Politics & Power Quote by Alan Keyes

Keyes isn’t just making a tax-policy suggestion; he’s staging a constitutional morality play. By naming the 16th Amendment (the legal basis for the federal income tax), he frames modern government as an illegitimate tenant in America’s house, living off a loophole rather than consent. “Return to the original system” is the tell: it’s restorationist language, the kind that implies we didn’t evolve into the present so much as fall into it.

The rhetoric works because it compresses a sprawling argument about state capacity into a clean villain-and-cure story. Income tax becomes the symbol of intrusive federal power: surveillance of personal earnings, bureaucratic reach, redistribution, and a permanent expansion of what Washington can do. Tariffs and duties, by contrast, sound old-fashioned, almost frictionless: pay at the border, keep private life private, and force government to live within tighter limits. It’s a vision of constraint dressed up as tradition.

The subtext, though, is a political wager. Replacing income taxes with tariffs shifts the burden away from high earners and toward consumers, often more regressively. It also ties federal revenue to trade volume, inviting volatility and, historically, protectionism. Keyes is appealing to a conservative audience that sees the New Deal-and-after federal state as an overgrown organism; repealing the 16th is shorthand for shrinking it.

Context matters: this line fits a post-Reagan, anti-tax constitutionalism that treats amendments not as national decisions but as mistakes to be rolled back. It’s less nostalgia than insurgency, using “original” as a weapon.