A couple of tax-resistance-related quotes I hadn’t seen before:
The first was pointed out by Larry Rosenwald and comes from the speech that Emily Greene Balch gave after sharing the Nobel Prize for peace in . She is speaking of two varieties of peace movement work: the individual moral stand of conscientious objection, and the organized political work of trying to change national policy in a peaceful direction (which, to her, meant the strengthening of international institutions as a way of subduing tensions between nations). Her aside, after discussing conscientious objection by conscripted young men:
I feel it rather surprising also that refusal of war has never taken the form, on any large scale, of refusal to pay taxes for military use, a refusal which would have involved not only young men but (and mainly) older men and women, holders of property.
The second quote comes from a translation/summary of a portion of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Confessions of a Revolutionist that Shawn P. Wilbur shared at In the Libertarian Labyrinth. Proudhon is speaking of his recollections of the French revolutions of :
The right of insurrection can only exist under an absolute government, where the people have no voice in the constitution; but in the present case, universal suffrage remaining to us, our only legitimate mode of defeating our adversaries was by legal resistance; and the plan proposed by Le Peuple, namely, an organized refusal to pay the taxes all over the country, would have been a most effectual instrument. Since the , however, this is no longer practicable or necessary; my proposition was received with distrust by the radicals: if the people refuse to pay taxes once, said these slavish advocates of government, they will refuse them altogether, and then government will be impossible: and my reward was a fine of 10,000 francs and ten years’ imprisonment.
