YES!

Drudge is reporting that Speaker Hastert is on board with getting rid of the IRS!

It's about time a politican publicly announced such a move. It would be a great boon to the economy, as well as a massive step forward in reducing the size of government.

Consider: when the IRS goes, 1) a huge number of federal employees, who add nothing to the economy and instead make the lives of hardworking Americans miserable, will enter the private sector and be productive for a change; 2) an unbelievable amount of federal dollars will be freed up, perhaps to pay down the debt in the short run but in the long run this must translate to lower taxes; 3) the economy will grow at its natural rate, free of some of the stifling effects of government involvement; 4) this could be the beginning of a cultural shift, as people begin to realize that it is the market that creates wealth (as opposed to government, which can redistribute at best) and individual citizens who are best suited to spend it helping their fellow citizens.

As a related point: I picked up The Burden of Bad Ideas last night and read something very interesting. The NY Times, starting in the early 20th century, ran a feature called the "One Hundred Neediest Cases" every Christmas. It was a list of, as the title implies, the 100 worst hard-luck stories of the year; each ended with an appeal to the charity of its readers and a dollar figure that would solve the problem for this or that unlucky soul.

The feature mainained a very moralistic spin for a long time. Those who brought misery upon themselves by being thieves, drunks, etc. were not listed. The majority of the cases, consequently, were widows and orphans who struggled to make the best of their circumstances but needed a little help in the meantime. Perhaps the oldest of several children fell sick when she was the sole bread-winner of the family (as her parents were either sick or dead), and needed an operation. The people profiled in these stories were not "charity cases;" they had stumbled a bit on the rough road of life and needed a hand back up so they could continue to provide for themselves. There were always massive responses; some wealthier readers of the Times would even sponsor individual people and pay for the entire operation, or adopt the child of an unwed and unfit teen mother (back then anyone irresponsible enough to become pregnant while unwed was considered unfit, and the feature always pushed the mother to give the child up rather than bring the baby up in a broken home). Some readers even proposed marriage to widows suddenly forced to raise their children alone.

Once the 60s rolled around, the feature took on a different flavor (though that's a story for another time).

The bottom line is, why don't any conservative papers or magazines do this anymore?