A Conservative Call for Civil Disobedience

A prominent U.S. conservative author is coming out with a new book that calls for civil disobedience.

The author, Charles Murray, says that the trend in government is always to make ever more regulations, and only rarely do these rules get loosened or revoked. The result is that our lives are choking on red tape. We’re restrained from innovation and entrepreneurship by the justified fear that we’ll stumble over some overlooked law and get taken down by some zealous bureaucrat.

The answer, Murray suggests, is for citizens to effectively nullify these regulations through mass non-compliance backed by mutual insurance plans to protect us against targeted government reprisals. This, he says, would soon make those regulations null and void.

Here is some press about Murray’s new book:

• Regulation Run Amok — And How to Fight Back: Murray summarizes his argument in the Wall Street Journal
• The Case for Conservative Civil Disobedience: a review of the book from The Washington Post
• Want to Sabotage Bad Laws? Healthy Contempt is More Important Than Legal Strategy: J.D. Tuccille ponders Murray’s idea in Reason’s Hit & Run blog

The civil disobedience + mutual insurance combination resembles what some U.S. war tax resisters do with their tax refusal + the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.

It is nice to see civil disobedience getting a respectful hearing in conservative circles, and I look forward to a time when the incessant gripes about taxation on the right start getting accompanied by some actual refusal.

Some tax resistance news out of Spain:

• The Nueva Tribuna of Spain reminds its readers that “war is funded with your taxes,” and describes the latest war tax resistance campaign launched by pacifist and antimilitarist groups like Ecologists in Action.
• Economic Disobedience: Ethical Integrity and Consistency in Tax Resistance is the title of an announcement by the Integral Catalan Cooperative of their tax redirection campaign.

A news dispatch from this date in 1909:

Resist Tax; Are Killed.

Forty Natives of Padany Sumatra Fell Before Soldiers.

Amsterdam, May 22. — The natives of Panay Sumatra have refused to pay the new tax levied upon them and are resisting every effort of the government to force collection. Today they fought a battle with the troops and forty natives and three soldiers were killed.

This is a little hard for me to decipher, in part because of the two spellings of the location. There is a city called Padang in Sumatra, and there is also an island called Panay in the Philippines. Both areas were, I believe, part of the “Dutch East Indies” at the time.