Resisting on Multiple Fronts
Your tax resistance campaign is most likely to succeed if it grows beyond simply advocating and practicing some form of tax resistance. That is only one of the fronts on which a tax resistance struggle takes place. A successful campaign will also address each of these:
- Support Tax Resisters
- A government doesn’t govern for long unless it can make life difficult for people who refuse to cough up the demanded tribute. For this reason, enthusiasm and righteous anger are usually not enough to keep a tax resistance campaign going. A successful campaign provides practical and moral support to resisters so that they keep resisting when things get tough.
- Increase the Number of Resisters
- Typically, the more people resist, the better it is for your campaign. New resisters increase the impact of the resistance, give the government more headaches, and increase the credibility of your campaign’s threat to the status quo. A successful tax resistance campaign makes it easy and attractive for people to begin resisting, and slows the rate of attrition of existing resisters.
- Frustrate Government Countermeasures
- Governments will respond to a threatening tax resistance movement by attacking the movement itself and by taking reprisals against individual resisters. Successful tax resistance campaigns can make it more difficult for the government to pursue such countermeasures.
- Expand the Arsenal of Resistance Techniques
- Continually developing new tax resistance techniques has many advantages: It makes your resistance more effective by increasing the amount of money withheld from the government. It attracts new resisters by enabling people who could not resist in one way to resist in a new way. And, by introducing new resistance techniques faster than the government can discourage the old ones, it makes the government play a frustrating game of “whack-a-mole.”
- Education and Public Relations
- By taking charge of your campaign’s image and message, you make it more persuasive to the population as a whole or to people in positions of influence. You also can educate people about the techniques and consequences of resistance, which helps in your recruitment efforts.
- Lay the Groundwork for Victory
- As you develop your campaign, consider what victory will look like and how you’ll preserve it once you’ve won it. A successful tax resistance campaign doesn’t necessarily end with a showy flag-raising—it’s often more subtle than that.
The following chapters show examples of tactics that have been used by tax resistance campaigns from around the world and throughout history to expand their struggles on each of these fronts. An additional chapter discusses how solitary tax resisters can also be successful on their own terms.
But first I’d like to consider some more general concerns about activism and dissent.