Tax Refusal as Conscientious Objection to War

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.

Tax resistance had a role in the struggles over the future of Cyprus in the , at least according to this Spectator article (excerpt):

[T]he Turkish community has had time to complete its scheme to wreck the [British government’s] plan. Led still in name by Dr. [Fazıl] Kutchuk but effectually now by Raud Denktash, a shrewd and able lawyer (whom the Government lost from its service three months ago because it would not even pay him the salary of a fledgling lawyer from England), the Turks propose to introduce partition “by avalanche.” Already they have refused to pay taxes to the Greek-majority municipalities, they have obliged their workers to leave the mixed trade unions and all inter-community associations, they have torn down signs in English and Greek.