You say that 'The "gun" is an abstraction to clarify the difference between government and economic power', but in point of fact you seem to be having difficulty with abstractions. I tried to take you through several shades of grey involving different instruments of coercion, to show a continuum of coercion, but your bipolar filter still insists on sorting them into just two polarized categories. Business good, government bad, no matter that they use fundamentally the same tactics.

You're trying to portray business as a disconnected string of isolated entities to maintain the myth of choice, e.g. your homily about being able to choose from among a variety of credit cards. Yet just recently, in the discussion of MedFICO, you encountered the "conspiracy", or less hyperbolically, the "collaboration" of all businesses to form a united front when it comes to credit. In point of fact, you can be denied any choice of credit card, and even the ability to have a bank account (the banking industry has its own blackball system, ChexSomething); and with MedFICO the health industry gains the same power to grant or deny their services across the whole industry.

I'm not ignoring the IRS, but what seems to be bugging you is that I'm not singling it out for special hatred. I'm treating all government and all business even-handedly, and judging them by their actions and influences, not their respective places in the Winger pantheon of good and evil deities.

But let's use the IRS as the standard for comparison anyway. Despite your wild-eyed hyperbole about guns as a symbol for physical coercion, in point of fact very few people ever serve jail time for transgressing against the IRS. The IRS levees financial penalties and imposes sanctions such as liens on property.

What does business do when you transgress against it? It levees financial penalties, ranging from high interest rates (when you're allowed to use credit), bad check charges, late fees, overdraft penalties; and imposes sanctions such as liens and blackballing through the credit agencies. While the IRS might use aggressive collection techniques, in general they don't hold a candle to the techniques used by private collection agencies, who are essentially bounty hunters for business; and who, unlike IRS auditors, personally benefit by receiving a cut of what they collect.

But here's the fundamental difference that you're resolutely ignoring: The IRS, as a government agency, is legally accountable to us. If you think it's picking on you, you have many recourses, starting with appeal to your Congresscreature, an ombudsman, and even the press; and a statutory appeals system that can keep the IRS at bay for years.

What's your recourse when business picks on you? That depends entirely on whether you personally have the resources to fight back on their turf: You too can retain a $250/hour lawyer to fight for you...if you can afford it. Otherwise, in most cases, people just fold, pay the unjustified penalty or the disputed amount, and write it off as the overhead of living in a capitalist society. If somebody materially harms you by putting false information into your credit report, tough--the burden of proof is on you to prove they're wrong.

I've personally fought the IRS and won. They're not the fantastickal supernatural invincible demons your fears conjure up. Shuffle the papers into an arrangement that favors your case, and they fold like wet toilet tissue.

Your fears are not a valid basis for a rational belief system.