U.S. Code: Title 26 - Internal Revenue Code

This is a follow on to the prior blog entry.
 The Title 26 Code is at this link.

It was titled "Code" long before code took on the current meaning of computer code.  Essentially that is what Title 26 is.  Computer code written in natural language not an artificial language of computers.  The prior blog entry looked at transforming the natural language coding a step closer to artificial language through computer based Natural Language Processing.

Lawyers transform/translate/interpret the natural language code in their own particular natural language processing manner for use in application.  Putting lawyers in the frame of programmers using a specific language to create information structures and processes is a new way of looking at what they do with their Legal Programming Language.  Maybe the frame of hackers might be more appropriate for lawyers.  Hackers that can not only manipulate the application processes of the system but the operating system as well through the use of programmed bugs and features that exploit ambiguities for advantage.  Perhaps justice?

Not really.  Bugs and features are the same single edge of the Mobius strip of legal code.  I have made prior entries in this blog about the mystery and beauty of a Mobius strip.  It defies the general notion of binary distinction of either/or on one hand while complying with the binary distinction of something on one edge and nothing at all on the other edge.  How can the other edge be called an edge if there is nothing there to define and edge? The edge is nothing.

It is either an ultimate ambiguity or an ultimate certainty!

The trick of the legal profession is to turn ambiguity into certainty or certainty into ambiguity.  All depends on the client and which side of the line they wish to exploit for some extractive advantage.  Only one of those advantage objectives is justice but it all depends on how narrowly justice is defined and the frame it is defined in.

Wiggle room in the tax code is ambiguity.  Call it loop holes.  Application of a rigorous computer programming language to the tax code reduces ambiguity.  That is what computers do.  Legal ambiguity and practitioners of the art should be reduced to the point where it can be drown in a bath tub.  That has been said in different ways.

Tax code is concerned to a great extent with money.  Seems like a fair statement.  Money is a numerical expression.  Seems like a ripe area for picking the low hanging numerical computed fruit with some good computer based information system structure and application programming.  That is the case now.  Turbo Tax for example.  The problem is that the system specification remains written in the legacy natural language programming form.  Who does that and its ambiguity benefit?  The big money players don't use Turbo Tax.  They use Ambiguity.

Where does the ambiguity in the Internal Revenue Code exist?  Not in the little numbers that are computer based rates tightly bound to their coded computation application, like Withholding for example.  The ambiguity of the code exists at the big money level.  That is where it should be programmed out.

Nothing programs out ambiguity like a rock bottom definition of the data elements.  A definition that states exactly what money is.  The medium of exchange is a broad data element description.  Currency is an exact description.  That exact description of currency is what this blog is all about.

The current nature of currency (should make some play on words here, the idea is in the back of my mind) is like a Mobius   Strip.  Something on one edge, nothing on the other.  Debt money.  I wrote about Mobius Money in a prior entry on this blog site.  My entry is the second hit on a google: "mobius money".  Some of my concepts are so weird they stand alone or nearly alone as word phrases on the World Wide Web!

Building a computer, the machine I mean, on the physical properties of the presence or absence of a physical charge is elegant concept.  Expression in logic rather than physics of the meaning of nothing is the bridge from physical to conceptual nature of things in our minds and the abstract structures like money we construct in our minds.  It works in the natural universe of things to build a computer on the binary presence/absence of a physical thing.  Conceptually?  We dictate the absolute presence of a thing as the start point.  Nothing is conceptually nothing, worth nothing and as far as we are concerned in our conceptual world has no use except to bridge the gap between the physical world and our conceptual real world.  Everything must be something in the conceptual world, not just something constructed on the  absence of the same thing that it is.  Unless, of course, it is a meta-physical conceptual world.  That is another world that we may choose to believe in as we wish.

If money currency  is a thing that never changes from something to nothing by virtue of a pure conceptual construct then the ultimate ambiguity of money currency is eliminated.  It can then be programmed in a computer based language and operating system. 

There would remain ambiguity about what is taxable.   However, since currency essentially pervades the tax system a complete record of all transactions that involve currency and its association to account ownership and transfer among all accounts, never going out of existence as in the debt money system then the information structure and its history is established to account for currency use to the extent that there is a great reduction in ambiguity.

There is some effort to restructure the code of law using Natural Language Processing.   I wrote about that effort in a blog entry some years ago that I will have to go back and find.  What must be done is not expressing the tax code in a higher level language but parsing out the structure of the existing tax code and then going back into the natural language specification and restructuring it to bring it into alignment and control of a higher level language.

That is step that the blog entry preceding this one would naturally take.  A natural language expression of the Tax Code would always exist.  However the controlling meaning of the tax code would exist in the higher level code language and information system structure, not the interpretation of lawyers but the expression of programmers of an operating system and its application programs.

This is a job for Silicon Value Information Engineers.  That would be self defeating.  The first ambiguity to be resolved is their tax evasion.

Maybe a job for Open Source patriots.

What is NLP and Why Should Lawyers Care? 

Ruhl and Katz: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Legal Complexity

 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2566535

 When this puts lawyers out of business and out on the streets maybe they can get government re-employment funding to go back to school to learn Information Engineering and Programming and become legitimate practitioners of the law with a professional objective of reducing ambiguity instead of creating it!