Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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Well, at least we still had the typewriter which was lucky, since that's what Therese uses to earn most of our income. So we said, "To hell with it, we won't stay here another night," and we threw what was left of our belongings into our pickup truck and drove out to the few acres Therese happened to own here in West Virginia. We rented this old farmhouse and began construction of a home and we've been here ever since. We love it. Our. neighbors are fantastic, wonderful people. We still go into Washington two days every week where Therese works as a freelance editor and I continue my work with Community Technology. But this is where we live.

PLOWBOY: It's certainly beautiful country for the establishment of a homestead and remarkably unspoiled to be so near the large eastern cities. Tell me, if you will, a little about that house you're building.

HESS: Therese drew up most of the plans and I designed the roof. It's going to be a unique dwelling, we think.

What we did was we dug a hole back into the side of a hill and we're laying cement blocks now to form the building's walls. Then we'll backfill those walls with dirt so the house will be insulated with earth. The roof will provide a rudimentary form of solar heat like a greenhouse-and we'll supplement that with wood stoves.

The lumber we're using came from an old barn, we picked up some secondhand roofing real cheap, and we're not spending anything for labor. We can't afford to. Virtually the only dollars we have are the ones that Therese generates with her typewriter.

PLOWBOY: Why are you so dependent on her income?

HESS: Well you might say that the U.S. Government and I are at odds. About eight years ago, based on my primitive belief that our government was no longer worth supporting, I stopped paying taxes. Naturally the Internal Revenue Service took a dim view of that and its people have apparently decided that I'm a one-man movement to overthrow the government.

PLOWBOY: Are you?

HESS: As far as I'm concerned, the federal government is overthrown because the Declaration of Independence clearly states that when a government gets to be intolerable, concerned citizens should abolish it. So I wrote a letter to the government saying that it was abolished. Interestingly enough, however, the Declaration of Independence has no current legal standing. The Constitution superseded it unfortunately.

At any rate, the Feds now have a 100% lien on my income and everything I own. I can't work for a salary. I can't have a bank account, a car, or a credit card. And now that my driver's license has expired, I've discovered that I'm no longer an official person. In the eyes of some of our bureaucrats, I simply don't exist.

But I'm not discouraged. I've applied for a learner's permit and, if all goes well, I'll soon be admitted back into the human race. This isn't as easy as it sounds, though, because-to get that learner's permit-I had to prove that I was at least if And how the hell do you prove you're 16, when you're 52? Fortunately, my mother had a birth certificate and I say "fortunately" because I doubt if the Powers That Be would have taken her word for my age. God, bureaucrats can be such a pain.

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