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Tax Strike Tactics

Join Cooperative Housing

Some tax resisters form cooperative housing arrangements that help them to resist. I have mostly seen this tactic among war tax resisters, many of whom resist as an ongoing commitment rather than as a protest or rebellion against a particular government or policy.

Governments usually inflict taxes when money changes hands: Income taxes when people earn or receive money, payroll taxes when employers pay employees, sales taxes when consumers purchase goods, value-added taxes as goods move through the supply chain, estate taxes when assets are inherited, tariffs and customs duties when transactions take place that cross borders, and so on. Individuals pay some of these taxes directly, and others indirectly through higher prices of goods and services.

Some tax resisters decide that they can resist such taxes more comprehensively by removing more of their activities from the marketplace—by relying less on economic transactions and more on community. Cooperative housing arrangements are one way they help each other to do this.

Example Bijou Community

For example the Bijou Community in Colorado Springs, Colorado, “runs services for the mentally-ill, homeless, working poor, incarcerated, and the general community, including: a soup kitchen, food banks, a land trust, several homes for transitional and homeless folks, a free bicycle clinic, and a musical theater group.” It also serves as a mutual support for its members, who each earn incomes that are below the taxable level as a method of war tax resistance.

Example Agape Community

The Agape Community in Massachusetts describes itself as “a lay Catholic residential community, ecumenical and interfaith in outreach and practice, with a focus on daily prayer, evangelical simplicity (eco-spirituality, sustainability, organic garden, vegetable oil fueled car, straw bale house, compost toilet, solar energy, wood stoves for cooking and heat), and nonviolent witness in the world, including actions against war, peace vigils, tax resistance, and civil disobedience when called, as we attempt to build a nonviolent world.” It was founded by war tax resisters and supports volunteers who live on a below-the-tax-line income.

Example Valley Community Land Trust

War tax resisters organized the Valley Community Land Trust in Massachusetts to hold the property and its buildings as a non-profit corporation. This structure helps the resisters to have homes of their own without their tax resistance making the homes vulnerable to seizure. When the Internal Revenue Service tried to seize the home of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner in 1989, the members of the community rallied around them and helped get their home returned to them.

Example Possibility Alliance

The Possibility Alliance farm in Missouri was a simple-living showcase guided by five principles: radical simplicity, service, social activism, inner work, and gratitude. It hosted free skills-share classes and a group called the “Superheroes” who dressed up like caped crusaders and biked out to do good deeds here and there. The founders are war tax resisters who resist by maintaining a very low (sub-poverty line) income. (They have since rebooted this project in Maine.)

Example Land League Villages

War tax resisters are not the only ones to have used this technique. The Irish National Land League organized a mass rent strike in the late-nineteenth century, aimed at English landlords and the political structure that prioritized their rights over those of Irish tenants.

When landlords evicted tenants who refused to pay rent, the League would try to find the tenants (and sometimes their livestock) a temporary home on the land of someone sympathetic with the resisters. These encampments might grow to hold several families and were sometimes called “Land League Villages.” On one occasion, hundreds of evicted rent strikers founded a whole new town, “New Tipperary,” on the outskirts of Tipperary, which was largely owned by one rich landlord and parliamentarian.

Notes and Citations