Adam Kokesh Interviews War Tax Resister Greg Reagle for Tax Day

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Adam Kokesh had a Tax Day show that featured an interview with war tax resister Greg Reagle:

• Wendy McElroy writes about conscientious tax resistance in the light given off by the flames of recent Congressional debates about taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reports that the number of tax returns the IRS believes to be claiming fraudulent refunds has skyrocketed this year. It’s a little unclear to me from the report how much of this is a real trend in taxpayer behavior and how much is an artifact of new IRS procedures or the fact that more people are e-filing, thus making their returns available for automated analysis quicker.
• “Bushel Bob” has a website where he explains why he shut down his produce market so as to avoid earning money on which he’d have to pay war taxes. Now he donates his produce to charity and thereby avoids the tax.
• NWTRCC is posting reports of Tax Day actions as they trickle in.
• Goldishack Guerrillas gives us “10 Reasons Not to Pay U.S. Taxes This Season.”
• Radley Balko, in Reason magazine, has an interesting interview with Stewart Rhodes about the “Oath Keepers,” a group of American military and police personnel who have taken a vow not to carry out unconstitutional orders. In revolutions worldwide and throughout history, the turning point has often been when the folks in uniform have started questioning their orders and refusing to attack the citizenry on behalf of the politicians.

A letter-to-the-editor by “J.H.” from the 21 April 1900 Friends’ Intelligencer:

This can also be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.

I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses. Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been. Within a day or two, in a letter from a young Friend, I observed his feeling on the subject; he said that at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.

A United Press Association dispatch that appeared in the Poverty Bay Herald on 22 April 1898:

West African Trouble.

A Missionary Murdered

London, April 21. News from Sierra Leone reports that the head of the Rev. William John Humphrey, M.A., was found impaled on a stick. He had evidently been murdered. The Rev. Mr. Humphrey was for some time curate of St. Peter’s, Tunbridge Wells, England. On volunteering for missionary service he was appointed principal of Foura Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1890.

[The trouble in Sierra Leone has arisen by the enforcement by the Government of a tax of 5s each annum on native huts. In many cases the huts are not worth 5s, and when the tax collectors went round in January last many of the people knocked down their huts and slept under trees. A number of chiefs were arrested for inciting their people to refuse to pay the tax.]