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If he had succeeded in killing her, would he have been an argument for the FairTax?

March 18, 2010

When a desperate loser killed an IRS agent and himself with an airplane in Texas, some people foolishly used him as a symbolic victim of the income tax, or the software industry's rules on independent contractors, or something. Congressman Steve King said that if we had just listened to him and enacted the FairTax national sales tax, that murder-suicide would never have happened.

Earlier this week another loser's battle with the IRS came to a quieter end. An appeals court upheld Floridian Randy Nowak's conviction for attempting to hire a contract killer to kill an IRS agent. Mr. Nowak apparently felt the agent was getting too close to his offshore accounts. For good measure he wanted to burn down the local IRS office.

You don't need to be a defender of the tax code to realize that murdering IRS agents is a bad thing. You don't see anybody using Mr. Nowak's plight -- he'll probably never be out of prison alive -- as an argument against the tax law. Still, the only difference between Mr. Nowak and the Austin tax kamikaze is that Mr. Nowak failed. That should give pause to anybody who views the Austin guy as something other than a selfish loser.

Cite: Nowak, CA-11, No. 09-11329