IRS Building Crash

I read today that someone by the name of Joe Stack crashed a small private plane into the IRS building in Austin. From all the news reports, it appears that he has had a bit of a history with the IRS (in other words, the jackbooted thugs there had been harassing him for a long time). Although I have to commend him for taking action, I have to take exception with his manner of doing it. If you look at the damage to the building in the photos that have been published, it is quite obvious that the damage to the building was superficial at best. Although there are quite a few windows that will need to be replaced, the actual structure of the building was not really damaged. One thing that I noticed is that on the office right beside the point of impact, the sheetrock was still intact. I guess that just goes to show you how minimal a weapon a small aircraft makes. The fact that he only managed to kill one of the jackbooted thugs just proves this point. Hell, I would hazard to guess that he could have killed more people if he had just entered the building with an ice pick.

I suspect that the people who have a problem with what Stack did would have also stood by and done nothing while our Founding Fathers were standing up and doing what was necessary to free us from British oppression. The government that we have now does not reflect the will of the people. It reflects the will of the special interest groups. "Best government money can buy"... Although Stack made a noble gesture (in that he gave up his life for what he believed in, no matter how futile), in the grand scheme of things, it is probably worth nothing since he managed to only get rid of only a single IRS agent. Still, as far as symbolism goes, he definitely did a number cosmetically on that building. It should take them at least a couple of months to replace all the glass he broke. The IRS will just move everyone to another building and they will be back to harassing the taxpayers just like before soon enough. Although I would hope that this would be enough to get people to rise up and get the government afraid of us so that they could straighten out this mess of a tax system that we have, I doubt it...

What the IRS should learn from this experience is that if you harass someone enough, sooner or later that person will reach their breaking point. I guess the IRS is lucky that Stack did not realize how ineffective of a weapon a small personal aircraft might be. Maybe they'll realize that if you push someone so far that they feel that they have nothing else to lose, bad things can come of it. Somehow, I doubt it though...

There are those who defend the jackbooted thugs at the IRS by saying that they are "just doing their jobs" or "just following orders". Well, that's the same excuse that the death camp commanders and guards in Nazi Germany used when they were brought up on war crime charges at Nuremberg. They also claimed that they were only implementing the decisions of the people higher in the chain of command. Well, that excuse didn't work at Nuremberg and it doesn't work now.