Tax Resistance News from Sweden, Austria, Spain, and Venice

An international tax resistance news round-up:

• A pos me salto-style movement in Sweden has gone a step further by initiating a mutual insurance plan. For a €12 monthly fee, the plan will insure contributors against any tickets they are given for being caught without a ticket — compare this to €100 for a monthly transit pass, or €150 for a fare evasion citation. So far, the plan is running at a healthy profit; taking in about twice as much from grateful subscribers as it has had to pay out in fine reimbursements.
• A recent poll of Austrian citizens found that a third of them were in favor of a tax strike.
• Iago Alvarez of the Economista Cabreado blog, writing at Público.es, voices the usual uneasiness of establishment liberals with tax resistance (“tax revenue is the lifeblood of our welfare state, the funding of our schools, hospitals, roads, etc.…”) but then decides things have finally gone too far:

  We must take the reins of our future, and I insist that it is us who must wrestle for them, and that the current drivers are comfortable the way they are and will not give them up. Only the daily struggle for democracy, either through your vote, your taxes, in the streets, or through self-managed projects, will lead to the regaining or the taking of power and will make us masters of our future.

  He then links approvingly to sites like the Economic Disobedience and Utopia Contagiosa.
• The Venetian separatists have started opening their own versions of “Offices of Economic Disobedience” — Uffici Pubblici sull’Obiezione Fiscale — to counsel people and businesses on how best to refuse to pay taxes to Italy in anticipation of eventually being able to pay taxes instead to an independent Venice.

From the 28 May 1902 Schuylerville Standard:

Syracuse Freshmen Suspended.

Forty-one members of the freshman class have been suspended from Syracuse University for refusing to pay per capita tax of thirty-five cents, levied on account of damages to property on “moving-up” day.

Trying to find a bit more about this conflict, I found other references to “moving-up day” problems. A few years later, the university asked students to take an oath both not to vandalize property and to actively discourage others from doing so. In 1909:

Traditional Moving-Up Day exercises — during which graduating seniors are excused from mandatory chapel attendance, juniors take their empty seats, and each class subsequently “moves up” — are temporarily abolished after celebrating freshmen paint Sims Hall, streetcars, and campus monuments.

The initial article suggests that the administration tried to use collective punishment to smother the goings-on, which seems only to have provoked resentment.