There is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program. Example 001: The income tax arrived in 1913 with a promise: temporary, modest, and aimed only at the very rich. The top rate sat at 7 percent on incomes above $500,000 (roughly $15 million today). Congress sold it as a surgical instrument to tax the rich. It became a chainsaw aimed at the middle class. Within five years, wartime spending pushed the top rate to 77 percent. The "temporary" emergency became the permanent architecture of American fiscal life. Politicians discovered something intoxicating: taxing income is far easier than taxing visible property, because the government intercepts your earnings before you ever touch them. Withholding, introduced in 1943, perfected this sleight of hand. You never possessed the money, so you never felt its full absence. Today the federal government collects $2.5 trillion annually through individual income taxes. The code runs to over 70,000 pages. Compliance costs Americans approximately $400 billion per year in accounting fees and lost productivity, producing nothing, building nothing, feeding no one. Every dollar seized through taxation is a dollar diverted from capital formation, from investment decisions made by people with actual skin in the game, toward decisions made by politicians managing election cycles. Mises identified the calculation problem: the state has no price signals to guide spending, so it wastes on a structural scale no private actor could sustain.