Aaron Russo, the film producer behind The Rose and Trading Places, spends the film hunting for a specific document: the law that actually requires American citizens to pay federal income tax. He cannot get anyone in government to produce one, and the search pulls him into interviews with two sitting U.S. Congressmen, a former IRS Commissioner, ex-IRS and FBI agents, tax attorneys, and authors, all weighing in on whether the tax has any legal foundation. From there the film connects the income tax to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, arguing that private money creation and federal taxation grew up together as parts of the same system. It closes on a newer alarm: a national identification card, set to become law in May 2008, built on RFID chips that would let the government track citizens directly. Russo frames the whole arc, from 1913 to the ID card, as one continuous erosion of civil liberties, and presents his interview subjects as the evidence rather than narrating a verdict himself.