The idea of addressing gun violence by taxing pistols is being tested at Cook County, Illinois. According to the Sun Times newspaper, a special gun tax kicks in today. The measure is not an April Fool’s Day joke. It is the brainstorm of the president of the County Board, Toni Preckwinkle. It will levy $25 for “on each gun sale in suburban Cook County.” At the rate at which guns seem to be flying off the shelves the idea is that this tax will bring in a sizable chunk of change.

The Preckwinkle Tax applies only to the Second Amendment. But the significance of the measure is that it opens up the question of whether our governments in need of money can tap into the full Bill of Rights. If, after all, one can tax the right to keep and bear arms, imagine what one could do with the right to freely exercise one’s religion that is vouchsafed in the First Amendment. How about $10 every time someone says a prayer.

For that matter, one could slap a tax on freedom of the press. If one could get, say, a dollar tax for each copy of a newspaper sold, imagine what one could raise by slapping excise on speech, another First Amendment right. One could have a sliding scale, depending on how long the speech was. One could try to impose a $1,000 levy on peaceable assemblies and a $10,000 tax on petitioning the government for the redress of a grievance.

The First Amendment, moreover is just the first article of the Bill of Rights. The Third Amendment ought to be another doozy, owing to the fact that so many people don’t want to have soldiers quartered in their homes, even in times of peace. If the government could bill you, say, $150 for not quartering its troops in your home, it could raise on the 118 million American households something like $17.2 billion each peaceful year.

Plus, the Fourth Amendment would be another gold mine, given the number of people who want to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures in their persons, homes, and papers and who want any warrants against them to be but for probable cause. One could fund whole police departments just by taxing a few dollars for each search not executed without a warrant.

Cash coming off the Fourth would probably be pennies compared to the money to be made off the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth is the one that guarantees, among other things, the right against self-incrimination. In other words, just by taxing a person at the rate of one dollar each time he or she kept his or her mouth shut, the government could let every school child in America have a White House tour every day and fly them back and forth for free.

The Sixth Amendment — the right to a speedy trial — would be a tricky one. The tax for exercising this right could be on a sliding scale. Imagine that, say, a person would pay a tax of $1,000 for exercising the right to an immediate trial. Maybe, though, someone wouldn’t want so speedy a trial. So he could pay a lower tax, depending on how speedy a trial he didn’t want. If one wanted to confront the witnesses against oneself, why, the tax on that could imposed on a per-witness basis.

Think, too, about the revenues that could come off the Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury. It’s one of the most basic rights in the entire Bill. No one thought of taxing it, though, until Toni Preckwinkle came up with the idea of taxing the Second Amendment. That precedent, however, opens up the possibility of the government getting money every time someone demands the right to a trial by jury.

The government could rake in a fortune, too, on the Eighth Amendment. This protects the right of bail. People will say that bail itself costs them money. But they get it back if they show up on the date assigned when bail was posted. The beauty of a Preckwinkle type of tax on bail is that the government wouldn’t have to give the money back. It could keep it to use for expanding the government even further.

Where you get into your real money, though, is on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. A tax on the Ninth would kick in every time the government refrained from construing the enumeration of a right in the Constitution in a way that denied or disparaged other rights retained by the people. Each time it did that, people would have to pay. In other words, you want to be left alone, it’ll cost you. It’s hard to see how the government could lose.

Same with the Tenth Amendment, only more so. What the Tenth says is that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by the Constitution to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people. The way this tax would be levied is that the state governments would have to pay the federal government every time the federal government let them do something on their own.

You can see where all this could lead. Toni Preckwinkle could emerge as a sage of political economy and a revolutionary of good governance. A force for a sound fisc. A movement could be mounted to run her for Senate on a platform more revolutionary than even that of the last candidate Illinois handed up. For she will have found a way to marry the exercise of our rights with the balancing of our budgets. No one ever said freedom was free.