Section-871
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.