Stack's manifesto offers insight into his personal journey as a tax protester - and into the large and growing movement that attracted him.
Passages of Stack's manifesto suggest that he was involved in a notorious home church scheme that was popular in the part of California where he lived before he moved to Texas, MacNab said.
Stack wrote that he was part of a group who held tax code readings and "zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful 'exemptions' that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy."
He said they had "the best high-paid experienced tax lawyers in the business."
MacNab said Stack likely was referring to a notorious scheme run by lawyers William Drexler and Jerome Daly. It was based on the idea that citizens could establish themselves as a church and gain the same tax exemptions afforded to religious institutions.
The scheme didn't work, and Drexler and Daly were disbarred and imprisoned. If this was the operation Stack was referring to, it may have been a turning point in his life. He wrote:
"That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my
retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie."
This inspired him to take action, write to politicians and meet with likeminded anti-tax protesters. He wrote: "I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity."
His anti-tax and anti-government beliefs may also have been fueled by Section 1706, an obscure and relatively unknown change in the tax code that focused on his industry and went into effect in 1986. Section 1706 essentially removed technical workers like software engineers from a safe haven classification of "self-employed consultant," making it easier for the IRS to challenge how Information Technology companies classified their employers.
An association of IT companies and industry professionals, now called TechServe Alliance, was created to protest the changes in tax law that it says singled out the industry.
"It made the whole business riskier for people using independent contractors because it favored the so-called employment business model," Mark Roberts, TechServe CEO, told FoxNews.com. "It created havoc on a number of folks."
Roberts was quick to condemned Stack's behavior as "an act of a very, very sick individual."
"I don't see a long-term lasting effect, just a troubled wayward person acting in response to a legitimate issue. But I don't think that actually impacts the issue," Roberts said.
Noting that Section 1706 was passed years ago, he added: "We still resent the fact that it singles out the industry, but folks have basically learned to adapt. It's kind of been awhile since this was a burning issue in the industry."
thinkahol * on 21 Aug 11One the oddities about the current economic doldrums afflicting the developed world is that if you look at the global average, this is almost certainly the best time to be alive in human history. Not only have we seen rapid per capita GDP growth in many poor countries, but even in countries that haven't gotten richer major development progress has occurred. Last, but by no means least, the world is getting much less violent: In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace. This is major good news.
