Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- NWTRCC has reprinted Melvin D. Schmidt’s paper on “Tax Refusal as Conscientious Objection to War” at its site. The paper gives a brief historical overview of war tax resistance, describes the results of a survey of sixty-one war tax resisters, speculates about IRS policy motives, and looks at the theory of war tax resistance through a Mennonite-focused theological lens.
- Carolyn Yoder brings us a more up-to-date look Mennonite war tax resistance, in a recent article for The Mennonite that includes interviews with fourteen people from the Community Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who are resisting war taxes in a variety of ways.
- The TaxProf Blog recently reprinted some excerpts from Diane L. Fahey’s new paper “The Movement to Destroy the Income Tax and the IRS: Who Is Doing It and How They Are Succeeding”. The paper, which takes a horrified-liberal perspective on this, asserts that Republicans and others of the right-wing are creating all of this outrage over “the IRS scandal” and other such things not just for short-term political gain but as part of a long-term plan to delegitimize the IRS and the nation’s tax system and erode the culture of tax compliance, at the service of “a small group of financial elites” who want to be able to stop paying. “The article concludes that if this erosion in compliance attitudes continues, it will reach a level of magnitude that a tipping point will be reached and noncompliance will be an acceptable norm.”
- Highway tax portals are still going up in flames in France. The latest was set aflame in Brech (about half-way between Lorient and Vannes in southern Brittany) and damaged enough that the government chose to dismantle and remove it.
