Tax Law Forces Sale of Collectible

August 22, 2007

Please bear with my rhetorical anecdote:

Years ago, I found a watch in my father’s “junk drawer.” You know, the drawer where a man keeps his wallet, keys, golf tees, receipts, buttons that can’t be matched to a shirt, and various other baubles and trinkets of practically no use to anyone? Anyways, the watch became mine via abandonment and right of discovery, but it wasn’t keeping time very well. We had it cleaned and tuned at a local jeweler, who informed us that all of the inner workings of the watch were 18k gold, and that it was worth a pretty penny or two.

Should I have paid a tax on the “found” watch, which has appreciated significantly since he purchased it in Austria in 1971, when the price of gold was, historically speaking, very low? How about a tax on the Barry Sanders rookie card (Fleer, 1991) that I won from a vending machine at the local sports collectible store back in 1993?

Now contrast these instances with the case of a certain Mr. Murphy, the young man who was (un)lucky enough to catch Barry Bonds’ record-breaking home-run ball, which I first mentioned two weeks ago:

“It wasn’t hard. It was simple math. I’m upset by the decision I had to make,” Murphy said. “I wanted to keep it. I’m young. I don’t have the bank account. … It would have cost me a lot more to keep it.”

It’s sleight of hand: the IRS is imposing the tax in order to cause Murphy to sell the ball, in order that the IRS may collect the revenue. The tax law is forcing the sale of a cherished, nearly priceless collectible, for the sake of government coffers.

If you want to argue that I should pay a tax if and when I decide to sell the watch (not likely) or the football card (equally unlikely), or even that Murphy should pay a tax if and when he decides to sell the cherished home-run baseball, that’s a completely different argument, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll concede* that point: receipts acquired thusly are certainly income in some sense.

The acquisition of an inanimate object like a baseball or a watch or a football card, however, is most definitely not income. Shenanigans, to the nth degree.

*I will of course, still disagree in principle with “income taxation,” but that’s an altogether different argument.


Posted in: Taxation is Theft

Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. dwz August 22, 2007 9:37 pm

    You just don’t want to pay your fair share, do you?

    :=)

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