Here at Homeland Stupidity, no government cow is sacred. Waste, fraud, abuse, plain incompetence, and bad policy are all fair game. As a result, government officials in the higher pay grades tend to be displeased with what they read here. As a general rule, the higher the pay grade, the more displeased.

Therefore, I was not at all surprised to hear that high-ranking officials in the U.S. Marshals Service were upset with Sunday’s published story regarding their Office of Protective Intelligence. I was, however, surprised to spot two surveillance teams while going about my business Tuesday night.

Before I get into that, though, I want to make a clarification regarding the Department of Justice inspector general’s report (PDF) on the OPI which was published last Wednesday. The report does state that “USMS’s efforts to improve its capabilities to assess reported threats and identify potential threats languished” between 2004 and early 2007, with a significant backlog of reported threats to be assessed in 2006. In fairness to the rank and file, the report also states that they cleared the backlogs and that OPI is revising its threat assessment process to be faster and more efficient. Those changes are set to take place this month.

However, the report also notes that there is no formal process in place “to develop protective intelligence that identifies potential threats against the judiciary. . . . USMS was slow to staff the protective intelligence function and has not developed a strategy to effectively collect, analyze, and share information.” This means that USMS’s ability to identify previously unknown threats is limited. Since, as the report acknowledges, less than 10 percent of individuals who “attacked or approached to attack a prominent public figure” communicated a threat beforehand, developing this capability is critical to providing effective protection.

As you’ll recall, an OPI inspector is here in New Hampshire attempting to assess Manchester resident Rob Jacobs. That is, of course, after he assessed several completely unrelated people who just happen to be Free State Project members. Jacobs and the inspector have yet to meet in person, as they have been unable to agree on a meeting place. After marshals failed to meet with him on Saturday, Jacobs attempted to set up a second meeting for Tuesday evening, which the inspector declined to attend. He apparently objected to the venue, Murphy’s Taproom, a local restaurant where Free State Project members regularly meet.

Tuesday evening at Murphy’s Taproom, instead of the inspector, several of us spoke to a local reporter, who wrote a more neutral story than this one.

We certainly need to do away with the whole sorry system of income taxation. Just throw Title 26 out. (And a few billion useless pork-barrel government programs along with it.) But doing violence to government officials won’t get rid of the income tax, and it will result in crackdowns the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country in recent memory, or perhaps ever.

Interestingly, those same high-ranking government officials are upset at the level of publicity this story has been getting in general, and especially with the publication of videos documenting the experiences of the people here who feel they were harassed and threatened by the marshals and “Treasury agents.” It’s been my experience that, for the most part, it’s the bad apples in government who object to having their actions publicized.

And perhaps the surveillance teams at Murphy’s got wind of some of this. Among the people they got to see while the Republican debate played on the TV screens were a state representative, an off-duty police officer planning a run for state representative next year, two local candidates for alderman in two different wards in the city, several individuals starting a newspaper, local Republican and Democratic party officials, and a couple dozen quite ordinary people who are sick and tired of big government spending their children into debt and invading their private lives at every turn.

Ideas, they say, are bulletproof. And the idea of freedom, to be left alone when you’ve harmed nobody and to have no more government than is necessary to protect your right to be left alone when you’ve harmed nobody, has persisted throughout human history. The income tax flies in the face of everything we understand about what it means to be free. It is indeed a form of slavery, involuntary servitude of the worst kind: the fruits of your labor are not only taken by force, they are taken by a group of strangers you have no effective way to reason or plead with. It will eventually be swept into the dustbin of history along with many other methods of tyranny which have preceded it.

But the battle is for the hearts and minds of those enslaved by it, many of whom don’t even know they are enslaved, and whom along with us would be freed. It is a battle of ideas. Bullets have no place here. It is the state which uses bullets and other means of violence to enforce its tyranny over the people. This is why freedom will ultimately prevail: the state’s bad ideas and their bad actions cannot stand in the harsh light of day.