The Secrets to Success

Your tax resistance campaign can make history if it learns what history has to teach. This book introduces you to tax resistance campaigns from around the world and over thousands of years—including many campaigns that were successful in meeting their goals. By reading examples of the tactics they used, you can discover new ways to help your campaign win.

If you learn how history’s tax resistance campaigns played out, you have a great advantage: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel or to stick with played-out tactics just because they’re familiar.

History is a Valuable Resource: Don’t Neglect It

A tax resistance campaign will be more successful if it takes advantage of the rich resources history provides.

Sadly, though, some tax resisters today have little interest in the lessons of the past—they seem to feel as though all they have to do is to take a noble, confrontational stand and then the government must inevitably give in. Why? It might be because of how popular media represent successful activist movements of the past—for example, the civil rights movement in the United States.

The most photogenic parts of such movements, and therefore those parts that are most often seen in documentary footage, were big rallies and marches like the March on Washington, public civil disobedience actions like the lunch counter sit-ins, and confrontations with baton-wielding cops. Today’s activists sometimes act as though they believe they only need to resummon such photogenic elements somehow, and then success can’t be far behind.

It reminds me of how “cargo cult” practitioners hoped to resummon the bountiful airplanes to their island by building an ersatz air traffic control tower out of bamboo. You might just as well expect to gain independence for California by throwing crates of tea into San Francisco Bay.

Superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful activist movement.

A Successful Tax Resistance Campaign is More than a Tax Resistance Campaign

The successful tax resistance campaigns I studied engaged in struggles on many fronts. They used a variety of tactics, and struggled and organized in ways that do not necessarily make for good History Channel footage. The dramatic sit-ins and salt-marches and so forth are the fruit of well-tended trees, where much of the important work happens out-of-sight at the roots.

Your tax resistance campaign is less likely to succeed if it limits itself to tax resistance. To be most successful, your campaign must deploy an appropriate and effective set of tactics on a number of additional fronts. In combination those tactics increase its effectiveness.

This book helps you choose the best tactics for your campaign. It shows you how historical tax resistance campaigns have waged their struggles on these fronts. It also inspires you with many examples of creativity and determination shown by people in such struggles throughout history.