Some tabs that have festooned my browser in recent days:
- Rob Greenfield has announced that “as an act of civil disobedience I will not pay federal income taxes for my lifetime.” He seems to have stopped paying in but only now made a formal announcement, in part prompted by the news stories about President Trump’s frequent non-payment of federal taxes. Greenfield is fond of bold and flashy lifestyle experiments. For example, he lived for a year on only foraged food. He’s cycled across the United States multiple times on a bamboo-frame bicycle. He lives on a poverty-line income while donating the income from his media appearances to charity. That’s all just the start.
- The president of the Tuscany branch of Confcommercio (the Italian General Confederation of Enterprises, Professional Activities and Self-Employment), Anna Lapini, announced that fifty thousand Tuscan businesses will stop paying taxes and duties. “Our companies have no more resources, and we prefer to continue to pay employees and suppliers as a priority over a state that does not understand — indeed tramples on — our reasons for existing.” Lapini explained that the group was resorting to a tax strike “for the same reasons for which Mahatma Gandhi or the founding fathers of the United States or the French people during the revolution used it in other times.” The strike went into effect on when a set of taxes came due, and striking businesses refused to pay.
“If working is no longer a right, paying taxes is no longer a duty,” reads one Italian protest sign.
- The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with brave mortal renegades defeating the mechanical hordes in Italy, Canada, and France (where one “device has not been able to operate for more than a week without being attacked since it was installed two years ago”), Germany, France, and Australia (where a “GoFundMe was set up to pay for a lawyer to help the… driver arrested for the camera’s destruction”), France, Guadeloupe, and Germany and France again.
- Predictably, the prohibitively high cigarette taxes in states like New York and California has led to increases in smuggling to evade the taxes, with more than half of the cigarettes consumed in New York now being smuggled in from low-tax areas.
