A fellow who may or may not be called James Clifford Hanna submitted an affidavit to a Yukon court to explain why he has not been paying any taxes recently.
It amounts to the argument that the birth certificate issued upon his birth created a legal entity termed a “natural person” to which he has no necessary relationship. I am leaving out certain of the more entertaining subtleties.
Anyway, I’d love to hear this particular argument taken apart piece by piece as though it were serious. I’m sure some of our legal beavers will want to get right on it.
The argument seems to be that he, as a “free will man”, is distinct from, and therefore isn’t responsible for the debts of, the “legal identity”, which has no money because it’s merely an abstraction created by the state. Voila, he owes no taxes.
IANAL, but I would think that a logical response would be along the lines of: “Fine, you have no legal identity. Therefore, you have no legal title to this property whose owner is officially identified as the legal identity. Therefore, we’re going to take such-and-such amount of this property as taxes. Ta.”
Seems to me you can’t have it both ways, even if you accept the absurd distinction between the “free will man” and the “legal identity”. Either the “legal identity” owns the money and therefore owes taxes on it like all the rest of us “legal identities”, or the “free will man” owns the money and therefore, since he is intrinsically devoid of any legal identity and consequently any legal existence, has no legal title to it.
IANAL, either, but - in the UK, at least - he’s a “natural person” from the moment of his birth, and can’t do anything about that - apart from jumping under a bus, of course. The registration of the birth certificate just confirms that he’s entitled to all the rights and duties of a citizen, it doesn’t create those duties.
It seems, from reading the affadavit (secondary point - if he’s not a person, how does he have the ability to swear an affadavit?), that what he’s really trying to do is renounce his Canadian citizenship, insofar as being a Canadian citizen obliges him to pay taxes.
I also note that in Para 3 of the affadavit, he claims to have a “contract of agency” with the “natural person” - however, only persons (legal or natural), not “free will men”, can enter into contracts. If he has a contract, then he’s a person of some sort.
It can’t really be, though, because it isn’t serious. Hanna’s assertion that his birth certificate creates a separate “person” is simply false. There is no such concept in our law.
As Kimstu points out he is playing bait and switch, claiming that his legal identity owes all the taxes but owns no property, while his “Free will” identity owns all the property and owes no tax, which is self-contradictory; if the agent the Crown identifies is the one that owes the tax, isn’t that the same agent the Crown identifies under the same civil law that he’s acquired all his property under the prorection of? But in any case, it’s irrelevant. Canadian law doesn’t make any distinction like that.
Anti-tax Nutbar Theories are tried every year or so, in Canada, the USA, UK, everywhere. They’re always insane. They all come down to “I want to play in the sandbox but I refuse to share my toys.”
A friend of mine had a similar idea for dodging insurance payments. He had gotten his hands on a crackpot book that said that because the highways are for free for the use of all, it is thus illegal to charge people for insurance. It never occured to him that the insurance isn’t for the highway, it’s for the car… the specialized piece of equipment that you have to have a license and insurance in order to operate.
I would find it funny if the “natural person” was acknowledged and then deemed to be a squatter and kicked off his own land.
Even if the Crown created a separate entity as James claimed, it’s irrelevant.
The entity the Crown is charging is James, whatever the words the government
uses to describe him.
Any country with taxes is gonna have this. Especially ones whose origins are in British common law, which gives you such a long and varied bunch of laws to base a lunatic argument upon. It’s possible to mix and match your legal references to support almost any position, especially if (as anti-tax people are prone to do) you interpret language in a way no court has ever interpreted it.
I remember one US-based anti-tax idiot who said the income tax was illegal because some line in the tax code read that the tax applied “in all 50 states, including Washington, D.C.” He decided this line meant that the jurisdiction of the tax was ONLY Washington, D.C., because it didn’t say “including Washington, D.C., Alaska, Alabama, Arizona…” etc etc. I guess if you squint your eyes and hit your head with a hammer you can see how it could be read that way; the problem being that no court has ever interpreted it that way, and if they ever did they’d just change the text of the law.
I’m no fan of big taxes; Canada taxes us way too much for marginally very little benefit, and could cut taxes quite a bit without losing any societal benefit, as long as it was done with some degree of intelligence. Those, however, are matters of degree and should be decided politically; should the top bracket be 29% or 33%? Should the sales tax be 5 or 7 or 10? Should we allow dedications for mortgage interest or not? All valid arguments, and that’s why we have elections. But we need some tax, however high or low you might decide it should be. People who don’t want to pay taxes at all are thieves and leeches. All these complicated arguments come down to “I Want A Free Ride.”
Practically all arguments of this kind to date, plus many others you wouldn’t have imagined in a million years anybody would ever take seriously, are explained and refuted on attorney Bernard Sussman’s “Idiot Legal Arguments” page – http://www.militia-watchdog.org/suss1.asp.
It should be noted, however, that this page is of very little value - it doesn’t excplain why the arguments are stupid, but just quotes courts saying they’re stupid - and is widely regarded as the worst-formatted informational web page in the history of electrons. It’s nearly impossible to read.
This is the “straw man” argument that originated with anti-tax protesters in the US and has migrated north.
Their argument (and I’m being generous in dignifying it that way) is that the issuance of a birth certificate by a provincial or state authority really creates an artificial legal entity, which they call the “straw man”, which is under government control and that is the basis for liability to pay taxes, to obey laws, etc. They argue that if you disclaim any connexion with the “straw man”, laws do not apply to you.
One sub-set of their argument is that names on government and court documents in all caps refer to the “straw man”, and names in traditional initial cap, followed by lower case, refer to the real person, so simply by reciting their names to the court as “Capital J, lower-case o, lower-case h, lower-case n, capital S, lower-case m, lower-case i, lower-case t, lower-case h” is enough to take them out of the jurisdiction of the court.
That’s a very much condensed version of what is normally 8 or 10 pages of rambling, idiotic pseudo-legalese. It normally gives me a headache when I get one of these files and have to wade through them.
Bottom line is that most courts that I’ve appeared in on these things just file them, dismiss the arguments, and move on to the real legal issue.
This is exactly the kind of semi-coherent quasi-legalistic batshit-crazy tax-protestor argument that has been around - and shot down by every court to consider it - since time immemorial.
A case I worked on that addressed many of such arguments: Ohio v. Bob Manashian Painting (2002), 121 Ohio Misc.2d 99.
A useful quotation for considering such arguments: “Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.” Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir. 1986), 791 F.2d 68, 69.
The registration of the birth certificate just confirms that he’s entitled to all the rights and duties of a citizen, it doesn’t create those duties.