…Popular comic and political activist Bepe Grillo on Monday week [sic] described the tax collection office Equitalia as the “terror of every Italian” and said he could understand why an anarchist group had that very day sent it a parcel bomb.…
La Repubblica newspaper quoted finance department data which suggest levels of tax evasion have leapt fivefold in the last three decades, with the treasury losing $275 billion in the last year alone.
Nereus Mendenhall wrote to Friends’ Review on
to correct the record
about how Quakers fared under the governments of the Confederacy during the
American Civil War. Some excerpts:
I do not hesitate to say that in my opinion the course of North Carolina and
of the Confederate government was as liberal toward Friends as that of the
United States government, or even more so. In the North the Friends were in
sympathy with the government. It is supposable that they rejoiced over every
Federal victory, and were sad at every Federal defeat. They could go into
hospitals, they could do other service, they could pay the commutation money.
Not so the Friends in the South. They had no sympathy with the Southern
cause; they were opposed to the war, as Christians, as citizens, as men. They
regarded every Confederate victory with sorrow, believing, as they did, that
it but prolonged the bloody contest. And yet, under the knowledge of this
well-known feeling, the Convention of North Carolina had such respect for the
sincerity of their convictions that it passed an ordinance releasing them
from military service on the payment (I think) of $100. And the Confederate
Congress — that ogre, as some would regard it — clearly released Friends on
the payment of $500 — $500 of Confederate money, even when the whole sum was
not worth more than $10 or $20 in gold.
Which acted most in accordance with the principle of Friends in this matter,
those who served in the hospitals, thus enabling the United States to keep as
many fighting men in the field, or those who refused either to do this or to
pay the trifling sum of $500 Confederate money, and thus acknowledge the
right of the Government to tax us for our consciences, may here be left
without answers.
The editor of the Review answered:
The Discipline of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting discountenances the performance
of any military duty whatever by its members, or the procuring of a
substitute. The Meeting for Sufferings also, soon after the civil war began,
issued an advice that members should not pay the commutation tax in lieu of
service. Although this was felt by many young men as going farther than their
own consciences would require, we know of no instance in which such
commutation was paid, or service in hospitals,
etc., rendered
instead of bearing arms, by any member of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Almost
certainly the number of Friends in the North who adopted the measure proposed
for their relief by the Government was very small. The number who abandoned
the principles of peace would seem to have been proportionally much smaller
than at the time of the war of the Revolution, when many Friends entered the
army.
