So lately I’ve been being very urban homesteader — baking bread, brewing beer and sake, making yogurt, weeding the garden, canning soups. I’ve been looking for a paying gig, too, which I think partially explains my sudden explosion of home usefulness: it gives me something productive to do while I wait for résumés and bids to be ignored.
What I haven’t been doing much is writing anything substantial for The Picket Line. Sorry ’bout that.
Meanwhile all sorts of interesting things have backed up in my bookmarks, waiting for me to add some insight or context before passing them on for you to enjoy. I think instead I’ll just let them spill out here and trust you to fill in the blanks:
- Francois Tremblay wonders if taxpayers become complicit in what their tax dollars support. He weighs the arguments for both sides (no, because their participation is legally required; and yes, because their participation is nonetheless voluntary) and then engages in some spirited give-and-take with his readers.
- Steven Schallert writes about his war tax resistance at his interestingly-titled blog shutters slide to unveil fingerprints of angels.
- War tax resisters Phil and Louise Baldwin Rieman died in a car accident shortly after . There have been several remembrances of the couple on-line, such as this one from the Church of the Brethren.
- Murray Rothbard writes about ending tyranny without violence (through withdrawal of consent) and the nearly 500-year-old insights of Étienne de La Boétie.
- Carl Watner takes a fresh look at the Whiskey Rebellion and what it means about the origin and nature of the U.S. government.
- Gene Healy and Benjamin Friedman of the Cato Institute note that the U.S. military is preparing a new occupation, and when they meet the enemy the enemy will be us.
- The Taxpayer Advocate said in its annual report that American taxpayers pay — above and beyond what they actually are charged in taxes — nearly two hundred billion dollars just trying to do the paperwork involved in taxpaying.
- Our local paper did the math and put a number on a conclusion that should have been pretty obvious: it’s much cheaper to take public transit than to drive. According to their figures, it costs Bay Area drivers about $1,000 per month to get where they’re going by car instead of by bus and rail. Hell, we pay that much for rent.
- There seems to be a lot of buzz about a revival of local, alternative currencies during this recession.
- A writer for Rebelión notes that Europe’s public is sick of spending so much on the military and asks, “is tax resistance not therefore justified, an investment in the struggle for what is worth the trouble of defending instead of the military costs that impede this to a great extent?” (en español)
- Finally, U.S. nuclear weapons spending topped $52 billion (and that’s only counting what we’re allowed to know about). Compare that to the budget of your favorite government agency, business, or non-profit.
