Matrix
The movement claim that 'resident' in IRC § 7701(b) means a federal functionary rather than a person physically dwelling in the United States is unsupported
A recurring move in alternate-tax theory reads 'resident' in 26 U.S.C. § 7701(b) as a functionary term — by analogy to 'resident physician,' 'resident agent,' or 'resident commissioner' — and treats 'resident alien' as a foreign national in U.S. employment or office rather than someone physically present in the country. The reading has no support in IRC text (the substantial-presence test counts days, not duties), no support in cross-domain legal usage (federal civil procedure, state taxation, voter eligibility, family-law residency requirements all use the dwelling sense), and no support in the etymology the reading invokes (the functionary uses of 'resident' historically *preserve* the dwelling sense rather than departing from it — early-15c ecclesiastical 'resident' clergy were precisely those who actually lived at the benefice). The claim's premises do not survive contact with the textual sources it claims to draw from.
The movement claim that ordinary Americans living in the fifty states are 'nonresident aliens' for IRC purposes is unsupported
A central conclusion of *The Federal Zone* and its derivative texts is that ordinary U.S. citizens living in the fifty states are 'nonresident aliens' for IRC purposes — taxable, on the argument's account, only on U.S.-source / effectively-connected income under § 871, rather than on worldwide income under § 1. The IRC's own definition of 'nonresident alien' at 26 U.S.C. § 7701(b)(1)(B) closes the cell against U.S. citizens by express conjunctive text: an individual is a nonresident alien only if 'such individual is neither a citizen of the United States nor a resident of the United States.' Both negatives are required. A U.S. citizen necessarily fails the first. The accompanying regulation — 26 CFR § 1.1-1(b), 'all citizens of the United States, wherever resident...are liable to the income taxes' — confirms the worldwide-tax rule. The claim has no support in the operative statutory text.
The Citizen/Alien × Resident/Nonresident Matrix
The IRC distinguishes individual taxpayers along two axes: U.S. citizenship (citizen vs. alien) and U.S. residence (resident vs. nonresident). The four resulting cells map onto real Code sections with distinct tax bases — citizens and resident aliens taxed worldwide under § 1, nonresident aliens taxed on U.S.-source / effectively-connected income under § 871. The Matrix is real; what the alternate-tax movement adds — moving U.S. citizens in the fifty states into the nonresident-alien cell — is not in the Matrix.