Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → American conservative arguments for tax resistance → TEA Party phenomenon

Now that the Democrats have taken over Congress and the White House, Republicans all across America have snapped out of their 8-year trance and remembered that they have a passionate loathing for wasteful government spending, centralized bureaucracy, executive overreach, reckless deficits, and the taxation that backs it all up.

This suspiciously-timed discontent has lately manifested itself in some “Tea Parties” in several cities. Meant to be evocative of the Boston Tea Party, they have mostly been occasions to gather and complain and wave signs.

There hasn’t been any actual rebellion, withdrawal of allegiance, or tax resistance so far as I have seen, except for the many references to “shrugging” or “going Galt.” John Galt was a character in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which fantasized about what would happen if the most productive, innovative, and industrious elite of America went on strike and refused to do any work that was subject to government taxation and regulation.

Promoters of the recent “tea parties” hint that the shrugging has begun, or is about to begin. Some even insist that they’re on the verge of shrugging themselves. But in all of the reports, I’ve heard a lot of talk of shrugging but so far only one credible report of anyone actually doing it: This one, from the comments here at The Picket Line.

One commentator compared it to the “if Bush is reelected, I’m moving to Canada” phenomenon, in which it was easy to find examples of people saying this before the 2004 election, but not so easy to find examples of people actually doing it afterwards.

I did find one example of a potential shrugger taking inspiration from actual real-life tax resisters who put their money where their mouths are:

[Dr. Helen] Smith, who’s still mulling over ways that she can “go Galt,” sees a possibility for a moral stand. During the Iraq War, she read about a painter who’d painted less, reducing his income, in order to dodge taxes and thereby make sure he didn’t fund the war. “I’d go John Galt just to not pay for programs I don’t believe in,” said Smith. “If we’re opposed to socialistic concepts — if we know they don’t work — why should we pay to support them?”

But my favorite of the recent Rand meditations was this one:

A banking company, BB&T Corp. of North Carolina, has given $30 million in grants in the last decade for various universities to teach [Atlas Shrugged]. Most recently, in March, 2008, BB&T gave UT-Austin $2 million for a Chair in the Study of Objectivism. Then in October, BB&T took (wait for it) $3.1 billion in bailout money.

I’m sure you’re eager to hear how the “Tea Party” went. The short version is three pictures long:

The crowd assembled in front of City Hall…

…and marched to the Federal Building…

…where they cheered on various speakers.

I went to the rally but didn’t find any other local war tax resisters there. One of our crew did show up, but oddly we never ran in to each other even in the fairly small crowd.

So there I was, with my “War Tax Resisters Aren’t Buying It” / “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is” sandwich board. The looks I got gave me the vibe of: “Is he from the bride’s family? the groom’s family? does anyone know this guy?”

A few people came up to talk with me. I didn’t get any hostility at all, mostly just curiosity. I told them what I was about, how I thought that war tax resisters might have something to teach that Tea Partiers might be eager to learn, and typically got a “hmmm” & a nod.

One fellow shared a good conversation with me about the prospects for tax resistance in the conservative set and whether as the country goes further to hell there’ll be any chance of the left-grassroots and the right-grassroots realizing that they have a common enemy in the politicians who are robbing them blind and telling them to blame it on each other.

The Party was dominated by the Fox News demographic, and the speakers tossed them the expected anti-Obama, anti-Pelosi red meat. To a large extent, many are eager to swallow what their manipulators are eager to dish out. But there were other folks there as well: some folks peddling Obama conspiracy theories of one variety or another, “show me the law”-style tax protesters, objectivists, some radical anti-capitalist critics of the economic crisis, and even a liberal Obama fan pissed off at the bailout who had the courage to grab the megaphone and address the crowd.

There was a sizable libertarian contingent — which you might expect, given the anti-tax, anti-government-spending focus. But other libertarians have been skeptical of the Tea Party phenomenon, and at least one went from being a Tea Party organizer to deciding to sit it out on the sidelines as the events became captured by opportunistic Republican politicians and media personalities.

A group of about a half-dozen very white punk rock kids, calling themselves “Anti-Racist Action” had somehow gotten it into their heads that the Tea Party was going to be a rally for the anti-immigrant “Minutemen” group. So they were there to counter-protest with a couple of signs reading “Smash the MinuteKlan” or some such. I may have been the only person who noticed. In any case, I saw a single sign in the Tea Party crowd complaining about the burden illegal immigrants place on taxpayers, but otherwise no indication of an organized “Minutemen” presence.

Amusingly, an Australian tourist came up to me at one point and asked if it was an anti-immigration demonstration. I was surprised and asked why he’d drawn that conclusion. He pointed to a sign reading “United States of France!” I had to explain that in the American conservative milieu, “France” is a shorthand description for everything bad, and that this had nothing to do with French immigrants.

How did the Tea Party compare with our local anti-war rallies, like that last ANSWER fiasco I went to?

Well… compare and contrast. On the contrast side, the Tea Partiers not only recited the pledge of allegiance, but they sang the national anthem and God Bless America… no Jackson Browne whatsoever. I also saw no giant puppets.

On the compare side:

• There was at least one “hey ho” chant (“hey ho, BHO, keep your hands off our kids’ dough”).
• The crowd was remarkably Caucasian. I could have probably counted the number of non-white faces on one hand.
• There was widespread disappointment at the turn-out, combined with wishful inflation of the count estimate and the assumption that the media would under-count the rally. (If I had to guess, I’d say there were 500–750 people at the peak; a San Francisco Weekly reporter says “a few hundred”, Joan Walsh at Salon says “about 250”, the Golden Gate X-Press says “more than 400”, The Wall Street Journal says “a couple hundred”, the local ABC station says “about 300”.)
• Authoritarian fringe parties were overrepresented among the speakers, who often deviated from the rally agenda to raise pet issues (at ANSWER rallies, these are usually various permutations of People’s Socialist Mumiaist Worker’s Party of the Socialist Worker People, at the Tea Party it was the Republicans.)
• There were upside-down flags, protest signs written on cardboard with markers, and calls for impeachment.

The protest signs had a familiar ring to them.

Although the turn-out from our local war tax resistance crew was slim, at least one war tax resister elsewhere braved the Tea Party. Heather Snow got frustrated by handing out flyers at the post office and decided to take a look at the Tea Party in her neck of the woods. She was unimpressed. She tried to do some direct outreach (whereas I just sort of passively used my sandwich board), and found an unreceptive, if not hostile, audience.

Myself, I’m not sorry I went, though I’m hard-pressed to point out anything much that made a difference to my cause or theirs.

Last weekend there was a big anti-tax protest in Washington, with other, smaller TEA parties held here and there across the country.

Photo by Reason.com

I’ve been keeping one eye on this TEA Party phenomenon, but so far I haven’t seen much worth reporting here. These protesters seem largely content to complain about taxes, and largely unwilling to entertain resisting them except in hypothetical tricorner hat fantasies.

I get the feeling that a lot of them are looking for a leader to tell them what to do. But the sorts of leaders they’re looking to for their rhetoric and ideas, the Glen Becks and Michelle Malkins and Rush Limbaughs and such, are by and large cowards for whom having a bunch of people complaining about the things they tell them to complain about is good enough. No way are they going to go out on a limb and begin resisting, though they may try to goad others into it if they don’t have to commit themselves.

But there are some possibly-encouraging signs. A group calling itself the “Three Percenters” were passing out a leaflet at the protest urging the participants to buckle down and stop whining at Uncle Sam — kind of a right-wing counterpart to Cindy Sheehan’s advice to the peace movement I shared earlier in the week. Some excerpts from the leaflet:

The original Boston Tea Party was a calculated act of law-breaking designed to send the British Empire a message it could not fail to comprehend. Making long-winded speeches, thumping impassioned chests and denouncing a government made up of people who have already written you off as unimportant, impotent, and no threat to their plans is a waste of time, energy, and oxygen.

Both political parties have conspired through malice or incompetence to bring us to this state, yet still people look in vain to the system of party politics for salvation. The Founders were not so stupid as to place all their hopes on a corrupt system. When the accepted channels of politics and remonstrance failed, they burned the King’s tax stamps, dumped his tea, broke the windows of his tax collectors with rocks and bricks, smuggled forbidden goods, defied “his royal majesty” in hundreds of other ways, and dared him to do anything about it. Liberty is not free, nor is it without risk.

All these tactics are still available to us today. Any inventive mind could think of many more effective means of getting across the idea that we insist upon our liberty in this modern era. It is not necessary to collect a crowd to do them, either. Defiance in action can be expressed individually in many ingenious ways.

Then there’s this article on “What’s the Point of Demonstrating?” from The Independent Institute’s Beacon Blog. The article itself isn’t all that interesting, but look at the comments! Lots of people nibbling at the edges of tax resistance, trying out the arguments in its favor, showing every symptom of being resisters-to-be.

So this may be a situation where all it takes is the right seed, some catalyst, and with surprising speed some new form of conservative tax resistance will begin to develop in parallel to the long-standing and largely left-oriented war tax resistance movement.

In The New York Times earlier this week, Robert Zaretsky drew some parallels between today’s American “TEA Party” movement and France’s Poujadism half a century ago.

Pierre Poujade

One difference Zaretsky doesn’t mention is that Pierre Poujade’s conservative, populist, pro-imperialist, anti-tax movement actually put some skin in the game, whereas thus far the “TEA Party” has been all talk.

In 1955, Poujade led his “Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans” in a tax resistance campaign. “Tens of thousands of taxpayers, mostly in southern France, where his strength is greatest, have refused to make their first installment in payment of taxes on last year’s income.” He also occasionally called for brief strikes in which Poujadists would shutter their shops. In some areas, so it was reported, “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them.” According to another account:

The loudspeaker is [the movement’s] symbol and it all started in earnest one bright morning… when a loudspeaker mounted on a truck brought awful tidings to the pleasant little town of St. Cere near Toulouse in south-west France.

“Attention,” it blared. “Attention. The tax inspector is in town.”

There was a rumbling sound as the steel curtains with which French shops are shuttered at night were rolled down all over St. Cere. Then, amidst ominous quiet, a strange procession wound its way through the medieval streets.

At the head of it marched the tax inspector, carrying a bulging briefcase. He was followed by 80 black-uniformed members of the Republican Security Corps with gas masks dangling from their shoulders and submachine guns at the ready. After them, looking just a little scared, came the entire citizenry of the town.

The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books. Nowhere did he get an answer. When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat from St. Cere.

The tax-hating citizens had revolted against the Government of France, and won.

Defiance soon was carried further than that. Angry “Poujadistes” began resorting to physical violence against stubborn tax inspectors who insisted on seeing the accounts. They also took to spiking forced tax sales by refusing to bid until the auctioneer had lowered the price of whatever was up for sale to a laughably small figure. Thus a tax delinquent might buy back his own shop for, say 10 cents. At an auction the other day, a brand-new car went for one franc, or less than one-third of a cent.

The movement has got its members elected to office in almost three-fourths of France’s departmental chambers of commerce. It has secure the support of most of the provincial press, often by threatening mass cancellations of subscriptions, while its own monthly publication, L’Union, has a circulation of 450,000.

Here’s a Life magazine article about the Poujade movement, featuring pictures of some of the resisters, and the detail that “some priests ring church bells to warn of the arrival of the revenuers.” Another brief wire service note shows that the Poujade phenomenon started to cross national boundaries and develop copycat movements elsewhere, perhaps not by accident.

Like the anti-tax, anti-big-government right-wing in the United States today, the Poujadists didn’t seem to mind certain expensive big government projects:

Poujade presented a seven point program to enable France to hold Algeria, hinged on the presence of a large army, strong measures of repression of the independence movement, severe punishment for those who advocate autonomy, and unspecified “reforms” to overcome the unrest of the natives.

When hecklers yelled, “How can you reduce taxes by starting a full fledged war in North Africa?” Poujade’s men quickly silenced them.

The Poujadists briefly formed a political party, and more than fifty of its slate were elected to the Chamber of Deputies (including a young Jean-Marie Le Pen). The movement was short-lived, though. The party was organized on rigidly authoritarian lines and didn’t have much of a platform beyond its complaints.

Poujade decided to bet everything on a single, high-stakes roll of the dice: he’d call for a reenvocation of the States-General (which hadn’t convened since 1789) as a way of overriding the existing government with a populist revolt. The American parallel would be if the “TEA Party” people were to call for a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the United States Constitution more to their liking. He couldn’t pull this off, and lost credibility. A year after their surprisingly strong showing at the polls, people were already asking “what ever happened to the Poujadists?”

If you thought the “dissent = treason” equation was fun when you saw it on the chalkboards during the last administration, you’ll love the new progressive remake of this timeless classic.

The latest ugly incarnation of this idea comes from Melissa Harris-Lacewell at The Notion, the blog associated with the leftie magazine The Nation.

The gist of her essay is that the ObamaCare refuseniks are not just bad-tempered but positively seditious in their denial that the government has the right to force its idea of a national health care plan down our throats. The protesters might as well be the Ku Klux Klan disrupting “our new Reconstruction” with “the descent of a vicious new Jim Crow terrorism.”

That overblown and offensive metaphor (illustrated with a still from the movie Birth of a Nation in which a crew of Ku Kluxers are in mid-lynch), though it forms the central thesis of the rant, isn’t even the worst of it. (Nor is Harris-Lacewell alone with such exaggerated comparisons: a protester put a brick through the window of a congressman’s office? — It’s Kristallnacht all over again!)

For one thing, there’s the way Harris-Lacewell describes John Lewis, who “was severely beaten [by police] 45 years ago when he tried to lead a group of brave citizens across the Edmund Pettus bridge in an effort to secure voting rights for black Americans.” Now Lewis is a congressman, and an ObamaCare supporter. The papers quoted an unnamed colleague of Lewis as saying that a protester was heard yelling out at Lewis: “kill the bill, then the nigger.”

Which is worse? An active, ongoing, open conspiracy by government forces to brutally repress people trying to assert their civil rights, or an unhinged protester yelling racist threats as a Congressman passes by? The latter clearly! Why? “When [Lewis] is attacked by protesters, he is himself an agent of the state. This difference is critically important; not because it changes the fact that racism is present in both moments, but because it radically alters the way we should understand the meaning of power, protest and race.… John Lewis is no longer just a brave American fighting for the soul of his country — he is an elected official. He is an embodiment of the state.”

Amazingly, Harris-Lacewell bolsters this argument with this:

I often begin my political science courses with a brief introduction to the idea of “the state.” The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it is the death penalty. If an individual takes his neighbor’s money, it is theft; if the state does it, it is taxation.

This, mind you, is her argument for why the state is a good thing, and those who oppose it are wicked. It has all the charm of a sermon that begins “Satan wants to steal our souls and subject us to eternal torment to feed the selfish glory of his own evil,” and ends, “hail Satan!”

Still, a liberal friend of mine earnestly forwarded a link to this article to his friends, solemnly remarking: “Indeed, the Tea Partiers are dancing right around the borderline of sedition. They’re objecting to the lawful authority of the state.” If only they would!

Don’t look now, but the war tax resisters are coming.

Neither the war tax resisters nor the TEA Party crowd seem to be getting much press yet this year. It may be that after last year’s big and novel TEA Party protests, it’s going to take a lot more to get the press interested this year.

Even more so than last year, the TEA Parties seem to have been absorbed by the Republican party, which has raised the hackles of some marginalized anti-war conservatives and libertarians. One started a Facebook group called “Taxed Enough Already? End the Wars!” and hopes to bring the anti-war small-government contingent out in force to this year’s Parties.

“I advocate overthrowing the government by force but not by violence, and tax refusal is but one of the cutting edges and forces that are available to us.” — David Dellinger, 15 April 1970, in Washington, D.C. at the Vietnam Moratorium rally

It’s “tax day” in the United States — the deadline for mailing in annual income tax returns. Activists of various flavors are making noise today, and if you think you might like to join in, you can pick one of the war tax resistance actions going on nationwide this year, hang out with CodePink at a TEA party, join up with libertarians to hand out propaganda at the post office, or maybe set up a penny poll of your own.

Today is also the annual 15 Minutes of Fame day for war tax resisters, and I’ll be keeping my eye out for media mentions. I was invited on something called “The Mancow Show” this morning. The host was some sort of weird, pro-wrestling-like caricature who solemnly says things like “if you cut me, I bleed red, white, and blue.” His show is one of those short attention span things that are mostly sound effects and snippets and soundbites and running jokes. Pretty much a waste of time; live and learn.

This evening I’ll be attending the People’s Life Fund granting ceremony. Many war tax resisters in the San Francisco bay area deposit the taxes they “owe” in this Fund rather than sending them to the U.S. Treasury (some with the option of reclaiming these deposits should the IRS seize money from them). Each year, the Fund gives away any interest and dividends earned on these deposits to various charities. This year the Fund is giving away some $20,000 to over twenty groups.

Ruth Benn was on a special Tax Day edition of Joyce Riley’s “Power Hour” after show-me-the-law style tax protester Peter Hendrickson. The Benn segment starts at about 33:00.

NWTRCC is keeping tabs on Tax Day war tax resistance protests nationwide at its site.

Meanwhile, Fox News contributor Ellen Ratner takes a look at the fledgling TEA Party / CodePink détente.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s time for a new Boston Tea Party, said Huey Long, seventy-five years ago today:

Will Not Pay Federal Tax, Huey Threat

Washington, April 22. (UP) — Senator Huey Long, Democrat, Louisiana, in a scorching blast at the New Deal warned today that states would refuse to pay Federal taxes if they are “stripped of their sovereinity [sic]” by stern administration measures of distributing relief and public work funds.

Before galleries, packed with eastern visitors in gay holiday attire, the Louisiana Democrat charged President Roosevelt had set up a “new Boston Tea Party.”

Referring to the recent action of Federal Relief Administrator H.L. Hopkins and Public Works Administrator Harold L. Ickes in refusing to permit Long’s men in Louisiana to handle relief and public work funds the Kingfish said:

“The states must not only be taxed without their consent but the states must allow the money to be spent only by surrendering their sovereign rights.”

I’m in Tucson now, preparing for day one of the NWTRCC National Gathering.

I’ll try to take some good notes and maybe a photo or two, but I’ll be pretty busy. Meanwhile, here are some links you might like:

• Reading the Tea Leaves: Will the Empire Break Up the Party? — Medea Benjamin of CodePink writes about her outreach to TEA Partiers, and the results of an informal survey she conducted to gauge TEA Party activists’ attitudes about military spending.
• War tax resister Dana Visalli shares What I Learned in Afghanistan — About the United States
• Jess Bachman has put out an updated version of his fantastic Death & Taxes poster that graphically illustrates the United States federal discretionary budget.

The Spring 2010 national NWTRCC gathering in Tucson, Arizona has been, as usual, a fruitful mix of experienced war tax resistance veterans and enthusiastic, curious, and somewhat uncertain newbies.

The agenda was less heavy this time than in the recent past — no contentious issues like the Peace Tax Fund Bill to worry us, and an improving budget situation. This left us plenty of time both to talk shop and to learn from local activists about their areas of expertise.

Friday night

Friday night we viewed the new war tax resistance film Death & Taxes and heard from Steev Hise, who directed the lion’s share of the filming and gave us some insight into the process, and from a couple of us who were in the film.

Film sales have exceeded our yearly projections already, half-way through the year, and everyone seems to report that the film is effective in spurring enthusiasm for and curiosity about war tax resistance.

Saturday morning

The meeting began, as such meetings often do, with a go-around-the-circle round of introductions. This also included updates about what local war tax resistance and other activists have been up to in recent months.

Erica Weiland addresses the meeting

Clare Hanrahan and Coleman Smith reported on their successful south-east regional war tax resistance gathering that was held at the beginning of the year. The opening of a new regional gathering (there’s a well-established one in New England already) was a priority for NWTRCC and so we were pleased to hear both that this meeting went well and that the organizers plan to make it an ongoing thing.

A number of people reported that their local groups were smaller and less-active this year than in the recent past. Most attributed this to the general dip in progressive activism during the Obama-sedation period, with some saying that they’ve noticed progressive activists so eager to distinguish themselves from TEA Party activists that they don’t want to associate themselves with a group whose focus is on tax resistance and they meet our message with more than the usual reluctance and defensiveness.

Still, there were the usual penny polls, literature tables, redirection granting ceremonies, and rallies on Tax Day this year, competing with dwindling but still sizable TEA Party crowds (that sometimes dilute our message and other times provide a media springboard for it).

The Nuclear Resister

Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa, who edit The Nuclear Resister, were our hosts and local organizers in Tucson. Their newsletter covers and organizes support for imprisoned anti-war / anti-nuke civil disobedients, including the occasional war tax resister.

They spoke about their work and about anti-nuclear activism in general, such as the actions coordinated by an international coalition to focus on the 40^th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Opposition to nuclear power has been on the wane, both because few new nuclear power plants have started in the United States recently, and because nuclear power has been greenwashed as a potential solution for global warming and other consequences of hydrocarbon fuel. Jack thinks the greenwashing is hooey, that nuclear power — seen over its whole lifecycle — is neither energy efficient nor emissions-friendly, and that the nuclear power industry is tightly linked with nuclear weapons and that the real reason we have a nuclear power industry has much less to do with electricity than with maintaining an infrastructure, knowledge-base, and the raw materials for a perpetual nuclear arsenal.

There was also some discussion of the campaign to divest from Israel, modeled on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign directed against South Africa.

Border activism

If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ll know that government harassment of immigrants is a big issue in Arizona right now, as the state government just enacted legislation that it promises will usher in a more draconian crackdown on illegal immigrants. There have been calls to boycott the state, and so there was some embarrassment that our group had decided to go through with its meeting here.

On the other hand, we met in part, and many of us stayed the night during our stay, at BorderLinks, a group that specializes in ameliorating the effects of government policy in this area. So we helped to support this work, a bit anyway, by our housing fees. BorderLinks, at least, was glad we didn’t cancel our conference.

Reviewing a map of recent deaths of immigrants in the desert near the Arizona/Mexico border

This also gave us an opportunity to learn from local border-issues activists, who had no difficulty pointing out both the close relation between our groups (a number of border-issues activists are also war tax resisters), and that because of the increasing militarization of border enforcement, war tax resistance is directly applicable to their struggle.

The repulsive border wall, and increased border patrol enforcement in general, have not stopped people from crossing the border, but have merely forced the immigrant trails to be more arduous. Crossing the border has become more deadly as the safer routes become more difficult to pass. Humanitarian groups have responded to the crisis by trying to put bottled-water and first aid stations along the newer routes, actively patrolling to come to the aid of people who are lost, injured, or dehydrated, and setting up desert camps where people can stop along the way. Such efforts are, naturally, subject to sporadic government harassment.

What of the TEA Party?

Saturday afternoon I ran a War Tax Resistance 101 workshop for people who were just getting their feet wet or who were preparing to take the plunge. This group was eager and enthusiastic going in, and, I think, came out of the workshop even more so, and with some more practical pointers on how to take the next step, whichever step that is for them.

The afternoon session ended with a group brainstorm about the relationship between organized war tax resistance groups like ours and the TEA Party movement.

Ruth Benn addresses the gathering

Some of us see the TEA Party as an embarrassing distraction on Tax Day, and think it is important that we clearly distinguish our message from theirs so that war tax resistance doesn’t get confused in the public eye as some sort of TEA Party variant.

Others felt that there is enough common ground between war tax resisters and some portion of the TEA Partiers that we might be well-served by trying to do some outreach, which might hold the hope of introducing the tactic of war tax resistance to antimilitarist libertarians, isolationist paleoconservatives, and the other radical government skeptics who make up one tendency in the TEA Party. For instance, Joffre Stewart reported having recruited a new phone tax resister from within the TEA Party ranks at one of their rallies.

There’s a new issue of More Than a Paycheck out, full of news about the war tax resistance movement, including:

• War tax resisters and the TEA Party movement — an uneasy alliance at best.
• A look back at Tax Day 2010
• Counseling Notes on couples and war tax resistance, on-line resources, and war tax resisters in Spain
• Ideas and Actions
• Resource updates
• A report on the Arizona national gathering
• Julia Butterfly Hill gives an update on her resistance

Tax resistance campaigns have found it useful to identify resonances with popular myths, esteemed tax rebellions of yore, and semi-fictional heroes. Here are some examples:

• Just about every tax revolt in the United States (and many elsewhere as well) appropriates the example of the Boston Tea Party as an evocative reminder of a grassroots uprising, the recent “Taxed Enough Already” TEA Party movement being just the latest of many, many examples.



• In Spain, the tancament de caixes plays a similar role to the Tea Party in America, with modern Spanish tax resisters comparing their campaigns with that legendary struggle. In England (and the British empire), John Hampden has long been the exemplar of choice, with his example being used from South Africa to Ireland to India to prove that celebrated patriots can refuse to pay their taxes.
• The phrase “no taxation without representation” has such resonance, especially in the descendant nations of the British Empire, that it gets trotted out even to support tax resistance campaigns in which representation isn’t really an issue at all. It was especially potent in the American revolution and in the women’s suffrage movements.
• The Rebecca Rioters in Wales, painting their faces and dressing in drag to destroy tollgates and mete out justice in the middle of the nineteenth century, were tapping into a folkloric form of grassroots justice that was centuries old. “Jack a Lents” painted their faces and dressed in women’s clothing to tear down turnpikes in England a century before, and I’ve found references to protesters led by men in women’s clothing and using the shared pseudonym of “Lady Skimmington” in the Western Rising in England a century before that.
• Resistance to the “Foreign Miners Tax” in California in 1850 gave birth to the myth of Joaquin Murieta, a sort of Robin Hood-like outlaw who became a desperado when he was forced off his claim by the tax.
• The Robin Hood myth itself has taken on a tax resistance theme in recent years. The popular Disney animated version of the Robin Hood story makes the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham a tax collector, and Robin Hood’s robbery of him a case of redistributing the taxes back to the people they’d been seized from:

  While he taxes us to pieces
    And he robs us of our bread
  King Richard’s crown keeps slippin’ down
    Around that pointed head
  Ah! But while there is a merry man
    in Robin’s wily pack
  We’ll find a way to make him pay
    And steal our money back

• Urban legends helped to fuel tax resistance during the French Revolution. Rumors that the King had abolished taxes led people to refuse payment or to destroy the obsolete offices and apparatus of taxation. Here is a similar example from Russia (as found in James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance):

  After the emancipation [of the serfs] in 1861, the peasants in Biezdne (Kazan Province) were demoralized to discover that with redemption payments, labor dues, and taxes their burdens were, if anything, heavier than before. When one of their number claimed that the emancipation decree granted them complete freedom from such dues — the term volia (freedom) appeared in many contexts in the decree — but that the squires and officials had kept it from being implemented, they leapt at the opportunity, now sanctioned from on high, to refuse payment.

  The myth of the czar’s benevolence, which was of course promoted by the czarist government, could backfire in this way when peasants refused to pay onerous taxes or obey other commands of the czar’s subordinates, under the theory that because the czar was so good he could not possibly have ordered such terrible things:

  Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the myth was its plasticity in the hands of its peasant adherents. First and foremost, it was an invitation to resist any or all of the czar’s supposed agents, who could not have been carrying out the good czar’s wishes if they imposed heavy taxes, conscription, rents, military corvée, and so forth. If the czar only knew of the crimes his faithless agents were committing in his name, he would punish them and rectify matters. When petitions failed and oppression continued, it may simply have indicated that an impostor — a false czar — was on the throne. In such cases, the peasants who joined the banners of a rebel claiming to be the true czar would be demonstrating their loyalty to the monarchy. … In a form of symbolic jujitsu, an apparently conservative myth counseling passivity becomes a basis for defiance and rebellion…

• Scott also talks (e.g. in his paper Everyday Forms of Resistance) about how “much of the folk culture of the peasant ‘little tradition’ amounts to a legitimation, or even a celebration, of [resistance]…”

  In this and other ways (e.g. tales of bandits, tricksters, peasant heroes, religious myths, carnivalesque parodies of authorities) the peasant subculture helps to underwrite dissimulation, poaching, theft, tax evasion, evasion of conscription, and so on. While folk culture is not coordinational in any formal sense, it often achieves a “climate of opinion” which, in other more institutionalized societies, might require a public relations campaign.

• The very name “Poll Tax,” which came to be the most widely-accepted name for what Thatcher’s government hoped would go down as the “community charge,” was a potent propaganda coup for the resistance movement. Danny Burns, a chronicler of that successful tax rebellion, says that “the story of [Wat Tyler’s] peasants revolt against the Poll Tax in 1381 was told in virtually every meeting. Calling on these traditions was an important part of explaining why non-cooperation was needed…” Signs that people would hang in their windows reading “No Poll Tax Here” also hearkened back to the tax resistance accompanying the Reform Act agitation in the 1830s.
• Today, tax resistance actions like the ongoing Household Tax resistance in Ireland compare themselves in turn to the successful Poll Tax revolt.
• The Lady Godiva myth concerns a “noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants.”
• A motley variety of myths about “common law,” about the True Constitution, about the significance of fringed edges to flags, and other what-not, fuel the often bizarre Constitutionalist tax protester movement in the United States.

One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.

• Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in 1637. He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
• American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
• A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were. So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit. Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
  • Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible. The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects. Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
• A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
• American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up. “I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.” Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment. After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
• American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.” Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances. Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
• Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument. She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
• When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in 2009, the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
• Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending. (The court declined to take his case.)
• A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance. “As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them. They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
• During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
• When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money. Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
• According to a book on war tax resistance: “In 1820 Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes. Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill. Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in 1856 found these provisions still in effect.”
• The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.

But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help. For example:

• When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in 1379, the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands. Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
• When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around 1832, the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
• The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
• During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.” Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.

So you may have heard that the IRS has been caught targeting overreaching audits at TEA Party groups.

I’ll admit that when I first heard these groups complaining that they were being targeted for their politics, I thought they were probably just being paranoid and histrionic. Turns out they were right.

There’s somewhat less to the story than the headlines might lead you to believe. There isn’t much solid evidence that anyone in the White House, or in the IRS, was on a “let’s nail the TEA Party” kick, exactly.

The IRS did target groups for their politics, but they did so in the course of trying to find groups who were illegally politicking while organized as 501(c)(4) organizations. In other words, they were looking for political groups because they had a reason to be looking for political groups.

501(c)(4) is a variety of tax-exempt non-profit organization. You cannot be a 501(c)(4) if your purpose is to do electioneering and other such political advocacy. But you can if your main purpose is to promote “social welfare,” even if this occasionally includes political work. Naturally, this fuzziness has led to a bunch of political groups trying to redefine themselves as social welfare groups so they can qualify for the exemption. So the IRS has wanted to give extra scrutiny to applications from groups that are attempting to organize under this section to make sure they’re not campaign funds in disguise.

But the IRS, as I’ve been gleefully noting hereabouts, has been struggling with a shrinking budget and workforce in recent years. During the run-up to the last election, the agency got a bunch of applications for new 501(c)(4) groups, more than it could handle, and so it tried to come up with a way of scrutinizing those that seemed more likely than not to be improperly political groups.

One way they selected groups to scrutinize more closely — and the IRS claims that this decision was made by a rank-and-file employee of the agency — was to see if they had words like “patriot” or “TEA Party” in their names. This had the effect of skewing IRS harassment toward right-wing critics of the status quo.

501(c)(4) groups also have the advantage (particularly when they are being used as cover for electioneering) that they do not have to report who donates money to them, the way political campaigns do. But during the IRS inquiries into these right-wing protest groups, the agency asked the groups to provide a list of their donors, which it was not authorized to do. I haven’t yet seen a good explanation for how that turn of events came about (a TIGTA report on the scandal will be released soon, and may have some details).

When these groups initially raised the alarm and said they suspected they were being targeted, asked inappropriately delving questions, and having their applications delayed for partisan reasons, the IRS flatly denied it was doing anything of the sort. The recent revelations are an embarrassing walk-back for the agency.

There really isn’t a whole lot of meat on the bones of the big IRS TEA Party tempest that everyone is up in arms about, as far as I can tell.

But thank goodness nobody cares what I think about it. The Fox News demographic is engaging in their usual well-choreographed outrage (their liberal counterparts, with very few exceptions, are conspicuously talking about something else). That much is predictable. But apparently things got bad enough that Obama had to knit his brow in public and put on his angry face. The Attorney General launched a criminal probe of the IRS personnel responsible, and Obama demanded the resignation of the current acting IRS chief (who wasn’t in charge when the controversial IRS policy was in force, and who apparently is getting canned for mostly symbolic reasons, or perhaps because he wasn’t proactively forthcoming about what he knew about the scandal).

Imagine the overworked, underpaid (or at least salary-frozen) IRS workforce — facing several furlough days this year — now knowing that trying to take creative shortcuts at work might lead to criminal charges if they step on the wrong toes — without a leader at the helm (Obama hasn’t yet nominated a replacement for the old IRS commissioner, who left office seven months ago, and the acting chief just got the scapegoat treatment) — being asked to be the bureaucratic force behind the complex, confusing, and controversial health industry overhaul that’s just beginning to come into force (without being given enough resources to do the job, thanks to a hostile Congress).

Expect more meltdowns and bureaucratic snafus. Each one of which will lead to more outrage directed at the IRS, more Congressional reluctance to give the agency the money it needs, further declines in employee morale at the service, and increasing inefficiency of tax collection.