I’ve mentioned before how I was inspired to embark on my experiment in tax resistance by reading Henry David Thoreau’s essay Resistance to Civil Government (more popularly known as Civil Disobedience).
Today I came across an study written a few years ago about Thoreau’s essay — The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience by Lawrence Rosenwald. It is a very good look at the historical and biographical context of Thoreau’s essay, and of how Thoreau’s understanding of resistance compares to other theories that were current at that time, and with the understandings of people like Gandhi who were inspired by Thoreau later on.
Thoreau’s writings on tax refusal, and Rosenwald’s “On War Tax Resistance” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.
Rosenwald is himself a war tax resister. He withholds the portion of his federal income taxes that he believes goes to support war, and then the government seizes a similar amount from him after some intervening bureaucracy. Like me, Rosenwald was eventually won over to tax resistance by Thoreau’s persuasiveness. He tells the story this way:
Now he does teach Civil Disobedience — and if his study is any indication, it must be one hell of a class. I’ve read Thoreau’s essay many times, but I’ve always felt like I’ve been viewing it through a keyhole because of my chronological distance from Thoreau and his time. Now I feel like I have a much better understanding of who Thoreau was addressing his essay to and what arguments he was responding to and amplifying.
Rosenwald writes elsewhere about how things have changed since Thoreau’s time and how the tax resister today has a different set of concerns, and confronts a different sort of tax collecting apparatus. Thoreau wrote:
But the state now confronts the tax resister more with laws and faceless bureaucracies and electronic seizures of bank accounts — this meeting of peers on equal ground is a thing of the past. Rosenwald finds little satisfaction in confronting the dumb behemoth that has replaced Thoreau’s tax-gatherer:
[T]he IRS has instituted an Automatic Collection Service, and we have been collected on three times, once by a levy on my salary and twice by levies on our bank accounts; each time the levy took not only the original refused tax but also penalties and interest. Even now the IRS occasionally fumbles; before levying my salary it attempted to levy a bank account I had closed out fifteen years previously, and between the first bank levy and the second it refunded the levied money with interest. But this clumsy, capricious power frets me more than a more efficient and so more predictable bureaucracy might have done…
Rosenwald also notes that Thoreau chose tax resistance reluctantly and in an attempt to avoid getting involved with politics. He eventually concluded that where taxes were concerned, a political choice could not be avoided (in Rosenwald’s words, “in paying taxes abstinence just isn’t a choice, because you either pay them and collaborate with the state or refuse to pay them and defy the state, but in any case you do politics”).
Today’s Thoreau-ish tax resister is confronted by many more of these entanglements than Thoreau was. Thoreau could imagine that “I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it.” Today you meet the tax-gatherer and other coercive agents of the state on a daily basis. Getting from the unexamined life to a place where you can plant your feet and “[l]et your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” is arguably much more difficult today.
