Form Mutual Insurance Pacts

People who participate in a tax resistance campaign are more willing to risk the wrath of the government if they know that wrath will not fall wholly on them. Your campaign can provide this reassurance by forming a mutual insurance plan. That way, if the government retaliates against a resister, that person won’t face the consequences alone.

Example Dublin Water Charge Strike

The 1994–96 water charge strike in Dublin was a mass refusal to pay new government fees, ostensibly for water and other utilities, that the resisters felt were a regressive “double tax” on households. The government tried to defeat the campaign by harshly targeting a few individual resisters in the hopes that this would discourage the rest. A strike leader noted:

The campaign immediately took a decision that when any individual was summonsed to court, we would turn up and contest every case—and that we would turn up in force.… [W]e made a decision which would prove crucial to the success of the campaign. We decided to initiate a membership of the campaign at £2 per household. This money would go into a war-chest to pay legal fees so that no individual would be left facing a legal bill. The idea that the individuals being taken to court were representing all of us was paramount. Within weeks 2,500 households had paid the £2 membership fee, and within 12 months there were over 10,000 paid-up households…

Example American War Tax Resisters

American war tax resisters have organized what they call “penalty funds.” With these, a community of resisters and sympathizers come together to pay any penalties & interest that the government manages to seize from a resister.

For example, the “War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund” works this way: If the Internal Revenue Service successfully seizes resisted taxes from a war tax resister, the resister notifies the Fund about the seizure and sends documentation that shows what portion of what was seized can be attributed to penalties & interest (the portion that was not simply the taxes that the resister had originally refused to pay). The Fund then divides this amount by the number of supporters who have subscribed to the Fund, and sends these supporters a request for that amount. The supporters send in their checks, and the Fund combines these to send a reimbursement to the resister.

This means that the resister doesn’t lose any more money because of the seizure than they would have lost if they had just paid their taxes in the first place.

This helps give courage to American war tax resisters who might otherwise be intimidated by the potential financial impact of penalties & interest. It also helps a wider community to participate in the resistance of an individual resister.

Example Chicago Property Tax Strike

You can use this sort of mutual aid to play offense as well as defense. Your campaign can pool money to file lawsuits that challenge government enforcement methods or the tax itself.

The Association of Real Estate Taxpayers (ARET) led a mass property tax strike in Depression-era Chicago. They had 30,000 members who each paid annual dues of $15. This money funded lawsuits that challenged a corrupt tax assessment system that illegally undervalued (or failed to list) the property of some wealthy and politically-influential landowners.

By signing up, taxpayers of modest means could secure professional legal service for a grand total of fifteen dollars in fees. The attorney general of Illinois estimated that ARET’s nine suits, if paid for by one person, would cost a total of $200,000! By offering this legal service, ARET put within reach of the ordinary taxpayer an avenue of protest otherwise prohibitive to all but the wealthiest.

A judge agreed with their arguments and invalidated the tax rolls for 1928–30, which made the city unable to collect unpaid property taxes for those years. “As the matter stands,” one newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them. They are in revolt with legal sanction.”

Example Anti Dray and Land Tax League

Campaigns that organize mutual insurance plans may have to make tough decisions about how the plans are funded and used—for instance, whether the insurance will benefit all resisters, or only those resisters who contribute to the mutual insurance fund.

The Anti Dray and Land Tax League organized a successful tax resistance campaign in South Australia in 1850. They formed a mutual insurance pact during the enthusiasm of the early days of the campaign, without putting much thought into the details of how the fund would work. This led to internal disputes.

Some thought the fund should be used to legally challenge every action the government took against every resister (an advocate for this position noted that “the moral force of the League was greatly enhanced by every triumph” in the lower courts). Others thought the fund should instead be used to vigorously appeal one particular test case to the Supreme Court in the hopes of having the tax declared to be invalid.

Some felt that only those who had contributed to the fund should be protected by it, and they put forward a motion: “That no expense be incurred on behalf of any person whose hundred [division] has not contributed £20 to the funds of the League.” But other campaign members opposed the idea that the League’s legal help would be restricted to dues-paying members. They believed that this would discourage the poorer members from resisting, and that because these dues would themselves resemble a tax, it “would savour strongly of the principle they were associated to oppose” and “would be a worse tyranny” than the tax they had associated to fight.

Example The Breton Association

The Breton Association organized tax resistance in the waning days of Charles X’s reign in France in 1829. They were more deliberate and precise when they established their mutual insurance fund, as you can see from their pledge:

To subscribe individually for ten francs… [and] to pay the same money on presentation of the drafts of Procurators-general, in case they should be named conformably to the third article of the present declaration.

This subscription will form a common stock or fund for all Brittany, destined to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public…

In case of any illegal change in the mode of elections, or any illegal establishment of the taxes, two proxies of each district will assemble at Pontivy, and as soon as they are twenty in number, they will have power to elect amongst the subscribers three procurators-general and an under-procurator in each of the five departments.

The duty of the general procurators will be to receive the subscriptions, to afford indemnities conformably to the second article, at the request of any subscriber prosecuted for the payment of illegal contributions; to sue in his name through the sub-procurator of his department for justice against the exactors by all possible means allowed by law; and to become the accusers of all those who are accomplices or abettors of the establishment of illegal taxes.

The subscribers named and proxies of this district [are] to assemble with the proxies of the other districts, and to deposit the present subscription in the hands of the general procurators.

Such precision made it clear to subscribers what they were subscribing to and how decisions would be made about the use of the fund. This made it less likely that the Association’s work would be distracted by arguments like those that came up in the Anti Dray and Land Tax League.

Notes and Citations

Kerr, Gregor “Lessons from beating the water charges” Workers Solidarity Movement
Gross, David “Protecting war tax resistance strengthens antiwar movement” Waging Nonviolence 11 February 2016
I subscribe to the war tax resisters penalty fund, and I made an application for reimbursement of $813 in penalties and interest in 2009. The subscribers to the fund pitched in $649—79% of my request—which meant that the total penalties and interest that I myself was forced to pay came to only about 3% of the tax I was resisting, over several years of resistance. (At that rate, I would probably have come out ahead if I had put the originally-resisted taxes in an interest-bearing account.) I understand that now the fund commits to covering 100% of any legitimate request.
Beito, David Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression (1989) p. 63
“Taxpayers’ Strike Made Chicago ‘Broke’ ” San Jose Evening News 15 January 1932, p. 3
See The Picket Line for more about the Anti-Dray and Land-Tax League’s campaign. The quotes (paraphrases of arguments at a League meeting) come from the article “Anti-Dray and Land-Tax League” in the 19 October 1850 edition of the Adelaide South Australian Register (p. 3).
“The Breton Subscription” in Gross, David (ed.) We Won’t Pay: A Tax Resistance Reader (2008) pp. 158–59