I’d just finished reading Carl Watner’s interesting voluntaryist-oriented summary of the beliefs, practices and history of the Amish (“By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them:” Voluntaryism and the Old Order Amish, ), and I was hoping I’d find time to write up a little something for The Picket Line about the successful legal battle that the Amish waged to be exempt from the Social Security program — taxes and all.
I’ll feature a section from the upcoming edition of NWTRCC’s “Practical War Tax Resistance” series pamphlet #5 on low-income / simple-living as tax resistance.
I suspect that most of this section will end up being cut, for space reasons and because its subject matter is only tangentially related to the core topic of the pamphlet.
But it’s too good not to share:
How Does the Federal Government Get Your Money?
If one of your goals in resisting taxes is to stop funding the government’s war budget, it is worth investigating in what other ways the government gets its funds besides the federal income tax, and whether you can reduce your contribution to these funding sources in the course of adopting a low income lifestyle.
According to U.S. Budget documents, in 2005 the federal government brought in its revenue in the following ways:
43.0%
Income tax on individuals & families
36.9%
Social insurance taxes (FICA, self-employment tax, the “payroll tax”, Social Security/Medicare)
12.9%
Income tax on corporations
3.4%
Excise taxes
3.8%
Other (estate/gift taxes, customs duties / tariffs, Federal Reserve deposits, etc.)
Social Insurance Taxes
Although social insurance taxes are ostensibly collected to pay for programs like Social Security and Medicare, any surplus that the government collects but does not use to pay for these programs, it “borrows” to pay for other items in its budget, including the military.
For this reason, some tax resisters who do not disapprove of programs like Social Security and Medicare still try to resist these taxes.
In recent decades, the percentage of government revenue that comes from social insurance taxes has risen.
Today, most families pay more to the federal government in social insurance taxes than in income tax.
Corporate Income Tax
As an individual you can reduce your contribution to corporate income taxes by reducing your contribution to the profits of corporations, and the best way to do that is by reducing your consumption of corporate-provided goods and services.
The Indian independence movement boycotted goods that the British colonial occupation monopolized and taxed, such as alcohol.
Gandhi’s independence campaign encouraged Indians to produce their own salt and cloth, both to withdraw financial support from the British monopolies and to encourage the development of domestic industry.
Rebellious British colonists used a similar tactic during the American Revolution — making homespun cloth in patriotic “spinning bees” and boycotting British monopoly tea.
What would be a good equivalent of the patriotic spinning bee for today’s anti-imperialists?
What commercial transactions does the government tax that it would have a harder time taxing if they were the fruits of household industry rather than the marketplace?
One good candidate is home-brewed beer.
The federal excise tax on beer comes to about a nickle per bottle.
By home-brewing, you can resist this tax, learn a craft, and drink good beer — all legally!
It is a winning proposition any way you look at it.
Imagine “brewing bees” or “drinking bees” at which tax resisters belt out songs of liberty with gusto!
Wrote one home-brewer: “I like the symbolism of home brewing tax-free beer.
Gandhi’s campaign had a value that went beyond its bottom-line pounds-and-pence figure.
Spending time spinning cloth was a way of consciously participating on a daily basis in the resistance, and wearing the homespun cloth was a way of broadcasting your commitment to those around you.
Besides, brewing beer is fun and when you’re done you’ve got beer!”
Excise Taxes
The federal government taxes the sale of certain specific things like alcoholic beverages, gasoline, airline tickets, ammunition, vaccines, local telephone service, tobacco, cars & car parts, fishing equipment, and coal.
The receipts from some excise taxes fund particular programs, while others just go into the general fund.
For instance, the federal excise tax on gasoline funds highways and mass transit projects, while the federal excise tax on local telephone service may be spent on anything in the budget.
You can avoid excise taxes in a variety of ways.
For instance, you can avoid the excise tax on alcohol either by not using alcoholic beverages or by producing your own (it is legal to produce your own beer or wine).
You can avoid the excise tax on local phone service by using an internet-based voice-over-IP phone instead of a regular phone line — assuming you do not get your internet over your phone line — or, as many tax resisters do, you can simply refuse to pay it and subtract it from your phone bill.
Tariffs
Tariffs are taxes on goods imported into the country that are applied when the goods arrive.
The Washington Post reported in that “the average tariff on non-agricultural goods imported into the United States is less than 3 percent” but that “tariffs on a number of everyday consumer products — including clothing, luggage, dinnerware and handbags — range well into double digits.
The same goes for some food, such as butter and cheese.”
You can avoid contributing to these tariffs by purchasing fewer foreign-made products.
However, when you purchase from domestic producers, you contribute to their profits and therefore to the income taxes they owe and pay.
This is an example of where lowering consumption in general is the best policy.
Other Taxes
If you have less income, you will also reduce your state and local tax liability.
Many resisters are opposed to state taxes because of concerns such as unnecessary highway-building (which creates community displacement and habitat destruction), prison construction, and the death penalty.
Other Revenue Sources
The official revenue numbers do not tell the whole story.
Much of the money the government spends is money that it borrows.
In some years, this can rival the amount it gets from any particular tax.
For instance, in the federal government brought in $1,880 billion through various taxes, but borrowed an additional $568 billion.
One way the federal government borrows money is by selling U.S. Treasury Bonds; the original purchasers of such bonds are loaning money to the federal government.
The government can also manipulate the money supply for its own benefit.
By doing so, it can use inflation to quietly tax people and to reduce the value of its debt.
John Maynard Keynes wrote: “A government can live for a long time… by printing paper money.
That is to say, it can by this means secure the command over real resources, resources just as real as those obtained by taxation.
The method is condemned, but its efficacy, up to a point, must be admitted.
A government can live by this means when it can live by no other.
It is the form of taxation which the public find hardest to evade and even the weakest government can enforce, when it can enforce nothing else.”
The resistance and conscientious objection of Amish people to social insurance tax forced the government to change its tax laws.
Some Amish people felt that government-sponsored social insurance programs were both mistrustful of God and destructive to the mutual support that forms an important part of Amish community life.
When the Social Security program and its social insurance tax became mandatory, many refused to pay the tax and refused to apply for benefits.
14,000 signed a petition to Congress asking for permission to opt out of the program.
The IRS began to try to enforce the law by seizing money directly from resisters’ bank accounts.
Amish resisters responded by closing their accounts entirely.
The IRS then began to seize money from the cooperatives that purchased the resisters’ products, and then finally to seize the resisters’ property.
The local IRS Chief of Collections said: “People have no right to use their religion as an excuse not to pay taxes.”
After a number of sympathetic resisters had been subjected to IRS seizures — in one case they seized a man’s horses as he was using them to plow his field — public outrage and Amish petitions finally convinced Congress to give the Amish the legal right to opt out of Social Security and cancel the outstanding tax bills of 15,000 resisters.
The Amish and Other Exceptions to Social Insurance Tax
In general, social insurance tax (also known as “FICA”, the “payroll tax”, or the “social security/medicare tax”) is hard to avoid if you earn your income in the above-ground economy.
Your employer is required to withhold money from your paycheck starting with the very first dollar you earn, and you cannot qualify for a refund no matter how little you make.
If you are self-employed, be aware that social insurance tax is assessed on incomes much lower than the minimum threshold for the income tax.
For most people, the threshold is $400 per year.
For an employee of a church or church-controlled organization, the threshold is $108.28 per year.
In addition, if you are self-employed, you are required to pay the tax by certain deadlines, four times a year.
The federal penalties, both civil and criminal, for refusing to pay social insurance tax are the same as those for refusing to pay income taxes.
The IRS does not distinguish between these two kinds of taxes in terms of applying penalties.
There are a few exceptions from the general rule that everyone must pay social insurance tax.
An exemption applies to the Amish and a handful of other religious groups that have been around at least since and that have religious scruples against participating in social insurance plans (see the sidebar).
If you do not earn any income — that is, if all of your income comes from interest, capital gains, pre-existing savings and the like — you do not have to pay social insurance tax on that money.
In addition, there are a few job categories that can provide income exempt from social insurance tax:
State and local government workers who participate in alternative employer retirement systems
Election workers (people who are employed by the government to staff polling places during elections) who earn $1,200 or less a year
College students who work at their academic institutions
Household workers (housekeepers, maids, baby-sitters, gardeners, etc.) who earn less than $1,500 from an employer
Self-employed workers with annual net earnings below $400
Paid ministers, members of religious orders, and Christian Science practitioners who elect to be exempt
But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.
―Ⅰ Timothy 5:8
Muttering into their beards, a cluster of black-hatted Amish farmers watched sullenly in Canton, Ohio last week, while an auctioneer sold off livestock confiscated by the U.S. Government.
On religious grounds, Amishmen had refused to pay the social security levy — 3⅜% of their own incomes — that the law demands of farmers.
To satisfy the Government’s claims, federal authorities in Ohio’s Wayne and Holmes counties seized 28 head of livestock from 15 Amish farmers, seized cash assets of 50 others.
The pacifist, Bible-quoting Amish sect is a survival from the 1690s, when it was founded by a Swiss named Jacob Ammann.
In some of the 50 Amish settlements scattered around the U.S. and Canada, the old ways have yielded a little to the march of centuries, but the Amishmen of central Ohio have clung steadfastly to their traditional customs and costumes.
They shun automobiles, movies, even home electricity.
All married men grow beards, and all men, women and children wear black headdress in public.
Farming and a few related trades such as blacksmithing and harness-making are the only approved ways of earning a living.
Parents refuse to send their children to public schools beyond the eighth grade — a quirk that has got the Amish into trouble with state and county authorities (Time, ).
The strictest members of the sect balk at social security levies on the grounds that Ⅰ Timothy 5:8 and other Bible passages command them to take care of their own.
And they do: records in Wayne and Holmes counties show not a single case of an Amishman seeking public assistance of any kind.
In their troubles with the Old Age and Survivors Insurance system, the Amish are victims of the irreversible bloat that seems to afflict social-welfare plans.
From modest beginnings in , when it applied only to regular employees and nicked only 1% from their paychecks, OASI has expanded in both coverage and bite.
Once Congress extended the system to farmers four years ago, it was plainly necessary for the Federal Government to make the Amish pay up: laws must apply to all alike.
But the plight of the Amish was a footnote reminder that the welfare state has its victims as well as its beneficiaries, its cost in dwindling freedom as well as its payoff in expanded security.
The Amish eventually won some legal protection for their conscientious objection to mandatory government insurance — a rare example of the government conceding a tax point in the face of conscientiously-motivated civil disobedience.
The health care industry legislation that became law today (of which I addressed some of the implications for tax resisters ) includes provisions to accommodate the conscientious objection of people opposed to abortion and of Amish groups who have traditionally taught that the purchase of insurance betrays a mistrust of divine providence.
Amish in good standing will be exempt from the law’s requirement that all Americans have health insurance, which is to say that they will not be subject to the federal excise tax on uninsured individuals.
Health insurance plans will not be required to cover abortions — indeed, states may prohibit abortion-providing plans in their “exchanges” — and those that do cover abortion will have to do so via a separately-funded option that cannot be paid for via the various government subsidies in the law.
President Obama recently emphasized these abortion restrictions by issuing an executive order that reconfirmed the ban on using taxpayer money to pay for abortions.
But neither the orthodox Amish nor the anti-abortion activists seem pleased with these concessions.
Gary Kauffman of The Goshen News interviewed David Yoder, who monitors national law for the Old Order Amish.
He points out that while there is an exception written into the law that shields individual Amish people from having to be covered by health insurance, there is no such shield for Amish employers, even Amish employers of Amish employees, who will be required to provide health insurance for those they hire.
“It’s a huge concern for all Amish,” Yoder said.
“It’s definitely not something we could comply with.”
Yoder also worries that as government-mandated corporate health plans insinuate into the Amish community, the cooperative neighbors-helping-neighbors form of mutual aid that takes the place of health insurance among the Amish will degrade, and, along with it, the quality of health: “Even if there is an exemption for us, health care quality will still go down.
Maybe not immediately, but in five or ten years.”
Meanwhile, many anti-abortion activists aren’t at all convinced that the many safeguards in the law will actually prevent taxpayer money from subsidizing abortions, or enable people who don’t want to fund abortions to find both legally-compliant and conscientiously-acceptable health insurance:
Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, said the idea of tax resistance has been mentioned in response to concerns about unjust wars.
“This bill says most of the plans getting federal subsidies make every enrollee pay a separate payment solely for people’s abortions,” he said.
“Some people have said what an opportunity for a movement of resistance for people of faith who have these plans or are saddled with one; to refuse to pay that particular fee.
If that is the only option we have, that is an interesting idea for Catholics and Protestants to focus on.”
It is a remarkable contrast to this how much the concerns of conscientious objectors to military taxation are ignored by lawmakers.
People who don’t want to pay the salaries of torturers, or who have conscientious qualms about building weapons of indiscriminate slaughter, can be and are ignored.
Convocations of Catholic bishops don’t hold press conferences on their behalf, legislators don’t hold their votes back on a pretense of standing up for them.
The official word from the courts is that it would be too onerous for the government to carve out an exception for such conscientious objectors, though this recent bill and others show that Congress is perfectly capable of carving a little here and a little there when that’s what it takes to get the job done.
But, as with this recent bill, even were Congress to make some sort of concessions to conscientious objectors to military taxation, these would be unlikely to go far enough to be satisfying to any but those who were eagerly looking for an excuse to put their consciences down and get on with other business.
New Wilmington, Pa. (UPI) —
They came here more than 200 years ago looking for a sanctuary of religious freedom, and now they are talking of leaving.
The old order Amish have collided with the Social Security Act.
The Amish will not pay the tax because they believe it violates God’s will.
And the Internal Revenue Service will not exempt them because the law is the law.
Independent, God-fearing farmers whose mode of living hasn’t changed for more than 200 years and who do not believe in mixing in politics, the Amish now hope an act of Congress will relieve their predicament.
Bishop Andy M. Byler, the white-bearded patriarch of about 1,000 Amish in Lawrence and Mercer counties in Western Pennsylvania, explains what might happen if legislation before Congress exempting his sect from Social Security participation is not passed:
“We would think of going to a place where we could practice our religion.
We would have to do something.
We would let them take out more liens (on Amish property), but we will never pay willingly.
It would be pretty hard on us.”
The Amish have no objection to paying taxes.
But Social Security, they insist, is a form of insurance, not a tax, and insurance denotes a lack of faith in God.
Last spring, the Internal Revenue Service, contending it had no authority to exempt the Amish from Social Security taxes, filed 75 liens against Amish farmers in this area.
A nationwide furor was caused when IRS agents confiscated three of Valentine Byler’s handsome Belgian horses during the spring plowing of for back payment of Social Security taxes.
Sold at auction, the horses brought $460.
Valentine refused to accept the IRS’ refund of $37.89.
Sympathizers through the country sent money and Byler ended up with more than enough to buy new horses.
Valentine, a slow-talking man of the soil, considers the government action persecution of a religious minority.
“I don’t see how else I can take it,” he said.
The predicament of “the plain people” led Rep. Richard S. Schwelker, R-Pa., to introduce legislation exempting them from Social Security.
It is awaiting a hearing.
A similar proposal was rejected by the Senate in .
Social Security is only one aspect of the outside world which makes life difficult for the Amish, who, above all else, want to be left alone.
Amish, who are conservative Protestants, migrated from Switzerland and Germany to the Lancaster Pa. area in the early 18th Century in search of freedom.
There are about 18,000 Amish around the country now.
Many of them are found in Pennsylvania and Maryland and in several Midwestern states.
The austere Amish men, whose beards serve as a sort of wedding ring, are conspicuous in black, broad-rimmed hats and black, buttonless outer clothes; the women, cautious and obedient, in bonnet-covered prayer caps, ankle-length dresses of robin egg blue or green and the shy but friendly children, small scale replicas of the adults.
Zealous protectors of their heritage the Amish shield themselves and their children from outside influences and are suspicious of strangers.
Stern punishment awaits both children and adults who break the laws of the sect.
Workers from sunup to sundown six days a week, the Amish are noted for their honesty and integrity.
Sunday is “God’s day,” a day of rest, and Sunday meetings and barn raisings serve as social events.
Any bills incurred by the plain people will be paid by the church if a member cannot meet his obligation.
The men scorn the use of farm machinery or cars.
“We do just as well with horses,” said Andy L. Byler, and the fertile and productive farms scattered over the hills and valleys testify to his words.
Despite their thrifty, self-reliant way of life, the Amish apparently are losing ground socially and economically.
Intermarriage has caused retardation among some Amish children, although the Amish here circumvent this problem by arranging marriages with Amish groups from Ohio.
The children are taken from school at the age of 14, “even if it’s a week before graduation,” says Mrs. Bessie McFarland, a lay teacher with about 42 Amish pupils in a one-room school house here.
Recalling more prosperous days, Rudy M. Byler said, “we used to have it but it went out the door.
What we buy is 20 times higher and what we sell isn’t as high as it was.”
, when farmers were included in the Social Security system, the Amish and the government have battled over the Amish farmers’ refusal to pay Social Security premiums.
Internal Revenue agents moved to collect from Amishmen’s bank accounts.
The farmers withdrew their savings.
The government tried to attach checks due the Amishmen for milk sales to cooperatives.
But co-op officials, many of them Amish, refused to sign the checks.
Finally, in an action which precipitated the coming court fight, government agents seized and sold the horses of Amishman Valentine Byler, just at spring plowing time.
This is on par with the old vaudeville skit of a Communist orator declaiming that “Come the revolution, the workers will eat strawberries and cream.”
When one bystander objected that he didn’t like strawberries and cream, the orator persists:
“Come the revolution, you will eat strawberries and cream and you’ll like strawberries and cream.”
Some tax resistance campaigns have accompanied their resistance with petitions to the government asking it to change its policies or to rescind the tax.
Here are some examples:
Some 14,000 American Amish petitioned Congress, putting aside that sect’s usual reluctance to participate in political affairs and asking the government to exempt them from the Social Security program, participation in which they felt was anti-Christian.
At the same time, some Amish were actively resisting the tax and suffering from government reprisals.
Congress eventually did carve out an exemption for the Amish and certain other sects.
American Quaker meetings frequently petitioned state legislatures when those bodies were considering laws that would force conscientious objectors to pay a fine or to hire a substitute — neither of which Quakers felt they could conscientiously do.
Here are two examples: from and .
On one occasion, American Quakers successfully petitioned the government to call off unscrupulous tax collectors who were seizing their property to pay such fines, in amounts that far exceeded the amount of the fine, and keeping the surplus (or sometimes the whole amount) for themselves.
In several Quakers wrote to the Pennsylvania Assembly to tell them they would be unwilling to pay a tax that body was contemplating for “purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess.”
African-American entrepreneur Paul Cuffee petitioned the Massachusetts legislature in and to complain that he was not permitted to vote, although he was a taxpayer — and he backed this up by refusing to pay.
His petition arrived at a time when the state Constitution was in flux, and may have helped influence its drafters to omit a clause restricting voting to white citizens.
The Benares Hartal in , began with “the people deserting the city in a body, and taking up their station halfway between Benares and Secrole, the residence of the European functionaries, about three miles distant.
A petition was presented to the magistrate, praying him to withdraw the odious impost, and declaring that the petitioners would never return to their homes until their application was complied with.”
Before launching the Bardoli tax strike, representatives from the Indian civil disobedience movement petitioned the government, asking patiently for the concessions they would later demand via satyagraha.
The Rebecca Rioters, with their pseudonymous campaign of midnight toll-gate destruction, had the government nearly begging them to present a list of grievances they could at least pretend to address.
Many groups of Welsh farmers did meet and draft lists of grievances.
A London Times reporter gained the confidence of one Rebeccaite assembly, and set out their grievances in the form of a Times article describing the meeting.
Another group of farmers met to draft a petition of their grievances which they sent to a government representative via a trusted intermediary.
On at least one occasion a group of parishes had petitioned the Turnpike Trust that ran one of the offending toll gates to remove it, before it was destroyed by Rebecca and her daughters.
During the 17th century Croquant tax rebellions in France, the rebels carefully worded petitions to the king that assumed his benevolence and that the tax hikes must have been snuck past his royal highness by deceitful advisors.
In , nonconformists in Massachusetts successfully petitioned the King to free imprisoned resisters to a tax meant for the establishment church there, and to affirm that Quakers should not have to pay taxes to maintain the ministers of another church.
Abby Smith addressed the Glastonbury town council in to explain why she would not be paying her property tax to politicians who took advantage of her voteless state.
A newspaper obtained and publisher her speech, saying that “Abby Smith and her sister as truly stand for the American principle as did the citizens who ripped open the tea chests in Boston Harbor, or the farmers who leveled their muskets at Concord.”
Soon the Smith case became a cause célèbre nationwide.
During the Annuity Tax struggle in Edinburgh, Scotland, “40,000 citizens of Edinburgh petitioned the House of Commons for [the Tax’s] abolition.
The town council, the magistrates of Canongate, the Merchant Company, the Anti-state-church and the Anti-annuity-tax Associations, all exerted themselves with the legislature and the government to procure its repeal…”
The hut tax war in Sierra Leone was preceded by petitions from a variety of groups there asking the government to rescind the tax, and explaining why the tax was felt to be particularly offensive.
In this case, the petitioning may have backfired, as the government stubbornly pushed forward with the tax, but, forewarned of opposition by the petitions, it “came to the conclusion that the exercise of force, peremptory, rapid, and inflexible, was the element to be relied on in making the scheme of taxation a success.”
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 .
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 , 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 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 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 , 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 , 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.
This is the seventh in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
We are now up to the post-World War Ⅱ period and the Cold War is about to ramp up.
Harold S. Bender gets us started with “Forward into the Postwar World with our Peace Testimony” (), which gives us some perspective on how wobbly the Mennonite nonresistance doctrine was even in regards to military service:
[O]f all the Mennoite men who were drafted, forty-one per cent entered the army and fifty-nine per cent stood by the faith of the New Testament and the Mennonite Church and went into C.P.S.
To be exact, thirty per cent went straight into the army, ten into noncombatant service, and sixty per cent into C.P.S.
In , Ford Berg took a hard line on Romans 13 in “The Christian’s Obligation to the Government”, disputing in particular the idea that Paul’s advice to the Romans was given during a placid period of Nero’s reign and so shouldn’t be taken to apply to all governments at all times.
(See yesterday’s Picket Line in which Edward Yoder tried to advance that gambit.)
When Christ was questioned about the paying of tribute (taxes) He answered, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” (Luke 20:25).
We have no record of an unco-operative spirit or a voiced undertone of resentment on Christ’s part concerning the payment of taxes.
But what this tells me is that there were Mennonites out there who were chipping away at the Christians-Always-Pay-Their-Taxes edifice, enough so that the defenders of the orthodoxy felt it necessary to write such rebuttals.
There was a question of whether or not Mennonites should participate in blood drives run by the Red Cross, as the agency was apparently still doing this in a “race”-segregated way (e.g. only giving “white” plasma to “white” recipients) that was offensive to Mennonite teachings on common humanity.
Ford Berg, in the issue, compared this to the relative lack of reluctance Mennonites had paying their taxes for war:
[I]f we are so touchy on this thing, perhaps we should recall that our tax money goes largely for war purposes, to which we carelessly respond that we are not responsible after we make our payments.
Dare we apply this reasoning to the blood donations also?
Both seem inconsistent, and yet…
Forty-eight men and women, including eight Protestant clergymen, in various parts of the nation refused to file Federal income tax returns as a protest against “bomb building” and war, it was announced by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, a national pacifist group.
“President Truman’s decision to begin the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb makes us even more determined than before to refuse to finance armaments.
Building this newest and most terrible weapon is further indication of the extreme depth of moral degradation into which our nation has sunk.”
As with the coverage in The Mennonite around this time, the first mentions of war tax resisters are those from outside the Mennonite community.
There is clearly some interest in this sort of witness or direct action, but it takes a while before Mennonites themselves put themselves forward.
Here’s another example, from the issue:
Twenty-five Quaker residents of Fair Hope, Alabama, have decided to emigrate to Costa Rica so that they may be free from military demand and from paying “war taxes.”
Said their spokesman, “Our economy has become so involved with military effort throughout the world, that a person can hardly make a living here without being a part of that system.”
A spokesman for the American Friends Service Committee said this would be the first instance in American history that a group of Quakers had left the country because of their religious pacifist convictions.
[W]e cannot apply our labor, money, business, factories, nor resources in any form to war or military ends, either in war finance or war industry, even under compulsion.
[I]n wartime, as well as in peacetime, we shall endeavor to continue to live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty; avoid joining in the wartime hysteria of hatred, revenge, and retaliation; and manifest a meek and submissive spirit, being obedient to the laws and regulations of the government in all things, including the usual taxes, except when obedience would cause us to violate the teachings of the Scriptures and our conscience before God.
The issue included an article on “Nonresistance in Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania” by M. Alice Weber that related the story of the war-tax-related Funkite schism in the early American Mennonite community, and also mentioned Quaker refusal to pay war taxes.
The first instance I saw of a Mennonite suggesting that Mennonites should take action to address the problem of their taxes going to the military was in the article “Give Caesar — Give God” by Christian L. Graber in the issue.
Excerpt:
A large part of the Federal Taxes are used to support the military budget.
If we do not deduct all that the government allows us to deduct, but rather pay a higher tax than we would need to pay, we are to the extent of such overpayment lending our voluntary support to the military program.
Good stewardship forces us to face this issue.
But this idea was taken as a reductio ad absurdum by Barney Ovensen, who was defending nonresistance against another Christian who was arguing that Christians should not be pacifistic (“Why It Is Not Right for a Christian to Fight”, ).
Excerpt:
McQuilkin says the man who pays taxes is just as guilty of killing as the man who actually joins the army and kills.
If this is true, every Christian is guilty — for we all are told to pay taxes to “Caesar.”
But where did McQuilkin learn this doctrine?
From Christ?
Of course not.
From the apostles?
No.
It is an awful thing to use the wisdom of this world in order to make void the “foolishness” of God.
For the third year in succession a woman pastor at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, has paid only 25 per cent of her federal income tax, because she is opposed to the large percentage of the national income used for war.
In a letter accompanying her tax return this lady says, “I cannot conscientiously pay more of my tax because at least that proportion of our national income is now used for war.
I believe it is wrong to kill human beings.
I believe that today war only increases the evils we are fighting and it will, if we persist in it, degrade us, destroy our liberties and our spiritual values, and eventually destroy us and our civilization.”
In the past two years a lien was placed against this pastor’s salary to collect the unpaid tax.
Probably the same method will be used again this year.
A series of notices in , , , and noted with alarm what a high percentage “of the taxpayer’s dollar” in the U.S. was devoted to military spending.
The annual sessions of the Virginia Conference, held , passed a resolution that indicates the attitude of unconcern was still dominant:
Resolved, That we gratefully acknowledge the sincere efforts of our government to provide for the welfare of its citizens; that we counsel our people to pay their taxes cheerfully…
An editorial by Paul Erb in the issue, “On Paying Taxes,” seemed to acknowledge that war tax resistance was in the air — not approving of it, but indicating that in any case there was a right and wrong way to go about it.
In our obedience to law, we reserve the right to obey God rather than man, if we are asked to do something contrary to our consciences.
But we do not think it is wrong to pay lawfully imposed taxes and customs, even tough some of the money maybe used for purposes which we cannot approve, like military preparations and war.
If anyone has conscientious scruples about paying taxes, he should be honest and aboveboard about it.
Certainly a Christian could never justify dishonest tax or import reports.
Yet a brother who is in business writes us of his certain knowledge that some Mennonites falsify their reports, and cheat the government out of some thousands of dollars.
“The Christian and the State” by Wilbur J. Miller, found in the issue, reiterated the traditional hard line on Romans 13.
“Mennonites and Bomb Tests” by Ronald & Elaine Rich () matter-of-factly presented war tax resistance as a possible Christian option:
Christians have responded to the challenge of this issue in various ways.
A few have refused to pay the proportion of their tax that is used for military purposes.
Some have voluntarily limited their income to the low level that is tax exempt.
I assume the following note, found in the issue, again refers to A.J. Muste:
A Presbyterian clergyman in New York has refused for the fourth consecutive year to pay the major part of his income taxes which he says are earmarked for military expenditures.
He pays only 20 per cent of his taxes and gives the rest to charities.
“The time has come,” he says, “when responsible clergymen must join in a common protest against the government’s present suicidal policy of reliance on military might.”
A Presbyterian pacifist minister who refused to pay the part of his federal income tax which he felt would be used for war purposes is now serving a six-month term at Federal Prison camp at Allenburg, Pa.
I’m not sure what if anything was behind the reluctance to mention his name.
A “Sunday School Lesson” (Alta Mae Erb again) in the issue asserted that when Jesus asked his interrogators to show him a coin, and then gave his Render Unto Caesar answer, what he meant by all that was:
“With these coins they paid their poll tax.
Jesus meant that this tax was among the things of Caesar.”
On , Melvin Gingerich testified before a Senate committee on a military conscription bill.
His testimony included the following phrase:
“We who have uneasy consciences because of the disproportionate share of our tax money which is going into military expenditures in contrast to that which is going into nonmilitary foreign aid…”
This, I thought, was a long way from Romans 13 and its insistence that Christians pay their taxes not grudgingly but “for conscience’ sake,” and shows how that norm was shifting.
Amish Farmers and the Social Security Tax
While this was going on, there was another tax resistance fight in the greater Anabaptist community.
The Amish, who placed a high value on mutual aid and on reliance on God and who therefore did not purchase insurance, were resistant to being roped in to the federal government’s Social Security system.
Many refused to apply for benefits.
Some refused to pay withholding taxes.
The first mention of this I noticed was this, from the issue:
The Federal International Revenue Service [sic] has ordered the seizure of livestock of Amish farmers in certain Ohio counties.
These farmers have refused to pay taxes which go for social security, which the Amish are opposed to.
Other mentions of this conflict included:
— the Amish farmers bought their horses back from middlemen who had bought them at a tax auction
— a bill was introduced that would exempt Amish from Social Security
— Amish refuse refund of overplus from auctions of their goods
— Amish petition government for an exemption from the Social Security law
— the Amish reportedly win such an exemption (but this turns out to be exaggerated)
— three work horses are seized from an Amish farmer for back taxes
— letters of protest hit the local papers after an Amish farmer’s horses are seized for taxes
— the IRS announces a crackdown on Amish social security tax resisters
— the IRS announces a moratorium on seizures from Amish Social Security resisters, and a Senator goes on record siding with the Amish on this
— debate on a possible exemption continues in Congress
— a Gospel Herald editorial sympathizes with with Amish resisters
and — more exemption legislation is proposed
— apparently they’re still debating whether or how much to exempt the Amish from Social Security in Congress
