An International Tax Resistance News Round-Up

An international tax resistance news round-up:

Catalonia

  • The Diputació de Barcelona, which governs the largest province in Catalonia, voted to stop paying value-added and income taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead forwarding the money to the Catalan Tax Agency. The left-wing separatist party Candidatura d’Unitat Popular proposed the measure, which managed to also win support of the center-left Entesa bloc. The Catalan Tax Agency currently forwards such taxes to the Spanish government, so the practical effect of this is currently minimal, but it sets the stage for an eventual Catalan independence bid in which its government will stop relinquishing such funds.
  • Meanwhile the Spanish Constitutional Court declared Catalonia’s attempts to strengthen the independence of its own tax agency “unconstitutional and nullified.”

France

Temps passé: les plus utiles étoien foulés aux pieds: Comme ils S’entendent (Tailles, impôts, et Corvées)

a nobleman and a priest crush the working man with taxes (here is another version of the same idea)

a bas les impiots

“Down With Taxes” with the taxes depicted as a hydra with greedy goose heads

 faut espérer q’eu s jeu la finira ben tôt: un païsant portant un prélat, et un noble: allusion aux impôts dont le poids retombait en entier sur le peuple: M.M. les eclesiastiques et les nobles non seulement ne payoient rien, mais encore obtenoient des graces, des pensions qui épuisoient l’Etat et le malheureux cultivateur pouvoit a peine fournir à sa subsistance

a noble and a priest ride on a peasant’s back, caricaturing those taxes from which the nobility and priesthood were exempt

Greece

  • Six Δεν Πληρώνω (“won’t pay”) activists who engaged in a protest against transit fare increases in Thessaloniki in were given suspended sentences.
  • The Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών (“people stop paying”) movement continues its campaign of disrupting auctions of seized property.

Honduras

  • In many parts of Honduras, crime syndicates / protogovernments rule the streets, often extorting more money from their subjects than does the internationally-recognized Honduran government. Some people resist these taxes, known locally as “impuesto de guerra” or “war tax,” but the consequences of refusal can be, and frequently are, deadly. The latest victims included eight bus company employees in Choloma, who were gunned down in broad daylight, a block away from a police station and by attackers in police uniforms, in retaliation against drivers who did not pay the tax. In bus drivers there took collective action, going on strike to demand better security.

Ireland

Spain

  • The Spanish war tax resistance movement has recently released its tallies of war tax resistance and redirection for this tax season. According to the group, some €92,514 was resisted by the 647 people whom they were able to find in their census. The complete report breaks this down by region and municipality and lists the 162 destinations to which these resisted taxes were redirected.

Wales

various

  • Robert McGee, whose scholarship on the attitudes of people concerning tax evasion and resistance in different cultures has been a topic here before, has published a new paper, this one on The Ethics of Tax Evasion in Islam. In contrast to his more typical work, this one is more speculative than empirical, and summarizes the opinions of Muslim authorities about the proper limits of the government’s authority to tax, and of the subject’s obligation to submit to such taxation.