The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online

I take objection to this. The NSA stuff is indeed questionable. Reading your gmail, that's very clearly a breach. But the IRS does have legitimate interest in knowing about when money changes hands. It's kind of their job.

Let's take away some of the linkbait and media sensationalism about this article. IRS already gets a privileged amount of information on the "usual" way in which money changes hands. Bank transfers, stock sales, dividends, your paycheck, interest - they're getting that info already. So how might social media fit into this? I say if a modern day Al Capone figures out a way to launder money based on Farmville credits, yes, I want the IRS to know about it. If sites like Facebook are introducing things like payment platforms, I don't see why the IRS should not be notified that money is changing hands, the same way they are notified for other transactions. That's not the same as reading your messages.

Which brings me to another point:

> An IRS audit based on trawling public data

A fluffy MSN article about what IRS might be doing is not the same as evidence that this is actually happening. If someone has evidence of innocent people being subjected to this in any substantial number, then please, let them come forward. Absent that kind of evidence I don't find it very believable.

No, it hadn't. As I stated earlier (and cited the case in which the decision was made), tax on certain forms of income (specifically, income from sales of property) was ruled to be a direct tax requiring apportionment under the Constitution.

> An "excise tax", which was the same thing, was implemented as a workaround.

Presumably, this is a reference to the Corporate Excise Tax of 1909, which wasn't the same thing, as the Court had explicitly previously ruled that a tax on corporations that was an excise for the privilege of operating a corporation, even when assessed by income, and even when the income included income from sales of property, was not a "direct tax" under the Constitution and thus did not require apportionment.

> The income tax amendment eliminated the unconstitutionality

...of Congress taxing income from sale of property without apportionment, yes. That was the problem with the tax act that had been struck down -- the fact that it included taxes on that one particular source of income in a non-apportioned tax.

That's not what corporate personhood is. Before corporate personhood became the law of the land, people retained all their individual rights despite forming legal entities. Neither does losing those rights happen in any other western country that does not recognize corporate personhood, btw.

> It doesn't mean their corporation gets a vote or can collect food stamps.

Oh, it does mean a corporation can lobby, which is very close to voting (and statistically, way more powerful than voting).

And it means a corporation can be found guilty of criminal negligence or even criminal behaviour, and yet not a single natural person is guilty. If you look at e.g. Germany, Sweden, or Norway - if there's criminal behaviour, the person responsible for it gets indicted EVEN if they did it as an officer of a corporation.

It's a kludge because, because for the small benefit it gives (allowing a legal entity to own property, which was solved in simpler ways all around the world), it lets the natural persons in control of a corporation evade criminal liability, and allows them to legally bribe, sorry, lobby with a force that they cannot without controlling said corporation -- at least not legally.

> And I'll put U.S. free speech absolutism over most of Western Europe any day.

Care to explain what you are talking about here, compared to (e.g.) Germany, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland? If you say "most", I guess at least ONE of these countries fall in your "Western Europe" group?

Did you, or do you, have experience living in western europe and/or the US, that you base that on?

And if you're suspected of misrepresentation, they'd still have good reason to go rummaging through your publicly or legally accessible info to make their case. These steps appear independent of the details of the tax code.