A while back I shared my notes from the recent NWTRCC national gathering. Ruth Benn, NWTRCC’s coordinator, took more thorough notes than I did, and today she shared her more official meeting minutes with us.

Via that link, you can also see NWTRCC’s objectives for the coming year, our fiscal year budget, and reports from some of the Saturday workshops.

Matthew Bajko at the Bay Area Reporter has done a write-up on the emerging gay rights tax resistance movement. It covers the folks I’ve been writing about from time-to-time here: Melissa Etheridge, Charles Merrill, and John Bisceglia, but also one I hadn’t heard of before: Emily Drennen, who created a Facebook group for anyone who will be joining her in “refusing to pay CA taxes until I can marry.”

The reporter, in doing his work collecting reaction quotes from politicians and from spokespeople for groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Californians Against Hate, also helped to pollenate the political landscape with the idea of tax resistance as a possible civil disobedience tactic.

Somehow in all the fooferaw that surrounded Ron Paul’s quest for the Republican presidential nomination last year, nobody pointed me in the direction of this speech he gave before the House of Representatives in May, 2007. Excerpt:

The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George. I accept the definition of patriotism as that effort to resist oppressive state power.

The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self-interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state. Resistance need not be violent, but the civil disobedience that might be required involves confrontation with the state and invites possible imprisonment.

Peaceful, nonviolent revolutions against tyranny have been every bit as successful as those involving military confrontation. Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved great political successes by practicing nonviolence, and yet they suffered physically at the hands of the state. But whether the resistance against government tyrants is nonviolent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism.

True patriotism today has gotten a bad name, at least from the government and the press. Those who now challenge the unconstitutional methods of imposing an income tax on us, or force us to use a monetary system designed to serve the rich at the expense of the poor are routinely condemned. These American patriots are sadly looked down upon by many. They are never praised as champions of liberty as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have been.

Liberals who withhold their taxes as a protest against war, are vilified as well, especially by conservatives. Unquestioned loyalty to the state is especially demanded in times of war. Lack of support for a war policy is said to be unpatriotic. Arguments against a particular policy that endorses a war, once it is started, are always said to be endangering the troops in the field. This, they blatantly claim, is unpatriotic, and all dissent must stop. Yet, it is dissent from government policies that defines the true patriot and champion of liberty.

It is conveniently ignored that the only authentic way to best support the troops is to keep them out of dangerous undeclared no-win wars that are politically inspired. Sending troops off to war for reasons that are not truly related to national security and, for that matter, may even damage our security, is hardly a way to patriotically support the troops.

Who are the true patriots, those who conform or those who protest against wars without purpose? How can it be said that blind support for a war, no matter how misdirected the policy, is the duty of a patriot?

Once a war of any sort is declared, the message is sent out not to object or you will be declared unpatriotic. Yet, we must not forget that the true patriot is the one who protests in spite of the consequences. Condemnation or ostracism or even imprisonment may result.

Nonviolent protesters of the Tax Code are frequently imprisoned, whether they are protesting the code’s unconstitutionality or the war that the tax revenues are funding. Resisters to the military draft or even to Selective Service registration are threatened and imprisoned for challenging this threat to liberty.

Statism depends on the idea that the government owns us and citizens must obey. Confiscating the fruits of our labor through the income tax is crucial to the health of the state. The draft, or even the mere existence of the Selective Service, emphasizes that we will march off to war at the state’s pleasure.

A free society rejects all notions of involuntary servitude, whether by draft or the confiscation of the fruits of our labor through the personal income tax. A more sophisticated and less well-known technique for enhancing the state is the manipulation and transfer of wealth through the fiat monetary system operated by the secretive Federal Reserve.

Nice to see a shout-out to tax resisters in the very depths of Mordor.

Melissa Etheridge’s pledge to stop paying California state taxes in the wake of California voters’ decision to outlaw same-sex marriages like hers struck me as a sort of heat-of-anger decision — not necessarily well thought through as far as its ramifications, but with the sort of appealing righteous logic that makes you think “damn the torpedoes” and just forge ahead.

In that way it reminded me a lot of my own decision to become a tax resister, in which refusing to pay taxes seemed to have become a moral imperative for me well before I’d figured out how I was going to do it.

Now Etheridge is on to stage two: figuring out the messy details.

Etheridge and her wife were on last Friday’s Oprah Winfrey Show, talking about their reaction to the California election results. I didn’t see the show, but here’s an excerpt from the show’s summary on oprah.com:

In a recent blog posting about the passage of Proposition 8, Melissa vented her frustration by saying she would stop paying taxes. “I tell people I have until April to make true on that blog,” she says. “That was [me] letting off a lot of steam. What I wanted to do was show the absurdity of a populace thinking they can take a right away or deny someone a right … and yet feel completely fine taking 100 percent of our taxes. It doesn’t make sense.”

Meanwhile, same-sex marriage tax resistance pioneer Charles Merrill was on The Ron Reagan Show yesterday. There’s some discussion of the Etheridge tax resistance pledge and general pro-same-sex-marriage talk throughout the show, but the Merrill segment itself starts about 19½ minutes in and lasts about 10 minutes.

Merrill has been resisting since 2004, and expects to finally be able to make his case in court next year.

And it hasn’t escaped my notice that John Bisceglia has refashioned his “Gay Tax Protest” site into one that is promoting a National Equality Tax Prote$t for this coming April 15^th. Today, I’m tracking these three tax resisters for legal recognition of same-sex marriage, but it feels like it won’t be long now before I’ll be able to write about the “movement.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, the current economic mess means “boom times for barter.” Excerpts:

As the financial crisis makes cash and credit increasingly scarce, the ancient custom of bartering is booming. Cost-conscious consumers are getting creative to make every dollar count.

Some are dusting off books, DVDs, video games and other little-used items to trade for necessities or gifts. Others are exchanging services such as house painting for Web design or guitar lessons for clerical work.

Every recession triggers bartering, economists say. But the Internet has given the practice unprecedented reach. Before the Web connected strangers from all corners of the country, bartering was limited by geography and social circle.

…exchanging something you no longer want or need for something you do is appealing to many. A growing number of websites, including TradeaFavor.com and JoeBarter.com, cater to the cost-conscious. There were 148,097 listings in the barter category of Craigslist in September, up sharply from 83,554 a year earlier, according to the classifieds website. Bartering via Craigslist’s Los Angeles service was up 72% over the same time, with 4,009 listings in September. Specialty sites such as PaperBackSwap.com and Peerflix.com, are also popular.

Jessica Hardwick, founder of SwapThing.com, started noticing an uptick in bartering in the spring. Families who were worried about the soaring price of groceries and gas started taking vacations by swapping homes with people who lived within a few hours’ drive. As the kids prepared to go back to school after their trips, they bartered PlayStation games, skis, even a bicycle for school uniforms.

Over the last few months, her Cupertino, Calif.-based site’s membership and traffic have snowballed as more people look to trade their talent and time. With 162,000 members, SwapThing.com, which used to be populated by collectors and video-game enthusiasts, has been transformed into a bustling bazaar for everyday goods and services.

Sunni at Sunni and the Conspirators has some commentary on the Times article.

Ever wonder what happens when the IRS gets audited?

The Internal Revenue Service has serious issues with outdated financial management systems and insufficient information security that could affect the accuracy of its financial statements, according to a Government Accountability Office report released on Wednesday.

The report concluded that the agency’s internal controls were not effective and that it did not comply with legal requirements for federal financial management systems.

I mentioned in my wrap-up of last weekend’s NWTRCC gathering in Eugene that “One couple who were first-time resisters and had only refused to pay a token $50 last year were assessed ‘frivolous filing’ penalties of $5,000 — each, even though they had filed a single return jointly — though they had filled out their return accurately and completely.”

I’m happy to report that this couple came home from Eugene to some good news:

…for those of you who heard of the couple who got slapped with $10,000 frivolous fine ($5,000 each) it was just lifted. Apparently the Taxpayer Advocate Office helped. For those of you who don’t know, this was a first-time resistance of a small amount of a larger tax bill. Honest return filed with a protest letter and partial payment. The filers were warned they might get a fine, so they re-filed and paid the amount refused a few months later and shortly after got a letter telling them they each owed $5,000 as a frivolous penalty. They protested and finally heard this quite unjustly applied fine was released. Whew. We’ll try to add more on the NWTRCC website about this frivolous business as we learn it. It appears to be applied very inconsistently and incorrectly.

That’s from NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn. The current distilled wisdom from NWTRCC on “frivolous filing” warnings and penalties can be found at its page on “What To Do If You Receive a ‘Frivolous’ Warning Letter”.

During World War II, the U.S. income tax expanded its reach. Formerly a tax that targeted the well-to-do, it became a tax on income-earners in general. In order to help this go smoothly, the government enlisted popular entertainers to create pro-tax propaganda.

I’ve already mentioned here The Spirit of ’43, a Disney cartoon that told citizens that “Taxes Will Sock the Axis.”

Today David Beito reminds us of another bit of this propaganda campaign. A song penned by Irving Berlin and sung by Danny Kaye: “I Paid My Income Tax Today.” Some sample lyrics:

I paid my income tax today
I never felt so proud before
To be right there with the millions more
Who paid their income tax today
I’m squared up with the U.S.A.
See those bombers in the sky?
Rockefeller helped to build ’em, so did I
I paid my income tax today

I paid my income tax today
A thousand planes to bomb Berlin
They’ll all be paid for and I chipped in
That certainly makes me feel okay
Ten thousand more and that ain’t hay
We must pay for this war somehow
Uncle Sam was worried but he isn’t now
I paid my income tax today

And that reminds me of this. The first evidence I’ve seen of a foul-weather war tax resister deciding to give it up at the first hint of sunshine. Obama’s not even in office yet, and already…

I’m Paying Taxes Now

Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to say that?

I’m paying taxes this year.

Barack Obama has just been called as the next President of the United States.

This war tax resister is going to pay her taxes for the first time in six years. I can’t wait. I love this country, and at this exact second, I feel that love. I will write my check with a happy heart. I can’t wait to introduce my daughter to our new President.

Sigh. In Eugene some people feared the possibility of this sort of reaction, but nobody seemed to know of any actual examples of it. Well, there’s at least one.

Today in the U.S., war tax resisters are about the only sizeable group of conscientious tax resisters (that is, people who resist in a spirit of conscientious objection to what the tax money is spent on — as opposed to people who resist because they think they have the legal or moral right not to have their money taken from them, and those who resist not because of any ideology but just because they think they can get away with it and the material benefit is worth the risk).

But this may be changing. This year I’ve been noticing a lot more mention of tax resistance in two other battles: the battle for legal recognition of same-sex marriage and the battle against (government funded) abortion.

In the same-sex marriage case, it’s less a conscientious objection position than one that says the resister won’t pay the “dues of citizenship” for what amounts to second-class citizenship. But that’s close enough for me.

In the abortion case, the rhetoric is much more similar to that of the war tax resistance movement. Indeed, a Catholic anti-abortion tax resistance pamphlet I recently discovered on-line has a subtitle — “Are You Praying for Life But Paying for Death?” — that echoes a motto frequently heard in war tax resistance circles.

The rest of the pamphlet also seems very familiar to me, based on war tax resistance arguments (particularly Christian ones) I’ve read. There’s the attempt to thread the needle between Romans 13 and Acts 5, a discussion of how taxpaying makes a taxpayer complicit and why this makes conscientious objection a moral duty, and finally some advice on practical steps the reader can take.

Myself, I’m of the “the more, the merrier” school on this. The more people with diverse ideologies and concerns begin to consider tax resistance as an option, the more the idea can take root that in general it’s inappropriate to force people to pay for other people’s priorities.

I got another letter from the IRS today about my unpaid taxes from last year.

This time it’s a “final notice of intent to levy” letter (a.k.a “Letter 1058”) that came by “certified mail” (which meant I had to sign for it). They sent me two copies of the letter, for reasons inscrutable, along with a one-sheet explanation of how they assess penalties & interest, a hopeful return envelope, and copies of Publication 594 (“The IRS Collection Process”), Publication 1660 (“Collection Appeal Rights”), and Form 12153 (“Request for a Collection Due Process or Equivalent Hearing”).

If past experience is any guide, within a few months they’ll try to find some account from which they can seize this money.

If you’re following along at home, in 2008 I filed a return indicating that the IRS would expect me to pay $3,863 (which included a penalty for having failed to pay quarterly installments of my self-employment tax). Since then, the IRS has added about $404 in interest and penalties to that amount, so that they’re now after me for a touch more than $4,267.

Someone with the Kafkaesque pseudonym of “Citizen K” has posted an Armistice Day message from an American war tax resister to American veterans.

To me, it seems to have a split personality and a repulsive self-loathing. On the one hand, the author is “enormously proud” of the veterans and “wholly indebted to their legacy” and “truly thankful” for the “rights and freedoms [that] were hard-won” by such “[b]rave men and women [who] gave their lives for cowards like me.” Indeed:

My words and actions are an affront to their memory, and I am not worthy of their sacrifice.

But on the other hand, because the author is “a peaceful man” whose “religion prohibits me from participating in any form of violence,” he has been unwilling to pay taxes to support all of that honorable stuff he’s so proud of, because, though he is wholly indebted and truly thankful for the legacy of these brave men and women, “[m]y daughter, my wife, my family deserves better from me. My efforts should build our lives together, not tear down other lives in lands far away.”

While I don’t agree with the need to enforce our national superiority through violence and bloodshed, I respect those who do. Without them I would not be free to write this and I know that.

Thank you to all those who came before me, and who continue to fight for what they believe in.

It’s hard to believe anyone could contain this much cognitive dissonance in his head without just going completely around the bend.

If Barack, Hilary, and John could agree on anything over the last year, it was that we needed to spend more money on the military. However: “A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department’s current budget is ‘not sustainable,’ and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military’s most prized weapons programs.”

How the hell did that happen?

This assessment is coming from the Defense Business Board, which is composed of people appointed by the Dubya Squad’s own U.S. Secretary of “Defense.” This isn’t some peaceniky group of outsiders.

The group’s conclusions could provide some political cover for Obama should he decide to target some of the Pentagon pork to make way for deficit reduction, lower taxes, or for spending on other programs. On the other hand, Democrats — always excruciatingly sensitive to being labeled “soft” — may see this as a trap and may fear running against Republican candidates who accuse them of weakening U.S. military might.

Pro-lifers are already starting to contemplate tax resistance as they expect that the new administration in Washington may rescind prohibitions on federal funding for abortion. One writes, somewhat histrionically:

The issue at stake here is the use of our tax dollars by the federal government to pay for the performance of abortions or euthanasia. I, nor any other Roman Catholic, cannot, in good faith, contribute materially (i.e. monetarily), to abortion. Should I be conscious of the fact that my tax dollars are being used to fund abortion or euthanasia, I can be declared in schism with the Catholic Church and be disallowed by my local bishop from receiving the Eucharist at Mass. In order to retain my standing as a faithful Catholic, in harmony with the Church, I will be placed in the position of having to perform an act of civil disobedience by becoming a tax resister. As past tax resisters have all failed utterly in defending their position before courts of law, I will likely suffer legal consequences for my failure to pay taxes to the federal government (granted, past tax resisters have not objected to said taxes on a religious basis, but rather on a constitutional law basis; I believe the result will be the same, however, regardless of the basis of the objection). To borrow a scenario from Dinesh D’Souza’s book, Letters to a Young Conservative (pages 81-82), should I refuse to pay my taxes, the government will kill me. D’Souza explains that the government will fine me for not paying my taxes and, after some time, send federal agents out to seize my property. I will, not unreasonably, attempt to defend my property; given that I will be outnumbered by trained, well-armed federal agents, I will likely lose my life in the ensuing fracas. So there, in a nutshell, is the problem: as a Catholic I cannot, in good faith, pay money to the federal government that I know will be used to perform an abortion; the government will object to this and either imprison or murder me.

I’m fresh back from the NWTRCC Fall national conference, which was held this year in Eugene, Oregon, and hosted by the enthusiastic and welcoming Eugene “Taxes for Peace Not War” group.

I’ve got a binder full of handouts and hastily-scratched notes that I took whenever I found a spare moment. Today I’ll share some of my impressions of the gathering and of the current state of the war tax resistance movement.

Frivolity

• Many of the attendees were concerned about the IRS being more aggressive in sending out notices of “frivolous filing” penalties to resisters who send letters of protest that explain their refusal to pay along with their tax returns.
  • One couple who were first-time resisters and had only refused to pay a token $50 last year were assessed “frivolous filing” penalties of $5,000 — each, even though they had filed a single return jointly — though they had filled out their return accurately and completely. The IRS also insists that once they have assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty, you must pay that penalty before you can appeal it!
  • The law seems pretty clear that the “frivolous filing” penalty is only meant to apply if the tax return is incomplete or incorrect, but the IRS seems to be applying it haphazardly — not only to people who file complete and accurate returns but who refuse to pay some portion, but even to people who file and pay every cent but who merely inclose a letter registering their protest or disapproval!
  • Meanwhile, other resisters — including one who files a return every year with her social security number at the top but with none of the other required information, and with the 1040 form over-written with a protest message in red ink — have never been assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty or even received a “frivolous filing” warning letter.

The coordinating committee discusses the RFPTFA on Sunday morning

The “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act”

• One item on the agenda was a request by the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund that NWTRCC formally “recommit to the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill and the efforts NCPTF is doing to get it passed in Congress.” As I explained last month, I have serious misgivings about “peace tax fund” proposals in general, and think that the current incarnation of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act in particular would do more harm than good. However, NWTRCC had endorsed a different version of this legislation years ago, and so many people expected this new call for an endorsement to be a no-brainer. Much debate ensued.
  • Robert Randall pointed out that NWTRCC’s “Statement of Purpose” includes “support of the US Peace Tax Fund Bill.” He interpreted this as being a built-in endorsement of the latest act which would make the current debate moot. However, no act by that name has been introduced recently — I think since 1995 — and in many important ways the current legislation does not resemble the version that NWTRCC endorsed back in the day.
  • I was a little worried that I would be the only one objecting to the endorsement and that this would put me outside of the general consensus of the group, but as it turns out there were many people present who expressed misgivings about peace tax fund legislation and who weren’t enthusiastic about endorsing it, and I heard more than one person express that this was a long-overdue debate.
  • Many of the Act’s supporters seem to have ideas of what the Act would accomplish that go way beyond the actual text of the legislation. One said, for instance, that if the Act passed, it would effectively allow citizens to annually vote yea or nay on war or on whatever wars the government was engaged in at the time.
  • Some participants in the discussion were concerned that NWTRCC remain on good terms with NCPTF, in part so that we may be more influential as they recraft their strategy in the coming years.
  • One person said that because the Act is a long-shot to ever become law, it is best judged not by what its effects would be if it were enacted, but by what it symbolizes as a proposal that approximates the hopes of people who want legal recognition for conscientious objection to military taxation. (Myself, I’m not sure I buy this argument, but in any case I think that the symbolism of the Act is ambiguous at best and may very well communicate a message that is, on the whole, harmful to the cause.)
  • The result of our discussion was that we decided to hold off on making a decision of whether or not to endorse until our May meeting, at which time we will have more time to disucss the question and more time to study the points that are in debate.
• A book of writings by and about Marian Franz and her work with the peace tax fund campaign is forthcoming, and will include a piece by Ruth Benn about the war tax resistance movement and its relationship with the peace tax fund campaign.

Election aftermath

• There was varied reaction to the recent presidential election. Many people were skeptical of the promise for meaningful change, and distrustful towards the Democratic party, and saw the election mostly in terms of whether it would anaesthetize progressive activists or whether it might be possible to reactivate the hopeful coalitions that helped to propel Obama into office once Hope turns to disappointment.
  • Others were very enthusiastic about the change and hoped that progressives and peace activists might finally be able to influence government policy. One person went as far as to say that we’d “won” and would have to get used to being winners on the inside of the power structure instead of ignored pleaders outside of it. Another hopefully imagined getting a group of progressive religious leaders to sit down with Obama and confront his faith with a challenge to go further than his public statements have so far suggested. To me this all sounds like stuff of the same sort as gingerbread houses, flying carpets, and fairy godmothers, but I mention it here to show that some of the Hope bubble has infected even a skeptical group like NWTRCC.
• There was much mention of “Camp Hope” — a vigil that will be held near Obama’s home in Chicago in January up to inauguration day. The goals of this vigil will be to encourage Obama to follow-through boldly on some of his more progressive campaign themes. The demands of the vigil are meant to harmonize with, rather than to protest, the goals of the Obama campaigners, and will concentrate on actions that the new administration can take immediately via executive orders.
  • This is said to be partially based on a similar vigil that took place in the run-up to Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977 that asked Carter to pardon Vietnam-era draft resisters and to cancel the B-1 bomber program, both of which Carter did.
• A new war funding supplemental bill is expected to hit Congress in January, and this will be an early test of what kind of Change we can expect from the new order, and what kind of power the current anti-war movement is capable of asserting.

The War Tax Boycott

• Last year’s war tax boycott campaign was well-received by some local war tax resistance groups, who found it a good focal point for their outreach efforts. However, the number of people who participated in the boycott disappointed the hopes of those who initiated the campaign. There was much discussion of whether we should continue the campaign into the coming year and if so in what fashion.
• If we were to continue the campaign into 2009 — making the April, 2009 tax day the climax of the campaign — this would give us little time to mount a serious outreach effort, and at the same time it would have to compete for attention with the actions of the opening months of the new Obama administration. It might be hard to convince new resisters to join up if they’re still placing their hopes for peace with their rulers.
• We eventually concluded that we would continue the campaign, but would concentrate this year on retrenching and consolidation rather than on a major outreach and publicity campaign, in preparation for a larger campaign when the inevitable Obama Disappointment sets in. Meanwhile, local groups that find the campaign useful can continue to use it as before.
• Rather than making April 15^th the target date for beginning to resist, we may be better off doing what Code Pink did with its war tax resistance campaign and tell people that their resistance begins the moment they take their first affirmative step toward tax resistance, for instance by adjusting their W-4 withholding.
• One person said that although she resisted taxes last year, she didn’t sign up for the boycott because she was only resisting a small amount and was redirecting that amount to local groups, and she had the impression that the boycott was mainly for people redirecting larger amounts to the two showcase charities highlighted by the boycott campaign.
• Some people who did boycott outreach found that some folks were reluctant to sign on to the boycott for fear of the danger of being on some government list, and stressed that there should be a way for people to join the campaign anonymously.

Miscellany

• Some local University of Oregon students dropped by the meeting and volunteered to create a redesigned mock-up of the nwtrcc.org web site that we could use if we’d like — a much-appreciated and spontaneous act of generosity.
• NWTRCC will be trying to nurture a new regional gathering of war tax resisters — something along the lines of the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters that is coming up later this month. To this end, it will be inviting groups that are interested in hosting such a gathering to submit proposals, and will select one of these proposals to support with some seed money and other assistance.
• NWTRCC decided to commit to revitalize the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which seems to have run out of steam (appeals for funds go out very infrequently, and resisters are reimbursed only after long delay).
• NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn is preparing a series of “Readings on Money.” These include transcripts of some of the discussion on that subject at the 2006 Fall gathering in Las Vegas, Karen Marysdaughter’s essay on “The Influence of Money on Decisions to Engage in War Tax Resistance,” George Salzman’s “Inheritance and Social Responsibility,” a debate about the ethics of accepting interest on loans and bank deposits from Juanita Nelson and Bob Irwin, and a look at the intwined structure of government spending, national debt, the war machine, the federal reserve, and the income tax from Jay Sordean.

Kathy Kelly leads a workshop on “Honesty and Empathy: Questions for Collaborators”

• Kathy Kelly led us through some role-playing exercises concerning collaboration and how to confront it, and shared some stories with us from her experiences with activism and humanitarian assistance. Her public presentation at the University after the end of the Saturday NWTRCC conference session was well-appreciated by those who attended. Kelly is an engaging speaker who relates interesting experiences vividly and well — with a great command of accents and the ability to invoke strong and varied emotions without making the audience feel like they’ve been strapped on a roller-coaster. One of her themes: around the world, many people are forced to make great sacrifices because of the decisions our political leaders are making. Meanwhile, what will rise us to make the sacrifices we need to make to make things right? To those of us to whom much has been given, much will be expected in this regard. We need to slow down and unflinchingly reassess our priorities. “This is what grown-ups do.”
• Mike Butler volunteered to bring NWTRCC into the MySpace / Facebook universe, so keep an eye out there.

Erica Weiland removes a pillar of militarism in Susan Quinlan’s workshop

• Susan Quinlan demonstrated some of the techniques she uses in youth outreach to teach about the unbalanced government budget priorities and about how to build a better society by shifting your support from the pillars that support a system of injustice to the pillars that support the scaffolding of a better system.
• I remember a couple of interesting stories of how people were introduced to war tax resistance. One couple was working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Colombia and met some war tax resisters there and then took up war tax resistance on their return home. Another new resister had been working for an alternative newspaper that received a grant from a war tax resisters’ tax-redirection alternative fund, and learned about war tax resistance that way.
• I sold several books — some of each of We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader, American Quaker War Tax Resistance, The Price of Freedom: Political philosophy from Thoreau’s Journals, and My Thoughts Are Murder to the State: Thoreau’s Essays on Political Philosophy, with We Won’t Pay being the top seller in spite of being the pricier volume of the lot — more people buying copies of that one than all the others combined.

Conference attendees review part of Steev Hise’s rough cut for Death and Taxes

• Steev Hise’s war tax resistance video project continues, with a projected completion date around the end of this year. Conference attendees saw a preview of a portion of the film and seemed enthusiastic about it.
• The next national meeting will be held this coming Spring (early May) somewhere in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. — details to be hashed out in the coming months. The next Fall national will be in Cleveland, Ohio around this time next year.

And with all that, I’m still leaving a lot out. But for now, that’ll have to do.

Thanks to Carnival of the Godless for plugging The Picket Line.

I’m in Eugene, Oregon at the Fall 2008 National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee conference.

Kathy Kelly looks on as Ruth Benn addresses the NWTRCC conference

So far it’s been a long administrative committee meeting (I’m an alternate on the administrative committee) talking budget and objectives and scheduling, and then meeting the people who have arrived for our regular sessions, which began after dinner tonight.

We have a pretty big crowd this time around, about fifty so far and there are more coming tomorrow morning.

And despite the numbers, we got through the “let’s go around and introduce ourselves” segment with time to spare. This group gets points for staying on-point and not getting thrown off much. In this way it bucks the trend of many grassroots activist groups, many of which can’t seem to run a meeting to save their lives. And it’s certainly not because we’re ideologically unified or lack talkative eccentrics! Somehow when it comes down to brass tacks, we get down to brass tacks.

Robert Randall addressing some of the NWTRCC conference attendees

Well, this is interesting. None other than Melissa Etheridge has jumped on the gay marriage tax resistance bandwagon:

Okay. So Prop 8 passed. Alright, I get it. 51% of you think that I am a second class citizen. Alright then. So my wife, uh I mean, roommate? Girlfriend? Special lady friend? You are gonna have to help me here because I am not sure what to call her now. Anyways, she and I are not allowed the same right under the state constitution as any other citizen. Okay, so I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am not a full citizen. I mean that would just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same rights, sounds sort of like that taxation without representation thing from the history books.

Okay, cool I don’t mean to get too personal here but there is a lot I can do with the extra half a million dollars that I will be keeping instead of handing it over to the state of California. Oh, and I am sure Ellen will be a little excited to keep her bazillion bucks that she pays in taxes too. Wow, come to think of it, there are quite a few of us fortunate gay folks that will be having some extra cash this year. What recession? We’re gay! I am sure there will be a little box on the tax forms now single, married, divorced, gay, check here if you are gay, yeah, that’s not so bad. Of course all of the waiters and hairdressers and UPS workers and gym teachers and such, they won’t have to pay their taxes either.

Oh and too bad California, I know you were looking forward to the revenue from all of those extra marriages. I guess you will have to find some other way to get out of the budget trouble you are in.

Gay marriage rights tax resisting pioneers Charles Merrill and John Bisceglia were quick to praise the action and urge others to join in.

Cast your whole vote,
not a strip of paper merely,
but your whole influence.

— Henry David Thoreau

RadioEye, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio show, recently did an interesting program about Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment.

The show has audio from some of the experiments themselves (hear the “victim” scream as he pretends to get shocked!) but also interviews from some of the experiment’s subjects — many years after the fact — describing what was going through their minds as they unwittingly participated in one of social psychology’s landmark experiments. Interesting stuff.

Fred Reed, a curmudgeonly columnist whom I follow not least because he’s done what I dream of one day doing myself (fleeing to Mexico and living a life of mad bliss), turns his pen on America’s militaristic culture:

“The Pentagon, methinks,” he says, “is out of control. We no longer have a military in service to the state, but a state in service to the military.” Reed believes that the military is becoming both further divorced from mainstream American society, and increasingly independent of civilian control (once you note the ease with which it assimilates the “commander in chief”). He warns: “We are going to pay for this.”

Apparently, it’s pretty simple and low-risk to file fraudulent tax returns claiming that you qualify for thousands of dollars in refunds. The IRS will cut you a check, then maaaaaybe somewhere down the road they’ll notice something fishy, then maaaaaaybe they’ll catch you, then maaaaaaaaybe they’ll try to get the money back.

No fooling.

Here’s a story about one of the ones they caught up with. He took in half a million dollars over three years this way — and all he had to do was just to pull the numbers out of his butt. Nothing fancy. It was only accidentally, “after federal agents learned that Fisher had cheated a local car dealer out of $1.2 million and used that money to buy gold bars and silver coins,” that the tax fraud was uncovered incidentally to that investigation.

A recent TIGTA audit found out that this sort of fraud is a billion-dollar problem for the IRS.

“This problem is becoming unmanageable,” the audit said.

The agency issued an estimated $1 billion in potentially fraudulent refunds, four times what it originally estimated, and then didn’t bother to further investigate half a million of the returns with discrepancies. Their Criminal Investigation division tracked down about $189 million of that billion, but left $894 million on the table.

From time to time I’ve read what I thought of as sort of interesting thought experiments about how massively-multiplayer video game universes have started to develop impressively large economies, with measurable exchange rates with the real world, and about whether real-world governments would eventually try to dip their taxing fingers into this revenue stream.

Turns out it was less of a sci-fi thought experiment than I thought. The governments of Australia and China are already implementing virtual currency taxation schemes.

It’s a strange new world. Did you ever think when you were playing “Monopoly” as a kid that one day it would come to this?

This looks like it could be a useful part of the solidarity economy: TeachMate

TeachMate.org is a service that helps people who wish to learn things find others who wish to teach them. You may think of it as of a dating service in education. We are also very fond of the idea of teaching for teaching: you can find people who’d love to teach you something in return for you teaching him another thing.

The essence of this service is simple: whoever teaches — learns. There are few simple things we wish our user could find out:

• You don’t need to be a professional to teach. Instead, you have to teach to become a professional.
• You don’t need to pay money for learning or ask for money when you teach someone.
• Learning is not about the degrees, it’s about the process and what you can do with your knowledge.

Thanks to FSK’s Guide to Reality for plugging The Picket Line.

Fifty years ago today, Time magazine published an article about Amish resistance to the social security tax in the United States.

But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel. — I Timothy 5:8

Muttering into their beards, a cluster of black-hatted Amish farmers watched sullenly in Canton, Ohio last week, while an auctioneer sold off livestock confiscated by the U.S. Government. On religious grounds, Amishmen had refused to pay the social security levy — 3⅜% of their own incomes — that the law demands of farmers. To satisfy the Government’s claims, federal authorities in Ohio’s Wayne and Holmes counties seized 28 head of livestock from 15 Amish farmers, seized cash assets of 50 others.

The pacifist, Bible-quoting Amish sect is a survival from the 1690s, when it was founded by a Swiss named Jacob Ammann. In some of the 50 Amish settlements scattered around the U.S. and Canada, the old ways have yielded a little to the march of centuries, but the Amishmen of central Ohio have clung steadfastly to their traditional customs and costumes. They shun automobiles, movies, even home electricity. All married men grow beards, and all men, women and children wear black headdress in public. Farming and a few related trades such as blacksmithing and harness-making are the only approved ways of earning a living. Parents refuse to send their children to public schools beyond the eighth grade — a quirk that has got the Amish into trouble with state and county authorities (Time, March 24). The strictest members of the sect balk at social security levies on the grounds that I Timothy 5:8 and other Bible passages command them to take care of their own. And they do: records in Wayne and Holmes counties show not a single case of an Amishman seeking public assistance of any kind.

In their troubles with the Old Age and Survivors Insurance system, the Amish are victims of the irreversible bloat that seems to afflict social-welfare plans. From modest beginnings in 1937, when it applied only to regular employees and nicked only 1% from their paychecks, OASI has expanded in both coverage and bite. Once Congress extended the system to farmers four years ago, it was plainly necessary for the Federal Government to make the Amish pay up: laws must apply to all alike. But the plight of the Amish was a footnote reminder that the welfare state has its victims as well as its beneficiaries, its cost in dwindling freedom as well as its payoff in expanded security.

The Amish eventually won some legal protection for their conscientious objection to mandatory government insurance — a rare example of the government conceding a tax point in the face of conscientiously-motivated civil disobedience.

Being as it’s Halloween and all, I thought today might be a good time for a visit from The Anarchy Boogeyman.

I’ll be taking the bold and ridiculous step of defining anarchism as properly understood and thereby infuriating generations of anarchists, almost none of whom, as far as I know, would agree with me.

That said… while everybody knows that anarchism is a bit of an extreme, “out there” political philosophy, I think that most people actually underestimate just how out there it is, and make the mistake of seeing it as a merely quantitatively different edge-case that more-or-less plays the same game on the same playing field as other political philosophies. Then they judge it according to that standard. This leads to misunderstandings.

I’ll try to explain. Just about every other political philosophy can be best defined by reference to an ideal, utopian state, and by a process for approximating it in the real world. These philosophies can then be judged by the desirability of this ideal state, the likelihood that we might be able to get close to that state, and what the cost of doing do would be.

So, for instance, a proponent of monarchism might define it as a system that features one single authority figure where the buck stops, who has more-or-less absolute authority (perhaps bounded by tradition or common decency), a well-defined line of succession that keeps trouble at bay, and what have you. Real-world monarchies, then, can be judged against this standard: does the monarch have ultimate authority, or is this authority diluted or countered by other institutions? is there a well-defined line of succession or are there various pretenders to the throne with their own teams of intriguers? and so on.

Democracy, constitutional republicanism, communism, democratic socialism, fascism… whatever you can think of — they can all be evaluated in this way. But anarchism — as properly understood mind you — cannot. And because its opponents, and frequently its proponents, do not understand this, they tend to misunderstand anarchism and distort it and make it ridiculous.

Anarchism is not a utopian end state and a method for getting there. It is not something of the sort that is appropriately judged by searching for existing or possible quasi-anarchies and comparing them to an ideal “anarchy.”

It would be as if in the debate over atheism the atheists kept being asked why we should worship their non-existent god rather than Allah or Jehovah. Or if in the debate over abolitionism, the abolitionists kept being asked to show how we would be able to tell the masters from the slaves once slavery was abolished. I imagine also the frustration felt by mathematicians who come up against students who have somehow gotten it stuck in their heads that ∞ is just the name of one really big integer and can be treated like one for all intents and purposes. It’s the same kind of missing the point. There’s something qualitatively different between anarchism and the host of non-anarchist (utopianist) political philosophies that you have to come to grips with before you can compare them competently.

Several years back, on a mailing list, I was venting some hostility towards abusive cops who enforced vice laws. Someone took umbrage and responded, “What have you really got a problem with, the cops or the laws? Because, last I checked, cops don’t make laws.” I responded:

I think cops are responsible for their own behavior, and can’t blame a bunch of politicians for “making” them do evil things (cf. Nuremburg trials). They have no excuse for not knowing that their business involves terrorizing people who are innocent of anything that could properly be called a crime. And they have no excuse for going along with it.

A spirited back-and-forth ensued that really demonstrates the point I’m trying to make today. I tried desperately to engage my debater but he was completely unable to hear what I was saying because he kept wanting to force me into a utopianist political philosophy paradigm, and had tight blinders on that wouldn’t allow him consider any arguments outside of that paradigm that did not conform to it.

He took government for granted, as so many people do, but could not even begin to wrap his mind around the idea of not doing so. In response, he wrote:

I love how you keep mixing up police abuse with enforcing a law passed by congress. You try to convey the impression, somehow, that I’m in favor of police abuse. Rather odd. I’m just saying the police are supposed to uphold anything that gets passed as a law. It’s unreasonable to expect them not to.

I shot back:

You try to convey the impression, somehow, that I’m in favor of police abuse

But you are — as long as that police abuse is legally authorized. And even when it isn’t, you seem far too eager to look the other way or make excuses. Why not just say “it’s wrong to break into somebody’s home, drag them away in chains, and lock them in a dungeon just because they were in possession of some illegal drug. If you do that, you’re doing something rotten. If you help people do that, you’re helping people do something rotten.” No. You’ve got to get all lawyery and say, “well, maybe it’s wrong, but it’s the law, and we have to make exceptions for the law, and besides it’d be wrong if you or I did it, but it’s a police officer, and they have the authority and besides it’s only their job and they don’t make the rules.” Bullshit. There’s nothing you can’t justify that way, and there were 175,000,000 tombstones engraved with that feeble argument in the last hundred years.

Well, this went on for quite a bit in the classic internet flame-war style. Then my debate partner said, “you’ve got one thing left to do before I can respect your point of view… give me a coherent suggestion for a solution.”

And this is how things got so weirdly frustrating. Because what he meant by “a solution” was a quasi-utopian political ideal end-point of the type I was describing earlier. So what he really was saying, whether he knew it or not, was that in order for him to respect my point of view I was going to have to abandon my point of view, because a quasi-utopian political ideal end-point was exactly not what I was arguing for.

But I tried to come up with something that would fit the bill:

Well, it's a rough draft, but it goes a little like this:

I want you, M— H—, to realize that it’s a cop-out to loan out your conscience to your employer, your neighbor, the majority, the Constitution, or the editorial page of Newsweek — and to understand that you’re faced with the awesome responsibility of testing and developing your conscience against the demands of real life, and then living according to the standards that you reveal. I want you to know that you are your own best and most qualified judge. If you ignore your own conscience you’re committing a particularly dangerous form of suicide — killing off your soul, and leaving behind the sort of dangerous robot who swerves from cradle to grave building gulags and genetically engineering more evil forms of smallpox.

(partially stolen from Gina Lunori’s Direct Action which itself is a liberally paraphrased update of a similarly titled essay by Voltarine deCleyre or some such, but you didn’t ask)

Part two goes like this:

Now I want you to expect the same from your friends, your co-workers, and even the police. Don’t let anyone who is doing something you know to be wrong get away with thinking that they don’t have to take responsibility for their actions. That means no “I’m only following what the law says,” no “I’m going to cede to the will of the majority,” no “I wouldn’t do it, except it’s my job,” no “if I didn’t do it, someone else would,” none of that bullshit.

To the extent that I had a “suggestion for a solution” to debate with M— H—, this was it. Not a “solution” in terms of a utopian endpoint for society at large, but just a reasonable code of conduct to apply to both of us — an egalitarian ethics (that is, an ethics that applies to everyone equally, without dividing people into castes or classes with varying qualities of ethical expectations and responsibilities).

That was the closest thing I had to “a solution” but to M— H— it was as good as nothing at all. “I’m not going to read this right now,” he wrote, “because it starts with ‘I want you, M— H—’ which means you’ve missed the point.” He concluded that my solution was really “just a big fat personal attack” and told me more explicitly what he was looking for:

Assume that whatever vector you need (protests, bills, laws, whatever) to get the end state you desire works. What end state do you desire? What system of laws, etc., do you think is the appropriate way to address narcotics, drugs, etc.?

I tried to disabuse him of his misunderstanding:

I think I got your point but you missed mine. I don’t want an end system of laws, etc. to address narcotics, drugs, etc. What I do want is for people to take responsibility for themselves and their actions and to demand the same of others, and to that end, I’m starting with you — trying to convince you to take on that challenge. The “end result” I have in mind isn’t a system that I’ll design and that other people will adhere to, but a society in which everyone realizes that to the extent they have will, they must assume responsibility for how they exercise it.

As for how this intersects with the particular case of narcotics, it means that people must take personal responsibility for their drug use and that people who intervene in the lives of drug users (cops, for instance) must take personal responsibility for the way in which they do so. Drug users can’t say “but dude, I was high” to pretend that they don’t own the consequences of their actions, and cops can’t say “I’m only following the law” when they cage a pothead. I’ve just got to convince them of that, which should only take another hundred billion emails… at this rate, only several weeks.

…I see it’s basically just a big fat personal attack.…

No, no! Read it again! It’s not meant as an attack at all. It’s a challenge, the same challenge I give to myself and test myself against and sometimes fall short at. You asked me what my solution is, and my solution is to try to hold myself to this standard, and to try to convince other people to do likewise.

But he kept pushing for me to pull back the curtain and reveal my unworkable utopia in which I play dictator and cackle over my hoard and concubines — there must be one back there somewhere. “In your society,” he asked, already implying a lot with that second-person possessive, “what happens if someone doesn’t accept responsibility? Who gets to decide if they’ve accepted enough responsibility? Who is responsible for dealing with those who no longer exercise sufficient responsibility?”

All fair questions, if taken naïvely literally, though really there’s an unspoken scaffolding of assumptions behind them: most offensively the assumption that in “my” society there must be some well-defined caste of people with authority and responsibility and some other caste without and some caste who gets to divide people up.

He followed this by prematurely attacking the utopian paradise he hoped I was going to try to construct: “I, too, would love to flip a switch and have everyone suddenly realize their duty to their fellow man, the amount of space their fellow men need, the need for personal responsibility and ethics, and, for that matter, their own personal potential. I would also like a million dollars in my primary checking account and a large harem… Systems that are designed around reasonable expectations instead of unrealistic ideals can roll with the punches a whole lot better. You can’t get rid of greed…”

All the while, ironically, he’s the one who can’t imagine a society that isn’t set up in pursuit of a utopian ideal.

At first I took the bait, though trying to avoid the hook, and talked about how we ought to deal with other people not taking responsibility for their actions, and how we go about judging when other people step over lines and we have to intervene. But I had a hard time accepting the framework of his question without it subtly forcing my answer into one that described a “system” of some sort, which really wasn’t what I had in mind at all. Finally, I wrote:

How each of us decides to act based on the decision that we make, though, is our own individual responsibility — not the dictate of a pre-written law or the output from a political establishment.

In my vision, there’s no set of authority-emblazoned citizens who have the ability to carry out justice on everyone’s behalf, and there’s no algorithm or game used to determine a result — I, you, and everyone else must decide what to do and must accept the consequences of our decisions.

What if we don’t? Well, it turns out we have no choice. We are responsible for our own actions, even if we pretend to loan out our responsibility to an institution or person. But in a practical sense, the only penalties are that A) we’re lying to ourselves, and B) we’re relinquishing control over our lives to some external force, thereby restricting our freedom, thereby inflicting our own punishment.

All systems have an error rate. What are your detection, correction, and prevention methods?

What system? The error rate is just human imperfection. This imperfection is only magnified when someone tries to codify human laws, or create human institutions to do our reasoning for us.

If your reasoning is out-of-whack and it’s causing you to do something rotten while thinking you’re doing something good, I can try to convince you otherwise. I can even try to put you in a cage if you’re not listening to reason and I think that what you’re doing is rotten enough that I want to spend my time that way, but not out of some abstract law or because I’ve been appointed CageMaster, but simply because I, taking responsibility for my own actions, am caging you.

Is this perfect? Hell no. If you’re stronger than me, maybe it’ll be me who ends up in the cage. And there’s no guarantee that the strongest one of us is the most sensible.

Fatal flaw? Not really. I never claimed that I was creating a perfect utopia, only showing a better way.

As our society is now, the stronger imprison the weaker, but are able to do so in vast numbers and without any person taking responsibility for being an imprisoner.

I, too, would love to flip a switch…

You asked for my program. It starts with you. It works one person at a time. The nice part is that it doesn’t require universal participation, majority participation, or even a critical mass. Each person who takes responsibility for themselves benefits themselves and those around them. Each incremental step is a step forward.

He thought I “totally dodged the question” of what happens in my as properly understood anarchism when somebody doesn’t accept responsibility. Which I did, I guess, but mostly because the question masked an assertion that I didn’t want to implicitly accept.

So I tried to meet the question, and the assumptions behind it, more directly:

In your society, what happens if someone doesn’t accept responsibility?

I guess it’s just too broad a question. Doesn’t accept responsibility for what? What do you mean by “what happens”? Do you mean, “what am I going to do about it?” or “what are you going to do about it?” or “what bad tidings must thereby befall the irresponsible person?”

It sounds like you’re asking me to come up with a commandment like “In Utopia, if you fail to accept responsibility for your actions, you will be set adrift on a raft and exiled from civilized society” or an admission like “In Utopia, there are no police, so if someone does something rotten because they refuse to take responsibility for their actions or because they’ve got a distorted idea of what their responsibility demands of them, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

But neither of those statements, nor anything like them, describe what I’m envisioning. I could go into more detail if someone doesn’t shove a sock in my keyboard soon, but a shortcut is that I’m not trying to envision a utopia in which everybody behaves harmoniously like in some seventh day adventist pamphlet illustration. I just have in mind a way for people to regain freedom and dignity and to extinguish the greedy and deadly inferno of the state. Not utopia, but not a bad consolation prize.

Alas, none of this made any headway. He still insisted that because I had never specified some final state that he could judge as good or bad, practical or impractical, there was nothing else in my argument that he could grapple with. He concluded that I just hadn’t developed my ideas to the state where they were worth arguing with, and suggested that maybe I assist my poor imagination by trying to write some science fiction about “my society” in order to better flesh out the details.

It really did seem to have all the talking-past-each-other quality of a “but this one goes to eleven” argument.

Ask an anarchist (as properly understood) to describe what an anarchist society looks like, and the utopianist expects to hear a description of some wholly-other, alien society, nothing like our own, that can be dismissed as an unlikely fantasy. But the anarchist instead responds with something much like “you’re soaking in it” — that is, anarchy is not some future utopia that the anarchist is striving for, but it is the way of interpreting and understanding the society the anarchist already lives in.

Oh, there is no Great Thunder God Oog, and his name isn’t some holy word that mustn’t be pronounced by man on pain of damnation, but just another syllable. Oh, there is no Santa Claus, it must be someone else’s generosity I have to be thankful for and I don’t have to worry about how the raindeer keep warm the rest of the year. Oh, there is no State, and that guy over there in the suit and tie ordering people around in its name is just a prick with lots of sycophants, not anyone I owe any respect to.

That’s all there is to it. Anarchy is what you see when you take off the blinders. It’s not utopian. In fact, it’s the only non-utopian political philosophy. And being that historically, proponents of anarchism have often been promoting utopian programs only quantitatively different from those of their socialist or liberal counterparts, and seeing as the word “anarchism” itself has such unfortunate and undeserved connotations, I think that those people (or is it “that person”) who adhere to anarchism as properly understood might well adopt the name “topianists” to make this distinction more clear.