Convince the Government to Rescind the Tax or to Legalize Resistance

A tax resistance campaign can claim victory by convincing the government either to formally rescind an offensive tax or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.

Example John Hampden

In 1637, John Hampden refused to pay a new property tax that King Charles I had instituted without the consent of the English parliament. His resistance succeeded at prompting the legal reform he sought.

At first he lost his legal battle, and was convicted by a slim majority of the judges who heard his case. But he successfully proved his point in the court of public opinion:

[H]e grew the argument of all tongues, every man enquiring who, and what he was, that durst, at his own charge, support the liberty and property of the kingdom, and rescue his country, as he thought, from being made a prey to the court.

The next parliament formally legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship money” tax and declaring that both the tax and the court judgement against Hampden “were and are contrary to and against the laws and statutes of this realm.”

Example American Amish

The resistance and conscientious objection of Amish people to a social insurance tax forced the U.S. government to change its tax laws.

Some Amish felt that government-sponsored social insurance programs were both mistrustful of God and destructive to the mutual support that is so important to Amish community. When the Social Security program and its social insurance tax became mandatory, many refused to pay the tax and refused to apply for benefits. 14,000 signed a petition to Congress asking for permission to opt out of the program.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tried to enforce the law by seizing money directly from resisters’ bank accounts. Amish resisters responded by closing their accounts entirely. The IRS then began to seize money from the cooperatives that purchased the resisters’ products, and then finally to seize the resisters’ property. The regional IRS Chief of Collections said: “People have no right to use their religion as an excuse not to pay taxes.”

After a number of resisters had been subjected to property seizures by the IRS—in one case they seized a man’s horses as he was using them to plow his field—public outrage and Amish petitioning finally convinced Congress to grant the Amish an exemption from the Social Security system and to cancel the outstanding tax bills of 15,000 resisters.

Example “Peace Tax” Plans

A number of pacifist groups, often including war tax resisters, have tried to get governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending. They want conscientious objectors to be able to pay their taxes without paying for the military portion of the government’s budget: to pay a “Peace Tax.”

So far, none of these long-standing efforts—which have included persistent lobbying of legislators, as well as legal challenges using a variety of arguments and in a range of national and international judicial fora—have borne much fruit. Governments seem universally unwelcoming to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have not yet been convinced that this alleged “right” deserves recognition.

Many conscientious objectors are themselves skeptical of Peace Tax plans, and feel that they would no more be able to conscientiously pay into a government-administered “Peace Tax Fund” than into the rest of the government’s budget.

One challenge for Peace Tax promoters is that it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a genuinely separate Peace Tax plausible. The Peace Tax legislation currently being promoted in the U.S., for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects, simply because it is easy for the government to shift money from place to place.

Governments cannot be trusted to implement schemes like these in a way that respects the intentions of those who would use them. Here is one particularly egregious example: Italy has a tax called the otto per mille (8‰). Taxpayers can ask the government either to turn their contributions to this tax over to the taxpayer’s church of choice as a tithe or to spend it on “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing. In some respects, this resembles the sort of plan that Peace Tax promoters have in mind. But Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War to be a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the otto per mille funds off that way. More recently they used that money for such “humanitarian and cultural projects” as prison construction.

Some Peace Tax proposals try to solve this problem by taking the Peace Tax money out of the ordinary government budget and turning it over instead to some more-or-less independent body that has an explicit mandate to spend the money in ways that do not stain the consciences of its contributors. While plans like this are more attractive to conscientious objectors, they are much less so to the governments that would have to sign off on them.

Some activists in Norway are trying to make it easy for the government to create a Peace Tax, by doing the hard work for it. They run a charity they call the Norges Fredsfond (Norwegian Peace Fund) and ask taxpayers to donate to it. When that fund reaches a critical mass of contributors it will gain legal tax-exempt status, and each dollar that people donate to it will reduce their taxes at their marginal tax rate (typically 28%, which means that—at least from one way of looking at it—a conscientious objector could offset his or her “war tax” by contributing about three times its amount to the fund).

The Norges Fredsfond is designed to resemble as much as possible a government-run peace tax fund that accepts tax money to be spent by the government on peace-promoting projects. The organizers hope that by laying the groundwork of creating and administering such a fund, they will be better able to convince the government to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation and to absorb the fund into the government as the lawful alternative fund for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes into.

Examples Informal Legalization via Government Neglect

A government may essentially concede simply by not trying to collect a tax or by not retaliating against resisters.

Colonial American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector surrendered.

I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.

American women’s suffrage activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.” English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others also made themselves too troublesome to bother with: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances. Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”

Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the Internal Revenue Service marks the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment. After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment falls under a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.

Example Conceding Without Conceding the Point

When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in 2009, the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu: It declared an agricultural emergency in the area. This legally exempted those farmers from paying taxes. In this way the government saved face by neither acknowledging defeat nor having to pursue the resisters.

Example Association of Real Estate Taxpayers

Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won their concessions in court. A judge ruled that property assessments in the city had been performed incorrectly—$15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans had been somehow left off the rolls. When they won their case, their tax resistance was effectively legalized and the government was forced to cease its attempts to collect back taxes from the resisters.

Example Irish Land League

The Irish National Land League proved that the pressure of a rent strike can work on landlords in the same way a tax strike can work on governments. During the rent strike, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties.

The action of such a large majority of landlords, in reducing their rents, after the League had been formed, and the system of passive resistance fairly established, shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.

Examples Prussia and Russia

Sometimes tax resistance is “legalized” by means of a conflict between rival governments or branches of government. For instance, when the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own in 1848, the National Assembly formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.

Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the Duma, which then reconvened in Vyborg, Finland and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.

Example Poll Tax Resistance

Poll tax resisters in Scotland held out for decades until in 2015, the Scottish parliament approved a bill that granted an amnesty to people who refused to pay, erasing their remaining tax debt.

Examples Governments Cannot Be Trusted

Beware of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help, or that you’ve made your point and they promise to change. This is a very common gambit and often just means they hope you’ll give up and go away or get distracted by something else before they have to make good on their promise.

When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while he was negotiating with the king in 1379, the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and stunned them by telling them that from now on he would be their leader and would personally see to it that their demands were enacted. Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion: “The low people were reduced to the same slavish condition as before, and several of the ringleaders were punished with capital severity.”

When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around 1832, the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical as their Tory cousins about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance. In 1834, a prosecution was brought against the proprietor of The True Sun for publishing “malicious and seditious libels, in which the people of this country were called upon to resist the payment of the assessed taxes.”

Something similar happened in Ivory Coast in 2011. Victorious presidential candidate Alassanne Ouattara called on his supporters to refuse to pay their taxes to the administration of Laurent Gbagbo, who was refusing to leave office. But when Ouattara won that battle and took charge, his government began pursuing the companies that followed his advice for back taxes.

During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government tried to mollify the resisters by passing something it called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.” Abolishing the annuity tax was exactly what the tax resisters wanted, but, despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax at all, but merely concealed it by wrapping it in with another tax under another name. The resisters were not fooled, and the resistance continued.

Notes and Citations

Providing more money for war sounds like exactly the opposite of what the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund intends with the legislation it is promoting. But sometimes good intentions lead to counterproductive laws and policies, and this is one example. They acknowledge that the bill would increase government revenue without decreasing how much Congress could spend on war:

First, they admit that if the bill were to pass “The government would receive more revenue from increased participation in the payment of income taxes and would spend less on the cost of forced collections.” They also say, of those who pay into the PTF, “nor will their participation in the Peace Tax Fund directly decrease the amount of money spent on war [as] this would violate the Constitutionally given powers of Congress to determine spending priorities.” So Congress would have more taxpayer money than before and could spend as much as it wants on war.

Sources: “Your Tax Dollars at Work” NCPTF fact sheet, 25 October 2012; “Questions and Answers about the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill” NCPTF pamphlet, September 2005
I was surprised when I learned how much of Americans’ delinquent taxes the IRS has essentially given up on. 40% is considered a “write-off” because the taxpayer is dead, bankrupt, out-of-business, vanished into thin air, or something of that sort. Another 23% consists of interest and penalties that the government considers to have inherently “less potential for future collection” although they still hold out hopes of recovering it. The remaining 37% is divided into a “collectible” portion (8.5%) and an “uncollectible” portion (28.5%). [“Financial Audit: IRS’s Fiscal Years 2006 and 2005 Financial Statements” U.S. Government Accountability Office report #GAO‒07‒136, 9 November 2006]
Hyde, Edward The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Begun in the Year 1641, vol. II (1717), p. 265
An Act for the declaring unlawful and void the late proceedings touching Ship-money, and for the vacating of all records and process concerning the same (1641)
Igou, Brad “Valentine Byler vs. the IRS: ‘Pay Unto Caesar—The Amish & Social Security’ ” Amish Country News 1999, 2005
“In Iraq l’8 per mille destinato all’arte” Corriere Della Sera 10 November 2006
Norges Fredsfond (I learned about the fund and the intentions of its founders from Øystein Øgaard at the 14th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns in 2013)
Evans, Joshua “A Drop in the Ocean” American Quaker War Tax Resistance, 2nd ed. (2011) pp. 79–80
Anthony, Susan B. in “Arguments Before the Select Committee On Woman Suffrage, United States Senate, March 7, 1884” Senate Report #399, 48th Congress, p. 13
“Why Pay Taxes?” The Vote 26 February 1910, p. 206
“El gobierno argentino decreta emergencia agropecuaria por sequía” Agence France-Presse 27 January 2009
Parnell, Charles Stewart “The Irish Land Question” The North American Review April 1880, pp. 388–406
Adams, John “Of the Insurrection occasioned by a Poll Tax, A.D. 1379” The Flowers of Modern History (1813), chapter 38
“MSPs vote to end poll tax debt collections” BBC News 19 February 2015
“Whig Prosecutions of the Press” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine March 1834, pp. 295–310
M‘Laren, Duncan “Statement of Facts relative to the Edinburgh Annuity Tax, now commonly called the Clerico-Police Tax” (17 June 1866) in Report from the Select Committee on the Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act (1860) and Canongate Annuity Tax Act (1866) p. 151