Government is in an endless pursuit of new ways to tax.

It’s tough enough to pay taxes but making out the income tax forms seems to make it worse.

They use to say that the only thing the government didn’t tax was taxes. Then President Johnson invented the surtax.

. . , the power to tax involves the power to destroy . . . Chief Justice John Marshall, Supreme Court Decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, March 6, 1819.

1. This month in History: December

On December 1, 1917, a priest in Omaha, Nebraska, named Father Edward Flanagan found a unique institution of this day. It was called Boys Town, and its basic concept was centered in Father Flanagan’s firm belief that, in his words, “There is no such thing as a bad boy.” He defined the problem: it wasn’t bad boys; it was the conditions that created their problems. So he tried to put friendless boys into an environment where they could have a chance to grow up as good citizens.

On December 2, 1923, President Monroe told the European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. We remember that as the Monroe Doctrine. The same document also stated: “In the wars of the European powers, in matters relating to themselves, we have never taken part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so.” We, like all other human beings of other nationalities, like to protect what we regard as our territory. And of course we think of it in global terms.

On December 3, 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard transplanted a human heart, in an operation assisted by his brother, Marius Barnard. After a full day’s work, the operation lasted nine hours and used a team of thirty people. The patient survived for 18 days, in Capetown, South Africa.  The donor heart came from a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had been rendered brain damaged in an accident on 2 December 1967, while crossing a street in Cape Town.^[1] After securing permission from Darvall’s father to use her heart, Barnard performed the transplant. Rather than wait for Darvall’s heart to stop beating, at his brother Marius Barnard’s urging, Christiaan injected potassium into her heart to paralyse it and render her technically dead by the whole-body standard. Twenty years later, Marius Barnard recounted, “Chris stood there for a few moments, watching, then stood back and said, ‘It works.’

In this day of highlighting presidential candidates and their sex lives including President Clinton groping White House interns and President Kennedy’s well known habit of groping movie stars, (only the Kennedy brothers didn’t stop there) Barnard described in his autobiography The Second Life a one-night extramarital affair with Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida, that occurred in January 1968. During that visit to Rome he also received an audience from Pope Paul VI.

U.S. Congresswoman Ann McLane Kuster (D-NH) stated that Barnard sexually assaulted her when she was 23 years old attempting to grope her under her skirt, while seated at a business luncheon with Rep. Pete McCloskey. . . I think they made a movie about these things, “Doing what comes naturally.”