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Before World War II, when income tax rates were comparatively low, most people who owed tax simply paid it in a lump sum in March. Tax day was a big annoying occasion on which the nation took a moment to be bummed about how much the government cost. 

Enter Hitler. And a young, brash economist named Milton.

In 1995, Reason’s Brian Doherty conducted a wide-ranging interview with Friedman and asked him, essentially, “Daddy, what did you do during the war?”:

Reason: You were involved in the development of the withholding tax when you were doing tax work for the government in 1941–43?

Friedman: I was an employee at the Treasury Department. We were in a wartime situation. How do you raise the enormous amount of taxes you need for wartime? We were all in favor of cutting inflation. I wasn’t as sophisticated about how to do it then as I would be now, but there’s no doubt that one of the ways to avoid inflation was to finance as large a fraction of current spending with tax money as possible.

In World War I, a very small fraction of the total war expenditure was financed by taxes, so we had a doubling of prices during the war and after the war. At the outbreak of World War II, the Treasury was determined not to make the same mistake again.

You could not do that during wartime or peacetime without withholding. And so people at the Treasury tax research department, where I was working, investigated various methods of withholding. I was one of the small technical group that worked on developing it.

One of the major opponents of the idea was the IRS. Because every organization knows that the only way you can do anything is the way they’ve always been doing it. This was something new, and they kept telling us how impossible it was. It was a very interesting and very challenging intellectual task. I played a significant role, no question about it, in introducing withholding. I think it’s a great mistake for peacetime, but in 1941–43, all of us were concentrating on the war.

I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn’t found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.

By making taxes relatively invisible and making paying them relatively painless, Friedman paved the way for the current status quo, in which significant portions of salaried workers’ incomes are handed over to state and federal governments without much fuss. Tax refunds, which feel like a delightful windfall to those who receive them, complicate the matter further by making many Americans feel like they are getting a gift on tax day, rather than giving their hard-earned money to the government under threat of violence. 

To review:

1) War is the heath of the state. 

2) All your heroes are flawed.

Happy Tax Day! 

P.S. Ease the sting of this revelation by reading the rest of that interview to be reminded of all the great stuff Friedman did, too.

I don’t have a candidate in the Republican presidential race, but I do have an outcome to root for. It seems more and more likely that the GOP will begin its convention without a clear-cut nominee, and I hope that is in fact what happens. No matter which clown gets the crown, let him scrap for it in Cleveland.

There was a time when the whole point of a political convention was to select a candidate, but those days ended long ago. The last semi-serious attempt to derail a nominee’s victory at a convention was in 1980, when Ted Kennedy tried to change the rules so delegates pledged to Jimmy Carter could vote for him instead. The last convention that began with any real uncertainty about who would win it was in 1976, when Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were still battling over delegates as the confab started. The last convention that actually took multiple ballots to pick a winner was in 1952, way back at the beginning of the TV era, when the Democrats went through three rounds of voting before settling on Adlai Stevenson as their standard-bearer. (That was also the last time a major party picked a nominee who wasn’t a declared candidate when the convention began.) Genuinely contested conventions continue to take place in the third-party realm—I’ve been to two of them—but not in the parties that most people pay attention to.

As the political importance of the conventions declined, they devolved into increasingly empty rituals, a quadrennial rite where the party papers over its members’ differences and broadcasts an infomercial to the nation. By 2012, things had decayed to the point where a candidate who had not dropped out of the race and had dozens of delegates supporting him—Ron Paul—was barred from speaking to the convention unless he agreed to submit his remarks in advance and to endorse the nominee. (He refused.) We were a long way from the days when Eugene McCarthy could address the Democratic convention in August 1968 yet not get around to deciding he’d vote for the guy who beat him til late October.

I have no nostalgia for the practice of party bosses picking nominees in smoke-filled convention rooms; the best alternative to today’s sorts of corruption and manipulation is not to return to the corruption and manipulation of yesteryear. But if we strip a party of the power to stage a completely choreographed spectacle, that just might inject some substance into the proceedings. At the very least, it would let the seams show. What a pleasure it would be to turn on the TV during convention week and see some actual unscripted disagreement.

A Pittsburgh public school principal is urging parents to talk to their kids about a “serious safety issue.” No, it’s not guns, or even lookalike guns. The principal is worried about squirt guns, which are absolutely prohibited at Hempford Area Senior High School. 

Their use outside of school grounds is also frowned upon, according to principal Kathy Charlton, who recently sent a letter home to parents warning them about “very dangerous” squirt gun games being played by students. 

Hempford seniors are engaged in a continuous game of “Squirt Gun Assassin,” according to CBS Pittsburgh. The game involves—you guessed it—teenagers shooting each other with water guns. Charlton’s letter to parents claims that participants have been known to chase each other in cars, and some money has changed hands. But the letter does not document a single tangible incident in which a kid got hurt. 

“We hope you will speak to your child to urge them to discontinue participation in this game,” wrote Charlton. “We appreciate your help and support, because we do not want to see anyone tragically injured or harmed due to participation in this activity.” 

No one wants kids to get tragically injured. But at the same time, no one should want them to lead dull, sheltered lives. Playing with squirt guns is a natural, time-honored childhood tradition—not something to be feared or discouraged. 

So, Pittsburgh-area parents: Please don’t talk to your kids about Squirt Gun Assassin. Tell them to go outside and have fun for a change. 

A 60 Minutes segment on smartphone hacking that ran over the weekend seemed mostly designed to make the average consumer scared about the state of his or her cybersecurity. Oddly, despite having the involvement of tech privacy-oriented congressman Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) onboard, the segment, by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, did not engage in any discussion about the big, current encryption debate happening on Capitol Hill, nor really any federal policies that might impact personal cybersecurity either positively or negatively.

Instead, the segment has “white hat” hackers in Germany break into a phone 60 Minutes provided to Lieu, given only his phone number. They succeed and are able to listen into his phone calls and access the content of his phone. Similarly, a group of hackers at Las Vegas’ annual DEF CON hacking conference were able to trick Alfonsi into connecting her phone into a spoof wi-fi connection (which she thought was her hotel’s wi-fi) and access her phone data, and through that personal credit card data.

It isn’t until the end of the 13-minute segment when it delves into who is most endangered by these cybersecurity weaknesses where we get into the political scope—Lieu himself mentions he had been called by President Barack Obama on his cell phone last year (not the one provided for this experiment, obviously). If the president had called this phone in Lieu’s possession, it would have given hackers potential inroads to communications by the president of the United States.

The ultimate message of the segment is that our data is only as secure as technology is able to keep up with potential causes of breaches. An accurate assessment, obviously, but given Lieu’s involvement in the segment and his record on opposing unaccountable federal data gathering, it is a little bit odd that given the current tech debate, 60 Minutes did not get into the role encryption plays in helping prevent the examples we’re shown—or if it even would have made a difference. Would end-to-end encryption (like WhatsApp has started offering) have prevented the hackers from accessing the content of data even if the hackers got digital access to these phones?

If better encryption is the answer to the vulnerabilities detailed in the segment, then that’s another reason to be deeply concerned by the proposed federal legislation by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) that would require tech companies to break their own encryption upon court demand in order to provide data to law enforcement. If there’s a way in, as this 60 Minutes segment showed, hackers will inevitably find it.

To the show’s credit, it does take a moment to point out that there are people in the intelligence community that are very likely perfectly fine with the existence of the vulnerabilities shown during these experiments, because they help the government get information. That they also put everybody else at risk does not seem to be a concern to them.

Lesley Stahl did do a segment on the encryption debate back in March, speaking with Pavel Durov, inventor of encrypted app Telegram, designed after dealing with pressure and censorship from Russia and the Kremlin to censor online communication from anti-Putin activists. A transcript from that segment is here.

Watch last night’s 60 Minutes segment below the fold:

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