EDITORIAL - There was a time when the month of April was looked forward to as the month when winter's back was finally broken, when the first meadow-flowers appeared and the farmer's plow broke the thawed soil. Nowadays, April has become a month dreaded by millions of Americans, the season when the taxman makes his ever-more-burdensome exactions.

For many, paying taxes once a year no longer suffices. Large numbers of Americans live with the IRS and the tax accountant as their nearly constant companions, making tax payments quarterly, and under the perpetual threat of audits and penalties.

We are serfs in our own land, under a system of taxation that demands more and more of our time and money. Federal and state taxes, particularly the income tax, have created an entire non-productive sector of lawyers, accountants, preparers, and tax software companies that exist only to help Americans more easily subsidize their serfdom.

How have we come to such a pass? In the early days of our Republic, Americans paid no direct taxes to the federal government whatsoever, and few forms of state or even local tax existed.

Americans remembered that taxation without representation was the spark that kindled the War of Independence, and had no intention of repeating the oppressions of the British government.

In those days, the long list of taxes provided by Blackstone in the first volume of his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England was regarded as a caution on how not to abuse the power to tax. Blackstone describes taxes and licensing fees as diverse as window-taxes and coach-licenses (the 18th-century equivalent of our driver's license), as well as a vigorously-enforced system of internal excises or sales taxes, whose "rigor and arbitrary proceedings ... seem hardly compatible with the temper of a free nation."

Yet one is left with the impression that taxes and licensing fees in Blackstone's England were not nearly as pervasive as they are in modern America. Corporations are taxed, and taxed heavily. Licensing fees are almost universally accepted in many trades and professions, and sales taxes are a way of life for most.

Such modern innovations as the progressive income tax, the capital gains tax, and the inheritance tax were not even contemplated in the 18th century. The first was popularized in Karl Marx's infamous Communist Manifesto as one of the so-called "ten planks of communism."

The average American pays somewhere between one third and one half of his entire income in taxes. If he wants to be self-employed (as most Americans were, prior to the First World War), he is penalized with having to pay twice as much in FICA exactions; many Americans, understandably, despair of being their own bosses, preferring to be employed by another who will shoulder half the burden of social security and Medicare "deductions" on their behalf. Thus is the mentality of serfdom encouraged, and free enterprise stifled by an increasingly feudal tax regime that would have horrified the Founders.

All of this is a consequence of departing from the wise Constitution our forefathers gave us. To feed the appetite of unconstitutional government, the Constitution was amended to provide for a perpetual, graduated income tax.

To create political pressure for more and more creative types of taxation, the size and scope of government was increased. Calls inside the Beltway to eliminate or even reduce any of the onerous forms of federal taxation are muted; our elected leaders know perfectly well that, absent a heavy income tax, an estate tax, a capital gains tax, or a social security cash cow, government would not be able to exist for long in its present dimensions.

The solution is to limit government to its delineated Constitutional roles. Such a reduction, it has been estimated, would very quickly allow us to pay off our astronomical national debt, and the resulting lean, mean federal machine would function very well on a diet of duties and excises, just as the original Constitution contemplated.

Our current leaders, of course, have no intention of doing this. Left to their own devices, they will continue to lengthen the vassalage of the American citizenry until we are working 12 months a year to serve our government, instead of the four to five months a year we now work just to pay our taxes.

At a deeper level, taxes are a reflection of the spiritual crisis engulfing our land. As the Savior once put it, we cannot serve both God and mammon. But as we misplace more and more of our trust in man, and in government in particular, rather than in God, we sink deeper and deeper into bondage both spiritual and material.

May God grant that we as a nation can yet summon the strength to throw off the shackles with which we have allowed our government to bind us, and cease to serve mammon. When that day arrives, maybe April will once again be a month of daffodils and sunshine.