Last I looked at the “household tax” protest movement in Ireland, only about half of Irish households had complied with the law and registered to pay the tax by the March 31 deadline. How do things look today?

Protests continue, including the one pictured in Dublin last week where non-compliance remains over 40%. The government has been sending letters threatening penalties to non-registering households.

Some time around this date in 1715 (when Robert Hunter, governor of the New York and New Jersey colony, mentioned it in a letter), some 36 New Jersey residents signed their names to the following petition:

Wee whose Names are under Written do Utterly Denie to pay or Suffer to be taken by Distress or any other ways any money Goods or any other thing by Frances Pagit our so called Constable Because wee Doubt of his Being a Lawful Constable & more especially Because wee have been Illegally Assessed by an Asseser who being a Known & open profest Roman Catholick which is Utterly Repugnant to the Laws of Great Brittain & Contrary to y^e Rights & Liberties of his Royall Maj^ties faithfull Subjects & if wee Submitt To Suffer or Acknowledge any such Roman Catholick to Ururp or bare any place in office of proffitt or trust Among us wee Should Count ourSelves Traytors to his Maj^tie our King & all True Protestants.

Several of the signers were indicted, but I haven’t yet been able to discover what happened after that.

Dan Ariely takes a look at Power and Moral Hypocrisy. When researchers arbitrarily cast subjects into positions of authority by doing a group role-playing exercise in which certain people are assigned to high-political-status roles like “prime minister,” those people become more strictly judgmental of others’ behavior while at the same time becoming more lenient in judging their own. That is to say that political power and authority don’t just attract hypocritical people, they generate hypocritical people.