Tax resister Richard Groff, whose letter to the IRS I reprinted in ’s Picket Line, also wrote a four-part essay for MANAS on Thoreau (which was later published as Thoreau and the prophetic tradition). I’m a sucker for Thoreau, so I dove into this eagerly.
Groff’s “Death and Taxes” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.
The essay, surprisingly to me considering Groff’s own tax resistance, does not attend much to Thoreau’s civil disobedience specifically, but instead analyzes Thoreau’s relentless self-examination and enthusiastic philosophy of living in an interesting attempt to place it in what Groff describes as a prophetic tradition. (Links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.) Some excerpts:
One of Thoreau’s discoveries in the Walden woods was that it may be easier to enjoy creative leisure when poor than when wealthy. He was not stricken by poverty but rather apprenticed himself to her to learn what she might have to teach. Intentional poverty, he found, is free of the business details and anxieties which plague the lives of those for whom the expression “high standard of living” carries only economic implications. Such a man avoids the world of commerce not because he is unequal to it but because he is above it. Life and time are worth too much to squander them in the idle pursuit of material riches. Thoreau reminds us that after we have obtained the minimum in food, clothing and shelter — and the minimum here, he shows us, is considerably lower than we are accustomed to think — we must then choose whether to spend our surplus vitality on superfluities for the body or necessities of the soul: “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” Having cast the mote of economic bondage from his own eye, Thoreau sees clearly the absurd contradictions in the lives of his idly industrious neighbors who slave-drive themselves, “making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day.” Vividly he portrays the inverted values of society: “No man ever stood lower in my estimation for having a patch on his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”…
Instead of solving his own problem of livelihood by increasing his income, Thoreau did it by decreasing his wants (“For a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone”) and supplying them by wholesome work with his hands: “For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support me.” “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…” The essay Life Without Principle sets forth his profound and eloquent thoughts on the subject of right livelihood.…
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Where others would wrangle confusedly on the periphery of an important question, Thoreau with his clarity of mind cut through the confusion by seeing its absolute and not merely its relative implications. For example, to those for whom the validity of the Fugitive Slave Law hinged upon its Constitutionality, he says: “In important moral and vital questions, like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not.… The question is, not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the Devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God, — in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor, — by obeying that eternal and only just constitution, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.”…
