In this moment of opportunity, the serious work of political leadership that needs to be done is the work of setting before the American people the only agenda that is going to restore our freedom. We must abolish the income tax and replace it with the tax system that was intended by our Founders when this nation began - a tax system that leaves our people in control of 100% of their dollars, and that gives to the earner the first use of every dollar that he or she earns.

Abolishing the income tax should be the premier goal of all tax discussion and policy for the next several years. And, as important as this goal is at a policy level, it is perhaps just as important that conservative leaders use the debate about tax reform as an occasion to make clear to ourselves and to the American people the reasons that this change is necessary.

"A Moral Imperative"

We need to start talking about what is really going to make a difference in restoring the liberties of our people and of this nation. We should make clear at every opportunity that the income tax is a slave tax - inherently incompatible with freedom. Abolishing it is therefore not just economically feasible, it is a moral imperative if we are to meet our obligation to bequeath liberty to future generations.

This moral case against the income tax will carry the day. And by presenting the tax issue in its proper moral context, we will finally put to rest the foolish uneasiness with the moral agenda that reduces it to divisive disputes about theology or sex. The moral agenda is about self-government and how we preserve the character to sustain it.

The tax issue is a moral issue because it raises fundamental questions about the way American citizens will insist that they be treated by their government, and thus inevitably by each other. Are we a nation of grown-ups whose government is our tool, or are we a nation of children whose will and resources are subject to the control of "Big Daddy" government? This is what is at stake in the "economic" debate now beginning over tax policy.

What, concretely, should be done? We should repeal the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and thus return to the original Constitution of this country. And then we should simply abolish the tax code that inflicts the income tax on our people. We should fund the federal government through tariffs, duties and excise taxes (i.e., sales taxes) as the Founders intended.

The income tax should be replaced with the kind of taxes most people are already paying - the taxes on things we buy and that we pay only when we decide to buy them. By restoring tariffs and duties to their proper role we will also make foreign populations who benefit from access to the U.S. market share the burden of supporting the governmental system that guarantees its existence.

What will be the result of this change? Instead of being taxed before we decide how to spend our money, we will be taxed only after we decide what to do with it. And if we decide that we want to save it, we won't be taxed. If we decide that we want to invest it, we won't be taxed.

Instead of waiting upon the whim of politicians and bureaucrats, we will control our own tax burden by controlling the amount and pattern of our consumption.

In larger economic terms, an excise tax system would also impose natural limits on the rate of taxation. Politicians would have to think like business people, being careful not to raise the price of goods so high that a drastic fall in demand destroys the source of revenue. Also, if the excise tax rate on any good or service were set too high, everyone in the sector dependent on it would unite to seek relief. Instead of the "let's you and him fight" divisiveness of the income tax system, the excise tax would be a unity tax, encouraging coalitions of interests across all income levels.

An excise tax system would mean that each citizen would decide what his tax burden was going to be. Not in every respect, of course. One couldn't simply decide to pay no taxes and otherwise live as he pleased. But rather than have our tax rate and tax payment determined before and apart from any decision that we make, economic or otherwise, we would instead determine and pay our taxes as the cumulative result of many, many decisions to purchase or not to purchase taxed items in the open market.

This is what the Founders intended to be our economic situation: ordinary citizens in the driver's seat of the economic patterns of their own lives.

Liberty from the income tax would mean, of course, liberty from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). We would no longer have the IRS, because we would no longer have a tax code that requires the government to demand that we report our income to its agents and gives these agents the right to take away our homes and our goods, and to destroy the livelihood of our families, in order to improve their records at the IRS.

We would no longer have our privacy invaded by a government that was interested - officially and legally - in burrowing about in our business to find out how much we make, where we make it, and when we got it.

The Habits of a Free People

By contrast, under a sales-tax system we would not have to report the facts of our individual economic situation or choices to a living soul.

Over time, the difference in these two patterns of economic life will have - has already had - its effect on the quality and extent of the responsibility we take for our own lives. And as the Clinton Administration explores new ways of manipulating the income tax to coerce our choices through targeted tax cuts, we begin to see the next stage of the manipulation. Now we are permitted the carrot of tax relief, but only when we make the choices the government directs and dutifully report them to our master.

This manipulation has already had a chilling effect on the willingness of our moral leaders in the churches to speak out against the moral abuses being encouraged by political and judicial decisions. Fear of losing their tax-exempt status has discouraged religious leaders from their traditional role as the nation's conscience, the sparks of its passions for moral decency.

Tolerance for moral turpitude in the highest offices in the land passes without remark. Meanwhile, the virtue of charity is corrupted by the expectation of gain as people give money to get money, rather than to please the living God.

The distance the income tax has already taken us down the road to servitude can also be demonstrated by considering how rare it is for anyone even to raise the question of what right the government has to know how much money we make.

Do we ask ourselves this question anymore? We blithely file our income tax every year, putting down all kinds of details about where our money comes from and telling people in the government what our income is. Has it occurred to us to ask in the course of doing that, what right at all do they have to know this? What legitimacy there is to this law?

Let me give you an illustrative comparison. Suppose that tomorrow the government were to levy a tax on sexual activity, and were to require that, at the end of a certain time, maybe on a monthly basis, every citizen had to report all sexual activity so that the tax could be accurately assessed. Would we accept that as a legitimate requirement? Or would it occur to us to stand up and tell the government that such matters are none of its business?

We do have a lingering sense that there are certain things about our lives that ought to be private, and certain relations we have with others that ought to be private. Why is it that after many centuries in which it was understood that one's income was his private business, we accept a regime that requires that we report this private fact about our lives to a government agency?

Whatever the reasons for accepting this regime in the first place, we accept it now largely because we have lived with it for decades and become used to it. But that is to say that the income tax has managed, in 80 years, to deaden the zeal for liberty - and vigilance in its preservation - that were once synonymous with the word "American."

We must ensure that the debate on tax reform includes a serious attempt to raise these questions. In this way, we can open the eyes of our fellow citizens to the fact that the income tax is not only bad for economic reasons, and because the Founders didn't care for it and didn't write it into the Constitution. It is also bad because it is based upon a premise that destroys one of the material foundations of privacy. How can there be a private sphere without a protected source of material support for it?

A free and vigilant people should never have tolerated this for a minute. The income tax is an inherently communistic tax, because one of the prerequisites of freedom is a sphere of privacy. And if you destroy the material foundations of that sphere of privacy, you have destroyed the possibility of freedom.

Yet the income tax is based upon a premise that hands to the government what it needs to destroy the material foundation of private life.

When we treat any aspect of our lives as intrinsically the concern of the government, we implicitly begin to accept the role of government in judging and controlling that aspect. Government is a practical entity - the only reason it needs to know things is so that it can do something about them. Whenever we grant, in principle, that the government has a right to know, we are granting it a right to control.

For this reason, the income tax is a kind of universal solvent, dissolving the private and personal resolve each of us should have to control responsibly the actions we take in the acquisition and expenditure of wealth.

We have survived the income tax as long as we have because the habits of American liberty run deep, and the American people have not quickly or easily taken into their souls the habits of servitude suggested by the actions the income tax requires.

But our fitful and sporadic tax "revolts" are being patiently waited out by our leaders like the increasingly exhausted attempts of a hooked fish to break free. Line is played out, the illusion of liberty is permitted, and all the while the deep conformity of the captive to the will of the captor is secured.

We need to pause and reflect, and remember to ask the fundamental questions before it is too late. We need to resist the pressure to be concerned only about the amount or fairness of the tax burden, and start to ask instead whether the current form of taxation itself is legitimate.

And when we ask that question, we must insist that what ultimately measures the legitimacy of government policy in America is not simply the procedure by which it becomes law, and much less the revenue it produces, but the degree to which it is prudently ordered to the production and preservation of the habits and character that befit a free people.

Conservatives must show that it is not only the socialists who are able to see the moral implications of taxes. Otherwise we will not be able to lead the nation to a fundamental agreement on a wise and lasting reform of taxation.

It is time that we insist on a tax policy for grown-ups, and that means abolishing the income tax and replacing it with a tax structure whose first premise is the capacity of American citizens to make their own economic decisions responsibly.

The tax debate is an opportunity for conservatives to demonstrate the unity of the moral and economic agenda, and to demonstrate concretely the confidence we do and must have in the people of this country. It is a profoundly democratic opportunity, and thus a great duty for anyone aspiring to be an American statesman and lead this people.

We must lead this people to the abolition of the slave tax, and for the right reasons. The question of fundamental tax reform is a test of the statesmanship of our politicians and of the quality of citizenship of our people.