you're there right so you should support the government that you're living under not the government that you decided to leave but you know there are some people that think well you know you can't make a lot of money in this country and then leave with all the gains well why not I mean first of all people that make a lot of money pay a lot of taxes while they're making that money it's not like they didn't pay their fair share but if I've amassed a large fortune and I leave I don't owe the country anything I worked hard for that fortune I made the fortune and I made the fortune by enriching others remember that's how capitalism works you get riched by enriching everybody who voluntarily does business with you it's not like hey you made a lot of money so you got to give something back when you leave it's not like you ever took anything out you don't get rich by taking out you get rich by putting in right the money you make is a reflection of the work that you did of the effort you put in of the the benefits that Society derive from your work people voluntarily purchased your products or you know your services because it improved their lives and it improved them by more than the cost otherwise they wouldn't have voluntarily bought it so you don't owe anybody anything when you leave if you decide you don't want to live in the country anymore then you could go and once you've left you have no further obligation to pay taxes and if you have a lot of unrealized gains and you didn't realize them while you still lived in the country if you realize them after you left well that's too bad for the you know the government doesn't get that money they should have treated you nicer they should have made it so you stayed right if they make it so you want to go well then they lose that tax revenue and and that's really where all this exit tax came from right wealthy people decide they wanted to leave and the government wanted to make it harder for them to do that I don't want it I want it easy to leave because if it's easy to leave and the government knows that well then they've got to be uh more responsible they've got to keep taxes low enough so that people aren't going to want to leave right that's what you want that's why all these governments always want to shut down all the tax Havens right I like the tax Havens because they keep government smaller it's competition if the if if the government knows that you could leave they have to treat you good if they know your money could leave they have to treat your money Goods so this is a very important case for a lot of reasons you know the more case was another case on apportionment that didn't go the way I hoped although two justices uh voted that it was unconstitutional but this is even simpler than the more case because in the more case the corporation had realized the income and the IRS said well we're going to um attribute that realized gain to the shareholders right and and the court bought bought that argument I think they were I think the majority was wrong I still don't think it's income but at least there was a realization on the part of the corporation but with the ex with the exit tax there's no realization by anybody no income has been realized at any level it's just a pure property tax measured by the amount that the property is appreciated but the way they measure the tax doesn't change the nature of the tax it's a direct tax on your property and if it's not imp portioned it's unconstitutional and it wasn't a portion it is unconstitutional so let's have the the justices rule this way uh reinforce the fact that we can never have a wealth tax in this country or a tax on unrealized gains this case will force the court to rule on that they wiggled out of it with the more case so this is a very important case I I am very thankful that somebody finally has challenge the constitutionality of a tax that I've always thought was unconstitutional I've never paid it myself you can't you know you can't challenge the tax until you've had to pay it so he's in a perfect situation now because he's being charged with evading it so now he's they've opened the door for this constitutional Challenge and I hope it goes all the way and he wins and and and this this could do a lot to making the country uh a much much better place by by forcing the politicians to treat the citizens a lot nicer knowing that if they don't they could leave without having to pay any kind of exit attacks for the privilege of of of leaving
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