Nonresident-Alien
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.
Brushaber held the income tax constitutional under the Sixteenth Amendment — not that Frank Brushaber was a nonresident alien
*The Federal Zone* claims that the Supreme Court in Brushaber treated Frank Brushaber as a nonresident alien and limited the income tax to a 'federal zone.' The Court's actual opinion contains neither holding. The case upheld the income tax as constitutional under the Sixteenth Amendment, addressed three constitutional challenges (apportionment, due process, geographical uniformity), and did not specify Brushaber's citizenship beyond a single procedural acknowledgment that 'averments as to citizenship and residence' had been made. The reinterpretation fails at primary source.
Brushaber: What the Case Actually Says
*Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co.*, 240 U.S. 1 (1916), is the most-cited and most-misread case in the alternate-tax movement. *The Federal Zone* and its derivatives read Brushaber as treating Frank Brushaber as a 'nonresident alien' and limiting the income tax to a 'federal zone.' The Court's actual opinion contains neither of those holdings. What it contains is a careful resolution of the *Pollock* / Sixteenth Amendment tension that produces the opposite conclusion: the Sixteenth Amendment removed the source-of-income consideration from the apportionment analysis, leaving the income tax operative as a constitutional indirect tax. Layered onto that, the IRC's own definition of 'nonresident alien' at 26 U.S.C. § 7701(b)(1)(B) — 'an individual who is neither a citizen of the United States nor a resident of the United States' — forecloses the territorial-volunteer reading at the statutory level. The Brushaber reinterpretation fails at primary source.
'Nonresident Alien' in the Internal Revenue Code
26 U.S.C. § 7701(b)(1)(B) defines 'nonresident alien' as 'an individual who is neither a citizen of the United States nor a resident of the United States.' The definition has two requirements, both necessary: non-citizenship and non-residency. A U.S. citizen — by the express text of an Act of Congress enacted in 1984 — cannot be a nonresident alien for IRC purposes. This single sentence forecloses the territorial-volunteer reading that *The Federal Zone* and its derivatives depend on.
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.