Politics & Power Quote by Alan Keyes

Keyes frames the income tax not as policy but as an alien ideology: a "socialist experiment" smuggled into American life. The phrasing is doing culture-war work. "Experiment" suggests a lab gone wrong, something imposed on unwilling subjects; "failed" preloads the verdict so the audience never has to ask, failed for whom and by what measure. The argument isn’t technical economics, it’s moral ownership. When he says government "had no claim to our income", he’s sanctifying wages as pre-political property, then casting taxation as a kind of trespass.

The timeline is a rhetorical trick with a purpose. "Just 80 years ago" compresses the long arc of U.S. state-building into a recent rupture, even though federal taxation and coercive revenue mechanisms predate the 16th Amendment by a century, and income taxes existed in wartime. By narrowing legitimacy to "sales, excise, and tariff taxes", he invokes a nostalgic civics lesson: the Founders’ government as small, clean, and externally funded. The subtext: modern government is not merely bigger, it’s less American.

Context matters: Keyes emerged in late-20th-century conservative politics, when opposition to federal power, the IRS, and redistribution became identity signals as much as policy preferences. The quote is calibrated for that audience. It converts tax policy into a story of lost innocence and reclaimed sovereignty, turning a complex fiscal instrument into a symbol of personal freedom under siege.