Monday, Americans go online to buy all the Christmas presents they couldn’t get in local stores. It’s time we ended the threat of greedy Internet taxes.

Photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr

Right now there’s only one thing holding back the states from reaching halfway across the country, and making out-of-state businesses responsible for collecting sales taxes.

That one thing is the Supreme Court saying that those attempts are unconstitutional.

Enter Anthony Kennedy. He wants some headlines again, and to win friends among tax-and-spend leftists, so he wants to increase taxes on all of us with interstate taxation.

If he gets the chance, and he probably will, he’s going to overturn the case (Quill v. North Dakota) that keeps us from paying taxes on this kind of interstate commerce.

The best way to save us all from this would be for the US Congress to pass a law banning the states from reaching across state lines, and making grandma selling mittens online collect sales taxes for 48 states. That would be a death blow to so much commerce and economic growth online.

America depends on small business, and small business today depends on the Internet. We shouldn’t let greedy, tax-and-spend states wreck that.