Participate in Barter and Other Off-the-Books Transactions
Switching to barter is another way to keep transactions off of the government’s radar and make them more difficult to tax.
Example Karl Hess
When the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) told American tax resister Karl Hess “that they would take every cent, literally 100 percent, of every penny I might earn and that they could discern” he decided that was a good reason to give up on pennies:
I asked… how they would handle it if I decided to just barter for a living. They had a ready answer: “If you get some turnips for your work, we’ll take the turnips.” Fortunately for me, either the IRS is surfeited with vegetables, or turnips are a good deal more difficult to track down than cold cash.
And so I survive. The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington, D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation. He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop, to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Example On-Line Sharing Networks
It is increasingly easy to get your needs met by engaging in off-the-books transactions—not just under-the-table cash payments or barter, but also swaps and freebies. A number of websites and other innovative projects (many now defunct) have facilitated things like this. You could go to yerdle or ShareTribe or Trade A Favor, for instance, and join a community of sharers, or you could “turn what you have into what you want” at swap.com, or you could visit the “barter” or “free” sections at your local craigslist, or find a neighbor with a hedge trimmer you can borrow at NeighborGoods, or swap the books you’ve finished for ones you’d like to read at PaperBack Swap, or pass along the clothes your child just outgrew through thredUP, or rent a car from a person rather than an agency with Getaround, or join your local Freecycle network to help useful stuff find good homes. And of course swap meets and garage sales survive (still mostly untaxed) from the horse-and-buggy days before the World Wide Web.
Aside from the benefit of taking transactions out of the taxed economy, sharing networks like these can be helpful ways of promoting and developing solidarity and grassroots mutual reliance at a time when the marketplace is becoming increasingly impersonal and when corporations and governments have become thoroughly codependent. This too can be of benefit to some varieties of tax resistance campaigns.
Notes and Citations
- Hess, Karl “Bartering” We Won’t Pay: A Tax Resistance Reader (2008) pp. 438–41