IRS Investigations: Using Regulations to Persecute Political Foes

I recently pointed out that arbitrary regulations, like electoral liquor ban in the Philippines, can be used to harass the political opposition. 

In the US, the tax agency the IRS will reportedly be investigated for allegedly employing the said maneuver.

According to John Samples at the Cato Blog

Last Friday, a spokeswoman for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted the agency had targeted various Tea Party and related groups during the 2010 election cycle. Later in the week, an Inspector General’s report will offer an initial look at the facts of this matter. At least two congressional committees also plan investigations. 

Many people recall that the Nixon administration used the IRS to harass political opponents. Surely the IG’s report and subsequent investigations will show whether the IRS has gotten back into the business of protecting an incumbent administration from its critics.

It is not too soon, however, to recall the the campaign finance reform lobby has been calling for a crackdown on political groups since the Citizens United decision. One possibility would be that the IRS gave in pressure from the reform lobby and went after the Tea Party groups.

Was there an intention to chill speech? The timing provokes doubts: the targeting began in the spring of 2010 just as the mid-term campaign season started and ended after the election when the harassment no longer has any rationale. The long delays of approving tax status certainly slowed down the wave coming toward Congress in 2010. 66 House members lost their seats in that election. Do any sitting members owe their offices to the IRS?

Attaining social “equality” must mean equality before the law via the rule of law rather than from arbitrary edicts which picks winners and losers that engenders unintended consequences.

A timely reminder from the great Austrian economist F. A. Hayek once wrote, (bold mine)

It is the rule of law, in the sense of the rule of formal law, the absence of legal privileges of particular people designated by authority, which safeguards that equality before the law which is the opposite of arbitrary government.

A necessary, and only apparently paradoxical, result of this is that formal equality before the law is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and that any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the rule of law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. It cannot be denied that the rule of law produces economic inequality - all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way.

It may even be said that for the rule of law to be effective it is more important that there should be a rule applied always without exceptions than what this rule is.... It does not matter whether we all drive on the left- or on the right-hand side of the road so long as we all do the same. The important thing is that the rule enables us to predict other people’s behavior correctly, and this requires that it should apply to all cases - even if in a particular instance we feel it to be unjust.