The Difficult Case of the American War Tax Resistance Movement

Some tax resistance campaigns include resisters from more than one category, and this can be a challenge. One example is the modern American war tax resistance movement, which includes resisters from each of the four categories I described, each with their own ideas of the goals of resistance. This has made it difficult for this movement to unite around particular tactics.

Introducing Four Resisters

I will show you what I mean by introducing four fictional American war tax resisters who represent these varieties:

Amy: Amy is a Quaker pacifist. “From an ethical point of view,” she says, “I don’t see much difference between firing a weapon at somebody and paying somebody else to fire it.” She also wants to be a law-abiding citizen, however. So the method of tax resistance that most appeals to her is to reduce her income to the point where she no longer owes federal income tax. This allows her to be comfortable with her conscience without breaking the law and risking legal sanctions. For her, the lower standard of living is a small price to pay for this peace of mind.
Brian: Brian has marched in anti-war protest rallies and has pleaded with his political representatives, but he thinks tax resistance is the best way to make himself heard. “Money talks. Stop paying your taxes and the government will stop ignoring you.” Brian refuses to pay half of his federal income tax, a percentage he believes is roughly equivalent to the portion of income tax revenue that the government spends on militarist projects. When taxes are due, he includes a letter with his tax return explaining his refusal, and he sends copies of his letter to his Congressional representatives and to his local newspaper. When the government responds by adding interest and fines to his tax bill and by seizing the money from his bank account, he uses these occasions to send out a press release about his action and why he feels it is important.
Clara: The bumper sticker on Clara’s car reads “It’ll be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” She’s trying to make this day arrive by persuading the members of a national peace group to withhold their taxes from the government and redirect the money to schools themselves. “If the government won’t use our tax dollars responsibly, we’ll just have to show them how it’s done,” she says. “But to make this work, we need a lot of people to join us, and we need to be very practical in choosing techniques that really deprive the military-industrial complex of resources.”
Donald: Donald notes that for a long time conscientious objectors to military service had to risk prison or worse before the government finally acknowledged that conscientious objectors have a right not to participate in war. He hopes that his tax resistance will help persuade the government to acknowledge that this right also extends to taxpayers who are conscientiously opposed to paying for war. He lobbies the government, asking it to create a “Peace Tax Fund” where conscientious taxpayers could deposit their taxes without fear that the money would be used for military spending. Meanwhile he is pursuing a court appeal in which he asserts conscientious objection to military taxation is a Constitutional right. “I would be happy to pay every cent I owe, even more,” he says, “if only I knew my money were not paying for war.”

Where They Agree and Disagree

Amy, Brian, Clara, and Donald may sit in the same circle at a war tax resistance gathering. They may take inspiration from the same exemplars and authors. You may see them marching together and signing the same petitions. They have a lot in common.

But because they have different motives and different goals, they may find it hard to rally around a common tactic or campaign.

For instance, when Brian thinks about Amy’s quiet, legal resistance, he wonders how she thinks she’ll persuade the government to change its policies that way. But Amy thinks, “I don’t refuse to kill people in order to protest against murder, but because it is wrong to murder. That’s also how I feel about my taxes.”

Clara considers Brian’s experience of having his bank account raided each year by the Internal Revenue Service and wonders how Brian thinks he’s having any impact on military spending that way. But Brian doesn’t have any ambitions of defunding the government. He still hopes to persuade it to change, and thinks that an uncompromising position of total opposition would be neither persuasive nor successful.

Amy looks at Donald’s lobbying and wonders why it is so important to him that the government legalize his conscience—isn’t conscience compelling enough without needing a law to agree with it? But Donald hopes that legalizing conscientious objection will give it more respect and visibility, and will encourage more people to consider a question of conscience that only brave dissidents are willing to consider today. The state of the law is a way of measuring society’s values, he thinks, and if the law recognizes conscientious objection to military taxation, this may mean society is more willing to recognize dissent from war as a proper role for its citizens.

Because Their Motives and Goals Differ, So Do Their Tactics

Superficially these activists are all “war tax resisters”—using similar tactics, with similar motives, and similar goals. But when you look closer you notice that their motives and goals are not identical, and so the tactics that are appropriate for one might not be for another.

Does your campaign include multiple varieties of resister? If so, you need to be sensitive to these different aspirations, and not assume that a tactic that is attractive to some will seem compelling (or even sensible) to all.

You may look at some of the tactics described in this book and think “what possible good could that do?” If this happens, remind yourself that different tactics are best for different goals, and consider that a tactic that looks useless to you may still have some use to another variety of resister.

Notes and Citations

Zahn, Franklin “Tax Refusal, Law, and Order” Friends Journal 1 October 1967, pp. 514–15 (“We refuse to steal not as a protest against burglary—with consideration of how ‘effective’ we may or may not be—but simply because for us stealing is wrong.”)
Freund, Ronald What One Person Can Do To Help Prevent Nuclear War (1982), p. 69 (quoting Bill Faw: “I would still do it even if no one else did. There comes a point, with Vietnam or the arms race, where you say, ‘I’m not going to participate in that, no matter what the cost.’ It’s kind of like Martin Luther saying, ‘Here I stand; I cannot do other.’ ”)