Miscellaneous tax resisters →
individual war tax resisters →
Larry Rosenwald
I’ve mentioned before how I was inspired to embark on my experiment in tax resistance by reading Henry David Thoreau’s essay Resistance to Civil Government (more popularly known as Civil Disobedience).
Today I came across an study written a few years ago about Thoreau’s essay — The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience by Lawrence Rosenwald.
It is a very good look at the historical and biographical context of Thoreau’s essay, and of how Thoreau’s understanding of resistance compares to other theories that were current at that time, and with the understandings of people like Gandhi who were inspired by Thoreau later on.
Rosenwald is himself a war tax resister.
He withholds the portion of his federal income taxes that he believes goes to support war, and then the government seizes a similar amount from him after some intervening bureaucracy.
Like me, Rosenwald was eventually won over to tax resistance by Thoreau’s persuasiveness.
He tells the story this way:
Now he does teach Civil Disobedience — and if his study is any indication, it must be one hell of a class.
I’ve read Thoreau’s essay many times, but I’ve always felt like I’ve been viewing it through a keyhole because of my chronological distance from Thoreau and his time.
Now I feel like I have a much better understanding of who Thoreau was addressing his essay to and what arguments he was responding to and amplifying.
Rosenwald writes elsewhere about how things have changed since Thoreau’s time and how the tax resister today has a different set of concerns, and confronts a different sort of tax collecting apparatus.
Thoreau wrote:
But the state now confronts the tax resister more with laws and faceless bureaucracies and electronic seizures of bank accounts — this meeting of peers on equal ground is a thing of the past.
Rosenwald finds little satisfaction in confronting the dumb behemoth that has replaced Thoreau’s tax-gatherer:
[T]he IRS has instituted an Automatic Collection Service, and we have been collected on three times, once by a levy on my salary and twice by levies on our bank accounts; each time the levy took not only the original refused tax but also penalties and interest.
Even now the IRS occasionally fumbles; before levying my salary it attempted to levy a bank account I had closed out fifteen years previously, and between the first bank levy and the second it refunded the levied money with interest.
But this clumsy, capricious power frets me more than a more efficient and so more predictable bureaucracy might have done…
Rosenwald also notes that Thoreau chose tax resistance reluctantly and in an attempt to avoid getting involved with politics.
He eventually concluded that where taxes were concerned, a political choice could not be avoided (in Rosenwald’s words, “in paying taxes abstinence just isn’t a choice, because you either pay them and collaborate with the state or refuse to pay them and defy the state, but in any case you do politics”).
Today’s Thoreau-ish tax resister is confronted by many more of these entanglements than Thoreau was.
Thoreau could imagine that “I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it.”
Today you meet the tax-gatherer and other coercive agents of the state on a daily basis.
Getting from the unexamined life to a place where you can plant your feet and “[l]et your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” is arguably much more difficult today.
[I]n my unsystematic, affectionate observation of our community, our movement, our campaign, whatever the right word is for it, I don’t see much that suggests we’re being successful in our outreach, or that suggests we’re growing and flourishing as a movement.
This isn’t to put down anyone’s commitment, my own included, or the solid moral reasoning it’s based on, but I’m guessing that what I wonder is, what would it be like to sit down at a gathering and raise a couple of new questions, which at least have the benefit of being new, however crackpottish they may seem?
Here are the ones on my list: 1) Why are we so disproportionately white (at least, at all the meetings I’ve ever attended)? 2) Why have we failed to become a larger and more powerful movement? and 3) in response to a visionary comment made at one gathering by Bob Bady (and this one I heard myself!), namely, “if we built a better movement, people would come to it,” what would we need to do to build a seriously better movement than the one we have now?
Rosenwald was responding to the preliminary minutes from the NWTRCC meeting in Nashville and reacting to a comment he heard from a participant at a regional gathering: “we always talk about two things: outreach to non-WTRs and sustaining ourselves as a movement.
When are we going to start talking about something new?”
I think Rosenwald is on to something.
The war tax resistance movement seems to be spinning its wheels and it’s time to reexamine what we’re doing.
To his first question, I have an observation or two.
I don’t know much about the demographics of the war tax resistance movement, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it is “disproportionally white” as he says.
I think this is probably because today’s war tax resistance movement in the U.S. descends from mostly-white religious movements like the Quakers and Catholic Workers with a more-recent infusion from the mostly-white anti-Vietnam-war movement.
Over time, certain aspects of white American (counter-)culture have permeated the movement — not because the people in the movement were deliberately trying to make it a white one, but because with few exceptions, they felt that such things were comfortable and unexceptional.
, when I went to the national NWTRCC meeting in Santa Rosa, I noted:
Because these sorts of things are par-for-the-course in the “white granola left,” it is easy for people who are part of that subculture not to realize that they may be somewhat off-putting to people who are not.
The war tax resistance movement often behaves as though we were trying to broadcast that we are very welcoming to white, mild-mannered, organic vegetarian, Dalai Lama supporting, folk-music-loving, gun-control advocates who voted for Kucinich.
That message comes through loud and clear.
Not that we should be broadcasting that mild-mannered et ceteras aren’t welcome, but if that welcome message is the loudest message we’re putting out, that’s the subculture we’ll be drawing our members from.
As for how to make this movement larger, more powerful, better, and more effective… I’ve got an even crazier idea.
People in the war tax resistance movement have two modes of trying to make change and influence people:
On the one hand, we try to influence the government not to be such a pack of scoundrels.
On the other hand, we try to convince people who also dislike the government’s scoundrelism to adopt tax resistance as a way of protesting it or of ending complicity with it.
When trying to convince the government, we use the whole assortment of sit-ins, letter-writing campaigns, protest marches, blockades, angry denunciations of all varieties, lawsuits, petitions and the like.
When trying to convince the taxpayers, though, suddenly we get very timid.
To the IRS, the tax resister will say “I cannot pay, and I won’t pay, because if I did, I would be complicit in the murder and thievery that this government engages in.”
But to the taxpayer who is complicit in the murder and thievery, the tax resister will say, “y’know, if you’re interested, you can make a powerful statement by redirecting the thirty-four cents in phone tax you pay every month, but if it’s too much bother, I understand.”
It is a shame that we divide our energy in this way.
The government will ignore us no matter how obnoxious we are (because we’re a fairly small, powerless movement and because they don’t care what we think), and we pretty much invite everybody else to ignore us by the timidity of our message.
My suggestion is to turn this around.
Let’s take ourselves seriously and act as though we believe what I think we believe: that the government is only the monster that we allow it to be by feeding it, that there’s no anti-war bumper sticker clever enough to make you actually anti-war if you’re still supporting the war with your money, that paying taxes to the U.S. government is not a neutral act but a pro-war, pro-militarism, pro-government act.
Let’s turn around and protest the taxpaying peace movement with the same energy we have been using to protest the government in vain.
I’d like to see us picket the taxpayers Michael Moore and Ward Churchill.
I’d like us to remind the folks applauding Iraq war refuseniks that conscientious objection is for everyone, not just for those in uniform.
I’d like to see us start a letter-writing campaign to MoveOn or a sit-in at the next United For Peace and Justice meeting, asking them to join the opposition.
I want to see us blockading the next protest march, holding a banner reading “When you’re serious, get back to us!”
Let’s make it crystal clear to the people who just might care that the best way to start opposing the war is to cut off your support for it.
I’m being a little provocative here for effect.
Some of the ideas I mention might be counter-productive and following their example might turn us into the annoying nags of the peace movement rather than expanding our influence.
There’s a good way and a bad way to go about this.
But I think that our current strategy of not standing up and challenging the paper-thin opposition of the taxpaying peace movement is no strategy at all.
I wrote up some of my impressions of of ’s NWTRCC meeting in Las Vegas.
I took notes on-and-off through and I’ll write up those things I remember that might be of interest.
The New Pamphlet I’ve Been Working On
I was at the meeting in part to present a first draft of a new edition of NWTRCC’s “Practical War Tax Resistance” pamphlet #5 on low-income / simple-living as a war tax resistance technique.
On night we distributed a few copies of this draft and over the course of I had a chance to sit down with a number of people and listen to their suggestions for improvement.
(If you would like to review the document, send me email and I’ll send you a copy of the draft.)
I’m aiming to have a final draft ready in , and with any luck we’ll have our new edition back from the press .
Not Much Evidence of a Tax Resistance Groundswell
Despite the growing anti-war sentiment in the country, there has been no evidence of a corresponding groundswell of interest in war tax resistance.
For the most part, people reported that their local groups were treading water in terms of membership and outreach.
There was more resignation than frustration expressed on this point, as most of us have become used to being, as we’d characterize it anyway, well ahead of the curve on this.
Many people also expressed that they often hear about lone-wolf tax resisters who for whatever reason never feel the need to align themselves with tax resistance organizations, so that the actual number of tax resisters is hard to gauge.
Survey in Progress
, NWTRCC started conducting a survey, informally, often at rallies, protests, and other activist events, to get a feel for what makes people choose or avoid tax resistance, and to do some concept testing of a possible large-scale one-year tax resistance campaign.
Of the few hundred people who have responded to the survey thus far, 47% are not doing any tax resistance now, and of that group, 61% would “consider participating in a one-year commitment to refuse a portion of your federal income taxes and redirect your taxes to a humanitarian cause if thousands joined you publicly” on a particular date.
All this sounds pretty good, and we plan to continue the survey , but even if we find a potential for this sort of tax resistance avalanche, NWTRCC alone doesn’t really have the resources to organize and launch it.
My hope is that we can package these persuasive survey results along with offers of our own specialized expertise and sell the idea of such a campaign to one of the larger national anti-war groups who could launch a campaign like this in a heartbeat if they cared to.
My own feeling is that this sort of thing is exactly the sort of sustained nationwide civil disobedience campaign the peace movement has been looking for; they just don’t know it yet.
Phone Tax Resistance Going Out of Style
Phone tax resistance has been a useful way of getting potential resisters to take the first step.
It’s pretty easy to do, and the risks are very low, and so many tax resisters have gotten their feet wet in this way.
However the proliferation of phone companies and phone plans, and the recent abolition of the phone tax on long-distance, have muddied the waters a bit.
There’s a pretty good chance that the excise tax on local service is on the way to the trash heap as well, so NWTRCC has begun to deemphasize phone tax resistance and the Hang Up On War campaign.
We’re still looking for the next “gateway” resistance tactic — any ideas?
Dan Jenkins Tries to Get the Courts to Recognize COMT
Some folks are trying to improve NWTRCC’s multimedia educational and persuasive offerings.
This is a good thing (our local tax resistance group still uses a slide show made during the Reagan administration, complete with a tape recording that goes “beep” when you’re supposed to flip to the next slide).
Alas, I was in a different workshop when this was being discussed, so I didn’t learn as much about this as I could have, but the project also includes a video contest — anyone can enter by producing a short video on the topic of war tax resistance — with cash prizes for the winning entries.
I’ll post more details on The Picket Line when the contest officially launches .
A New Flyer on W-4 Resistance
NWTRCC’s produced a new flyer on W-4 resistance (adjusting the withholding allowances on your W-4 form so that your employer sends less of your paycheck to the IRS) that may be helpful to folks who would like to resist their income tax but who find themselves with nothing but a refund to resist when April 15th comes around.
Tax Resisters and Student Financial Aid
A preliminary fact sheet was distributed that covers the implications for war tax resisters who are participating in student financial aid programs, or whose children are.
It’s not ready for publication just yet, but looks like it will be a useful resource when the time comes.
A Report from the International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns
We also got to read Larry Rosenwald’s report back from the International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns which was held in Woltersdorf, Germany .
He was struck by the differences between the tax resistance movement in the United States and its counterparts in the rest of the world (Europe in particular).
In Europe, the movement is focused more on using the law and the courts (national and international) to legalize some form of conscientious objection to military taxation, and less focused on civil disobedience and forms of extralegal conscientious objection.
They find it confusing that in the United States there’s both a Peace Tax Fund campaignand an organized war tax resistance movement.
It mentions the tax resistance of Larry Rosenwald, Juanita Nelson, Ruth Benn, and myself.
Tax resister and Thoreau scholar Lawrence Rosenwald shares his Notes on Pacifism, a refreshingly unsentimental take on the subject.
He takes on the connection between war and what we do with our money:
The classic formulation here is still the one made by the Quaker activist John Woolman, in :
Oh! that we who declare against wars, and Acknowledge our trust to be in God only, may walk in the Light, and therein examine our Foundation & motives in holding great Estates: May we look upon our Treasures, and the furniture of our houses, and the Garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions, or not.
The power of the passage has to do with its uncertainty, with the fact that Woolman formulates his point as a question.
He’s not telling us in advance that every “great Estate” has the seeds of war in it; he’s just insisting that we find out whether it does or not, and he’s right.
Maybe it’s impossible to figure out the chain of causation between each of our expenditures and the waging of war.
But it’s possible to trace the connections in some cases, and in such cases we should as pacifists sever the connections we find as quickly and sharply as we can.
I started thinking of myself as a pacifist — when, that is, I began to scrutinize one expenditure in particular, namely, the money I was spending on the American military.
There’s much to say against doing that sort of resistance; the IRS often collects not only the refused taxes but also interest and penalties, the resistance becomes routinized, one gets regarded as an eccentric or an extremist or a traitor.
But each year since I began it’s seemed better to resist than to pay voluntarily, and each year it gets more puzzling to me that so many pacifists freely pay taxes to the American government and its gigantic armies.
Surely a pacifist doesn’t have to be a war tax resister.
But a pacifist does have to give such resistance serious consideration, find some authentic answer to the question of why, if one is opposed to war across the board, one would go on voluntarily paying for it.
Some short bits from here-and-there around the web:
The Get Rich Slowly blog recently highlighted Don Schrader, a low-income / simple-living war tax resister and Albuquerque-area local legend.
At last count, there were 56 comments from people evaluating Schrader’s eccentric and dedicated lifestyle and the principles behind them.
The Colorado Springs Independent covers the war on war tax, and includes quotes from Peter Haney and Esther Kisamore.
Expatriate satyagrahi tax resister Jeff Knaebel delivered a speech at the Gandhi Sixtieth Memorial in Pune .
The text of the speech has been reprinted at LewRockwell.com.
Excerpt:
Complete non-violence today would mean acquiescence in systematic destruction of the whole earth, and thus all of humanity with it.
Some situations demand that we defend our land, our right to livelihood, and our lives with violent defensive action.
Direct Action Today, I feel, however, is best expressed in self-restraint, in the quiet refusal to buy corporate products, in boycott, in self-reliance and in tax refusal, in refusal to report for combat in aggressive war, in refusal to accept corporate and government media propaganda as truth.
I know what “simplified” means in these contexts, and I’m highly aware of being a war tax resister who doesn’t try to live such a life, at least in some senses of “simplified,” and I’m wondering, Where exactly… is there room for me, a war tax resister , “sustainable for the long haul,” and with every expectation of continuing to do war tax resistance as long as I live?
“Simplicity” isn’t… being presented as something to deliberate over; it’s presented as something to “embrace.”
As I mentioned , a frequent point of contention in debates about conscientious tax resistance is whether (and if so, to what extent) paying taxes makes a taxpayer complicit in the deeds of the government.
Different people have taken positions at either extreme (not at all complicit, absolutely complicit) and at various points in the middle, and have deployed persuasive arguments and metaphors to argue their cases.
I’ll explore some of these arguments today.
I’m going to start off with some discussion of law and legal culpability.
The Nuremberg Principles
One reason a discussion of legal theory is important in what initially seems to be a discussion about moral, not legal, responsibility, is the Nuremberg Principles.
The people who drafted these Principles were trying to articulate what they supposed to be universal, eternal, and self-evident crimes.
(This was meant to solve the problems of jurisdiction and ex post facto law in the trials of Nazi war criminals, and also to formally outlaw such things as aggressive war.)
The Principles state, in part,
“Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity [elsewhere defined] is a crime under international law.”
and
“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
A number of war tax resisters have taken these Principles as an inspiration, and some have even adopted the conceit of saying that they are afraid that if they pay taxes they may risk being prosecuted under the theory the Principles articulate.
The United States government is certainly guilty of the crimes listed under that first bullet point, so — leaving aside the practical difficulties involved in holding anyone accountable for complicity with the United States government at this stage of the game — what must one do if one wants to avoid such complicity?
Must one resist paying taxes, for example?
Larry Rosenwald is one war tax resister who believes the answer to that question is an unequivocal “yes”:
To pay war taxes is to acquiesce in building weapons of mass destruction… what international law as derived from the Nuremberg principles arguably defines as a crime…
It is, simply, a wrong act for any pacifist, any adherent of international law, any person fundamentally opposed to American policy; and I do not understand what keeps such people from refusing taxes…
And he’s not alone.
Conspiracy theory
I quoted blogger FSK yesterday as saying, “If you pay taxes, you are as responsible for war as the soldier who kills people.
If you pay taxes, you are directly responsible for every bad thing government does.
Paying taxes is immoral.”
This representation bears some resemblance to the legal concept of conspiracy.
One set of jury instructions about conspiracy put it this way:
[W]here several persons conspire or combine together to commit any unlawful act, each is criminally responsible for the acts of his associates or confederates committed in furtherance of any prosecution of the common design for which they combine.
In contemplation of law, the act of one is the act of all.
Each is responsible for everything done by his confederates, which follows incidentally in the execution of the common design as one of its probable and natural consequences, even though it was not intended as a part of the original design or common plan.
There are a couple of glaring problems with stretching the concept of conspiracy to cover taxpayers.
For starters, it seems hard to take seriously once you consider all of its ramifications.
For instance, I don’t think FSK really believes what he’s saying he believes.
He’s said on other occasions that he has an above-ground job at which taxes are withheld from his paycheck, and that while he’d be willing to take a job in the underground or “agorist” economy in order to avoid these taxes, he wouldn’t be willing to take a pay cut to do so.
Can it really be true that as a taxpayer he feels “directly responsible for every bad thing government does,” — as responsible as the people who directly carry out those bad things, but that he feels so blasé about this that he wouldn’t stop doing it if it cost him any money?
His excuse may be that he has to earn a living, but how is this different from the same excuse given by a soldier, Senator, or bureaucrat — assuming you believe, as FSK says he does, that a taxpayer is just as responsible as they are for their actions?
Secondly, to prove “conspiracy” in the legal sense, you have to show that the parties to the agreement agreed to work together to achieve some common end, and that either the end itself, or the methods they chose to reach that end, were illegal.
This isn’t as hard to prove as it might sound at first.
You don’t necessarily have to prove that the conspirators actually met or signed onto a formal plan.
As one set of jury instructions put it:
[I]t is not necessary to constitute a conspiracy that two or more persons should meet together, and enter into an explicit or formal agreement for an unlawful scheme, or that they should directly, by words or in writing, state what the unlawful scheme was to be, and the detail of the plans or means by which the unlawful combination was to be made effective.
It is sufficient if two or more persons, in any manner, or through any contrivance, positively or tacitly come to a mutual understanding to accomplish a common and unlawful design.
and another:
[A]ll who take part in a conspiracy after it is formed and while it is in execution, and all who, with the knowledge of the facts, concur in the facts originally formed and aid in executing them, are fellow conspirators.
Their concurrence, without proof of an agreement to concur, is conclusive against them.
They commit the offense when they become partners to the transaction or further the original plan.
Do taxpayers meet this sort of qualification?
If you’re putting on your prosecutor’s-hat, you can probably look at these instructions and say, sure, I could make it stick.
But if you’re defending the taxpayer against a charge of conspiracy, you’ve got a good trump card to play:
In short, if my client is accused of illegally conspiring with a government, by paying taxes to it — how can you suggest that there was some sort of “agreement” or “mutual understanding” if the government had to threaten my client to comply?
That doesn’t sound like an agreement to me.
My client isn’t an accomplice, but a victim!
Duress — How much can it excuse?
But just how good of a defense is it to say that you were paying taxes under duress?
Can such an argument always relieve you of all responsibility, or does it only work when certain conditions are met, or only relieve you of a certain amount of responsibility?
How much compulsion must the government use before it absorbs responsibility?
Is there a threshold?
Does it depend on what they’re trying to absorb responsibility for?
It couldn’t be the case (could it?) that the government could “force” you to murder someone by threatening you with a $25 fine for refusing — and that the government could take all of the guilt off your shoulders in this way.
Alas, in the debates about tax resistance, usually government compulsion is seen as an all-or-nothing sort of thing, and questions like these go unanswered.
William Lloyd Garrison said at one point that willingly paying taxes to a government that upholds slavery was wrong, but that to acquit yourself it is sufficient for you to announce that you are not cooperating willingly, and to strike an attitude that is consonant with that declaration:
[A man] may consent peaceably to yield up what is demanded of him, but not without remonstrance, and only as he would give up his purse to a highwayman.
He will not recognize it as a lawful tax — he will not pay it as a tax — but will denounce it as robbery and oppression.
Tolstoy agreed, emphasizing that although it was wrong to voluntarily pay taxes, under the Christian non-resistance principle that he (and Garrison) adhered to, it was also wrong to resist the government in seizing taxes:
A religious man may not resist by force those who take any of the fruits of his labour — whether they be private robbers or robbers that are called “the Government”…
The proper thing to do when the government comes calling, in this school of thought, is to refuse to pay voluntarily but to submit peacefully to distraint of property.
But J.G. James argued against such passive tax resistance, by saying:
It may well be questioned if the payment of rates or taxes is voluntary at all, since the account is presented in the form of a demand, and not a polite request.
Inasmuch as payment is compulsory in any case, is not Passive Resistance merely an awkward, expensive, and an inconvenient mode of payment for all concerned?
It’s easy to confuse these two cases:
in which someone actually forces you to do something (such as forcing you to stay in prison by locking the doors)
in which someone threatens you with unpleasant consequences if you do not do something.
In the first case, you don’t have alternatives to choose from, so you don’t have any blame for what you’re stuck with.
In the second case, though, your options have merely been changed.
You still have a choice to make, and that choice can be praiseworthy or blameworthy.
Hannah Arendt wrote:
…in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy:
“If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”
And while a temptation where one’s life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.
If the tax collector says “give me your money or else,” that isn’t the end of the inquiry, but the time to say “or else what?” and then to weigh the options.
If I believed FSK’s argument that what the tax collector was saying was “be directly responsible for every bad thing government does or else” I’d be asking my “or else what?” with bluff-calling incredulity.
When you eat a Chiquita you’ve done your part
Can you be found legally guilty for payments you made under duress?
You certainly can, under some circumstances anyway.
Look at what happened to Chiquita (you know, the banana company).
Chiquita had been operating in Colombia and, as a cost of doing business there, had to pay taxes to some of the governments that control parts of the country.
Three of those governments were designated as terrorist organizations by the United States government, which has passed a law prohibiting anyone from funding such organizations anywhere.
In addition, there is an international agreement (as of ) that prohibits funding terrorist organizations.
It says:
Any person commits an offence within the meaning of this Convention if that person by any means, directly or indirectly, unlawfully and willfully, provides or collects funds with the intention that they should be used or in the knowledge that they are to be used, in full or in part, in order to carry out:
(a) An act which constitutes an offence within the scope of and as defined in one of the treaties listed in the annex; or
(b) Any other act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.
(On its face, this would seem to prohibit paying taxes to the United States government, but seeing as the government is a signatory to this agreement, and seeing as all of the signatories are governments, I’m sure there’s a loophole.)
In any case, Chiquita pled guilty in a plea bargain and was hit with a $25 million fine.
But I’m not sure if this really is relevant to the topic at hand.
Note that Chiquita was not charged with conspiring with these Colombian terrorist groups — wasn’t charged as a co-conspirator or accessory in their crimes — but was charged with a distinct crime of providing funds to terrorist organizations.
On the other hand, that crime may itself just be a sort of legal shorthand that amounts to essentially the same sort of thing.
I haven’t investigated the legal theory behind it.
It’s Caesar’s fault
J.G. James was a believer in law and government, and so he felt that when taxes or tax expenditures conflicted with conscience, the proper response was to do what could be done within the law to rectify the problem, but to go no further:
[I]t is the duty of a conscientious citizen to pay an unjust charge if he has tried in vain to prevent the measure passing into law, on the ground that he is no longer responsible for the expenditure of public funds, after he has done his utmost to control that expenditure by legalized means
This argument, that once the money is out of your hands you are no longer responsible for how it is spent, comes up frequently in debates about tax resistance — often even from tax resisters themselves, when trying to explain the limits of their resistance.
For instance, John H. Dadmun was a conscientious objector during the American Civil War who, in addition to refusing to serve in the military, refused also to pay someone else to serve as a substitute in his place (which was at the time a legal alternative to service).
This was because, he said, “that is the same as to go myself.”
But he was willing to pay a militia exemption tax (though it would take him some time to raise the money).
Someone chided him about this, noting that “the government can take the money and get a substitute.”
Dadmun responded:
“It might do so, but there is no provision into the law to carry that into effect; and furthermore, the Marshal has told me it had not been so used, but must be paid into government and he could not trace it further…”
Eventually…
[T]he brethren gave me almost a hundred dollars, and others lent me for Christ’s sake, not knowing whether I would be able to pay or not, and thus I was able to purchase my liberty, and satisfying the government, by “rendering Caesar his own,” with image and superscription thereon; and if he makes a bad use of it, he is responsible; as I have no further control of it.
G.W. Gillespe, another Civil War-era conscientious objector, had a nearly identical stand:
[T]he idea of hiring a man to kill for me would implicate me in the crime; so I refused to give even five cents for a substitute.
If I had had three hundred dollars, I could conscientiously have given it to Caesar as a last resort, to get exempt from the bloody field of carnal strife.
Some tried to persuade me that it was just as bad to pay the money as to hire a substitute, as the money was for that purpose.
The difference is great.
The Lord will not hold me accountable for the mischief that money, taken from me by force, would do when employed by others.
Caesar demands taxes of us; we pay them, according to the instruction and example of our Lord.
We render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and Caesar hires a man to shoot his enemies for him; are we to blame?
By no means.
But to hire a man to fight in my place, would be like hiring a thief to steal in my place.
Both guilty.
Rendering unto Caesar
Here we hit one of the big stumbling blocks that Christian tax resisters have run into.
The New Testament is distressingly explicit, in Romans 13:
Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.
The authorities that exist have been established by God.
Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.…
[I]t is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience.
This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.
Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
If Jesus wanted us to know that we should resist taxes to governments that were going to apply the tax money in sinful ways, he was given every opportunity to make this clear when he was asked: “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
Instead, he responded with the koan “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” which confused everybody at the time, and the meaning of which continues to defy consensus today.
The best the resisters could come up with to justify their position was either a confidently asserted, if somewhat strained reading of the “Give to Caesar” koan (one war tax resister insisted that Jesus delivered his koan during a time of peace in the Roman Empire, so Jesus was by no means countenancing war taxes), or the story from Acts 5 in which the apostles defied the law and continued to preach the gospel according to God’s explicit command.
Asked to explain themselves,
Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than men!”
Most Christian tax resisters took the “Give to Caesar” koan and certainly the Romans passage to mean that God does indeed command us to pay taxes, even to unjust governments, but took the Acts “We must obey God rather than men” statement to provide an occasional override:
Essentially “render unto Caesar and submit to the government, unless that means disobeying God.”
T.S. Grimké put it this way:
[If the ruler] require me to pay taxes, although one object of the taxes be the support of idolatry, or the waging of war, I comply, simply because he has a clear right to levy taxes, and the responsibility of applying them is with him, not with me.
He is lawfully possessed of the power on the principle of civil obedience, as taught us in the New Testament; taxes are among the usual and necessary instruments for the administration of government; the use to which he shall apply them, is not my province, but his: he requires nothing unlawful of me, and therefore I comply.
Here then is the distinction.
If he commands what is unlawful, as a means for the attainment of even a lawful end, I refuse obedience.
But if he commands what is lawful, intending when the command has been performed by me, to employ the fruit of my obedience in the accomplishment of unlawful purposes in which I have no hand, I obey, because he requires of me only what is rightful.
I have nothing to do with his motive or his object.
I would illustrate this by the case of a debt.
I am indebted to another.
He demands payment.
I am not at liberty to refuse, because I happen to know, or have reason to believe that he will employ the money, when paid, for unlawful or immoral purposes.
This follows from the principle already stated.
My duty is very clear, to pay the debt: the use of the money, when paid, is at once his right and responsibility.
This may be aptly illustrated by a modification of the case stated.
I am indebted to another; but the debt is not due.
He calls for payment, not having a right to do so, and I happen to know, that his reason for wishing the money then, is to make an improper use of it.
I am bound to refuse; because not being bound to pay then, I am volunteering to grant a favor, knowing that it will be abused.
On the same principle I can conscientiously pay taxes, knowing, that among other objects, the public money will be applied to pay judges and jurors for trying and condemning criminals to capital punishment; to pay the salary of the president of a college, who teaches that public prayer is unchristian, and the clergy a set of impostors; or to pay the expenses of war.
This seems to me the only safe and wise principle, and it furnishes a suitable criterion for civil obedience.
[However, if the] magistrate, instead of a general tax law divides the taxes, and lays on the advocates of Peace the war tax.
They cannot conscientiously pay it; because they are thus made the sole and direct instrument of carrying on the war, and without their compliance, it must be at a stand.…
…Obedience is due to the civil magistrate, not as a duty to society, but as a duty to God.
God only can then lawfully fix the land-marks of that duty.
This was also Edward Swaine’s argument against tax resistance by nonconformist Christians against government support for establishment churches.
And he was unafraid to take his argument to its logical ends:
If Cæsar say “Give me money,” we must give it; for God has nowhere said “Do not give Cæsar money,” or “Do not give Cæsar money without satisfaction that he will properly apply it.”
If Cæsar say “Do not preach,” Paul must refuse obedience, for Christ has said to him “preach!”
If Cæsar say to us, “Go to the North Pole” — or “wear a cocked hat” — we must do so; for God has not claimed our obedience to the contrary.
He has not said, “Do not go to the North Pole” or “go only where you please.”
He has not said, “Do not wear a cocked hat,” or “wear only what you like.”
Those things, then, concerning which God has claimed nothing of us, we must render unto Cæsar.
Swaine draws the line in this way:
God says to us in effect… If [Caesar] should say to you… “I resolve to establish the worship of Baal for the good of the Empire,” and to levy a tax for that purpose, the resources of the State are his, and you are bound to render the tax.
But, if he should say I hold it to be for the good of the land, that every one acknowledge Baal to be God, and therefore require the payment of the tax to be accompanied by a recognition by the payers of the godhead of Baal, you are bound, while you pay the tax, to refuse the recognition, though impaling or burning be the penalty.
Or, if the tax be collected under an enactment that every one who pays shall be considered as offering to Baal, you are bound to refuse the payment, for to pay in such case would be equivalent to worship, and a rendering to Cæsar of that which is God’s.
But I do not justify your refusal of taxes, because they may be levied for a purpose that my law condemns.
He who violates my law must answer, and that is not you who pay the tax, but he who levies it if a bad one.
It is he who misapplies the National Funds, not you who had no rightful command over them to apply or misapply.
You have no responsibility, and violate none of God’s laws, if your tax dollars are spent in sinful ways, according to Swaine, because “the tax-gatherer comes… not for a contribution, or subscription, or aid, but for property no longer the subject’s to give or to withhold, and no longer under his rightful control…”
Taxes for bad objects are to be paid, not because we can be excused for helping evil by any voluntary act, that we are morally free to forbear, nor because the payment of such taxes will not help evil, for it will help evil, just as much as the payment of a debt to one who is going to misapply the money will help the evil, — but because the tax is not the subject’s any more than the debt is the debtor’s to help with or to withhold.
The payment therefore is his duty, for he is not morally free to decline it, although it will help evil.
Is paying a tax like paying a debt?
This comparison of taxes to debts, as used by Grimké and Swaine above, was an important metaphor in the ongoing debate about tax resistance.
If paying taxes to the government is good in and of itself, because God has so decreed it, then taxpaying can’t simply be judged according to its consequences.
A tax payment, in this way of thinking, is not a donation or a subscription or a contribution that is made voluntarily, but is a duty akin to repaying a debt.
You can’t ethically refuse to repay a loan because you think the person you owe money to will spend it unwisely.
Here’s an example of how this metaphor was used by one tax resister:
Joshua Maule was a Quaker advocate of war tax resistance.
When a general tax was increased by a certain percentage in order to pay for war expenses (with the government explicitly saying this was the reason), Maule refused to pay this additional fraction of his taxes, and he insisted that this was the only position consistent with traditional Quaker teaching regarding war.
Maule’s critics asked him why he continued to pay other taxes (like excise fees) or the remaining portion of his general tax — since surely some of these taxes would also go to pay for war.
Nathan Hall compared Maule’s stand to someone trying to avoid drinking intoxicating beverages by, for instance, only drinking 75% of a bottle of 50-proof (25% alcohol) liquor:
We both have a testimony against the use of ardent spirits, but are, being very thirsty, placed in a situation where we can get no water except some that has a small portion of whiskey in it.
Being under the necessity of taking something, thee may, by inquiry and calculation, find what proportion of the objectionable article is contained in it, and leave just that much in thy bowl; while my understanding will be that in partaking I partake of both good and bad, and in refusing refuse both.
So that with me the question is and has been, not what portion I should pay so much as whether any at all.
Maule responded by trying to draw a sharp line between ordinary civil taxes, which like a debt he must pay regardless of how some of it may be used, and explicit war taxes, which fall under a different rule:
The arguments used in reference to what disposition the officers of the law might make of the money collected appeared to me to be valueless.…
I am not accountable for the acts of other men: if I owe a just debt, I must pay it; if the person receiving the money uses it for a bad purpose, the accountability is with him; but if he demand money of me avowedly to be used in any way to the plundering of my neighbor, destroying his property, or taking his life, then if I furnish money thus demanded I become an accomplice in the evil work and accountable for the sin.
I consider our civil taxes a just debt that should be promptly paid, but I am satisfied that no human authority has either a moral or a religious right to demand of me money or means of any kind to aid in destroying the lives and property of my fellow-men.
Samuel Allinson put forward the most forceful attack on the tax-as-debt analogy in .
First off, he denied outright that God has commanded us to give Caesar anything that Caesar plans to put to a sinful purpose: “if tribute is demanded for a use that is antichristian, it seems right for every Christian to deny it, for Cæsar can have no title to that which opposes the Lord’s command.”
Having knocked out the divine pillar upholding taxpaying as a moral duty, he then proceeds to attack the idea that taxation represents some sort of secularly-contracted debt, or part of an implied “social contract.”
Allinson argues that no Christian would agree to the terms of a contract that might require him to do the devil’s work:
Every valid contract is voluntarily entered into, and as it is the duty of every one previously to see that his engagement is innocent, so when his promise is purchased by a consideration given it would be dishonest and deceitful not to perform it, the other party having, as it were, deposited so much effects in his hands, which he is to render back according to agreement and when received the receiver has a right to apply it as he pleases without any account to the payer, but in the case of taxes he who gives has a right to call to such an account and therefore seems himself liable for and privy to the application.
Every man has or has not given his assent to the government he lives under, in the first, he has formally declared his allegiance thereto, in the latter, that allegiance is implied in consideration of his receiving the protection and benefit of it in the safety of his person and the security of his property, in both, it is no more than to be “true and faithful” which can never mean a compliance with every requisition, for we owe a superior allegiance to the King of Kings, and whenever the requisitions of man run counter thereto we “ought to obey God rather than men”
…
We have never entered into any contract, express or implied, for the payment of taxes for war, nor the performance of anything contrary to our religious duties…
Conclusion?
So have we made any progress here?
We’ve at least been able to review the question from several angles and to get some historical perspective on how it has been wrestled with.
I think I’ve demonstrated that both of the extreme positions — that paying taxes makes you a fully-guilty accomplice in whatever the government then does, or that paying taxes because it is involuntary is a decision without ethical import — have serious flaws.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the Christian and the legal viewpoints, but as an atheist and an anarchist, to me those viewpoints are often only tangentially advisory at best and mere curiosities at worst.
For me the question is an ethical one that has to be resolved with my reason and my conscience.
And as best as I can make out:
I am under no original ethical obligation to pay a tax.
Taxpaying is not in and of itself good, and I did not in reality enter into something akin to an agreement or contract that I would be unethically violating by failing to pay.
Given that, I have to evaluate my decision to pay or not to pay a tax by looking at what consequences I expect will result — in other words, by imagining two worlds, one in which I paid the tax and one in which I haven’t — and choosing from them which one I’d prefer to be in.
By doing this, I also imagine two of me, one who paid the tax and one who didn’t, and I choose which one I want to become.
In doing this, as with so many other decisions, some of my considerations are ethicalish (which of these worlds is more just? which of the possible me am I more proud of?) and some are more ordinarily self-interested (in which world am I more satisfied or better-off or esteemed?).
This is, as far as I can tell, how it is and how it should be.
And where this has led me so far is where I’m at.
Resisting some taxes completely (the federal income tax), others not-so completely (federal excise taxes), others hardly at all (the state sales tax), others dysfunctionally (the self-employment tax, which I don’t pay voluntarily, but which I accept will probably be seized).
Along the way, I recalculate my situation and recalibrate my decisions based on my best judgment and my evolving understanding.
And these wanderings through the thoughts of people who have grappled with these conundrums before me don’t hurt.
A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation.
In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.
Here are some of the examples I found:
Tax resister “insurance”
For instance, the Breton Association in
France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”
Another example was the Association
of Real Estate Taxpayers in
Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal
battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty
Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the
IRS.
The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal
amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina
colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up
[the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any
confinement.”
Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities.
Whiteway Colony
was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the
Bijou and
Agape communities live below a taxable
income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Supporting resisters as an employer
Some members of the Restored Israel of
Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal
taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were
resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold
taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American
citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans
to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn
withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a
voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or
half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several
months.”
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also
used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and
crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction
house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke
out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized
for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way
communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse
to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment
of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to
a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown
in’ by the auctioneer.”
Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail
Jessica Ramer and a
Claire
Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash
whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether
or not to declare the income.
Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was
told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the
government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged
meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the
charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government
calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when
you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even
leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t
tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is
the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but
still give the nice server what they have earned.
Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging
IRS
seizures:
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington,
D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply
of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation.
He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a
lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop,
to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my
attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason
barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic
control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth,
alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India
made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition,
and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed,
non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on
alcoholic beverages).
Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses
One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used
by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in
Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and
Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that
his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn
many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty
Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on
the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan.
The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda,
reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of
Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they
would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with
the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable
persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their
moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the
duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and
half Gentile.… among the Jews the words
“tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,”
“tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting
combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were
accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all
social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of
the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost
son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose,
and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their
testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit
at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests
especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of
pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful
receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic
regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might
easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and
necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials
to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the
refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before
the American revolution. John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes,
the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland,
have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet
high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains,
in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and
have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence
every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to
“have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to
him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the
spirit of liberty everywhere.
Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey
Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:
[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of
virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept
offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as
unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them;
withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life
which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to
each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they
deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to
the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after
the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent
technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of
violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this,
governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently,
percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which
only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned
by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce
their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a
wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers
who complied in paying the excise tax.
Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade
people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people
who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of
taxed British imports by declaring that
…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods
of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public,
shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation
takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer:
and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence,
with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer;
and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country,
and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics
In
Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by
offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show
that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at
the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the
democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as
non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from
those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter
of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes
that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as
previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of
individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings,
you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for
establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which
tax collector.
Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the
social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax
resisters. In , for instance,
448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New
York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the
Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K.
Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman
Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan
Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many
large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic
friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their
names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister
alternative funds function
partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs
as he was picketing the
IRS
office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax
debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this
sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
Keep in contact with resisters and express support
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the
IRS
as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across
the country.
Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making
Here there are too many examples to list.
Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that
“The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure
eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may
be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they
have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry
to its knees.”
Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real
needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put
it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they
thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had
been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to
learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted
to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was
uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed?
They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I
sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me
to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about
the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They
were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly
nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and
readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my
clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The
older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the
clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that
in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more
courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief
deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me
and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged
the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the
men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to
have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I
had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.
You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel
like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that
score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was
deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to
try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that
I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to
greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about
wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
Support the families of imprisoned resisters
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in
India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake
to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”
Study the law, give legal support
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for
women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is
certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation,
and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by
their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”
Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and
Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the
interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable
television on United States involvement in Central America, and a
people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community,
however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf
of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”
Can you think of any I’ve missed?
A couple of tax-resistance-related quotes I hadn’t seen before:
The first was pointed out by Larry Rosenwald and comes from the speech that Emily Greene Balch gave after sharing the Nobel Prize for peace in .
She is speaking of two varieties of peace movement work: the individual moral stand of conscientious objection, and the organized political work of trying to change national policy in a peaceful direction (which, to her, meant the strengthening of international institutions as a way of subduing tensions between nations).
Her aside, after discussing conscientious objection by conscripted young men:
I feel it rather surprising also that refusal of war has never taken the
form, on any large scale, of refusal to pay taxes for military use, a refusal
which would have involved not only young men but (and mainly) older men and
women, holders of property.
The right of insurrection can only exist under an absolute government, where
the people have no voice in the constitution; but in the present case,
universal suffrage remaining to us, our only legitimate mode of defeating our
adversaries was by legal resistance; and the plan proposed by
Le Peuple, namely, an organized refusal to pay the
taxes all over the country, would have been a most effectual instrument.
Since the , however, this is no longer practicable or necessary; my
proposition was received with distrust by the radicals: if the people refuse
to pay taxes once, said these slavish advocates of government, they will
refuse them altogether, and then government will be impossible: and my reward
was a fine of 10,000 francs and ten years’ imprisonment.
The new issue of More Than a Paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter, is online now, with stories on such topics as:
Rosenwald’s account was interesting, particularly that actual war tax resisters were few and far between at the conference (most countries were represented only by people working to enact some form of legal recognition for conscientious objection to military taxation, a la the Peace Tax Fund Act).
The United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain, was represented by a movement of civilly disobedient conscientious objectors as well.
I wonder why the Spanish resisters who have been so much in the news there didn’t show up on the radar at the conference.
There have been some interesting and thoughtful threads on the wtr-s email list recently.
Is it really war tax resistance if you’re pretty sure the IRS is just going to lift the money (with penalties & interest) from your bank account anyway?
Is the point of our resistance to register our disapproval strongly with the government, or to actually withhold funds from the war machine?
Carol Moore reacts to news of a recent IRS seizure of a resister’s bank account:
“The problem with doing [war tax resistance] when you make a lot of money is they get so much interest and fines, which almost defeats the purpose.
Better to do ‘token’ resistance of whatever feels right — be it for you $500 or $2000, or whatever — and make them go through the effort of collecting.”
Randy Belmont says: “I am very puzzled why WTRs use banks.
Most banks are members of the Federal Reserve Banking System and if they are not members they are tributaries, in that they must follow all regulations and are beholding to the Fed.
Why would anyone who refuses to voluntarily fund war do business with these people?
The funding of America’s empirical wars is brought about through the fiat money creation machine known as the Federal Reserve.
“Stealing ones money from a bank account is the simplest and easiest strategy for the IRS.
I read over and over the same scenario of funds being stolen from bank accounts.
Yet, people continue to patronize these institutions.
There is no law requiring one to use banks or keep money deposited in the bank.
Please stop using banks!”
Christopher Toussaint responds: “To use a war analogy, in this case for nonviolent resistance, one must sometimes go behind enemy lines, use their infrastructure to infect transformational memes into the dominant society, get a hold of their ‘ammunition’ and use it against them.
We are a minority, guerrillas who must be grounded in integrity and street smarts.
After all, if we are forced to live in poverty and/or keep our cash in our mattresses, haven’t we compromised ourselves beyond the point of sacrifice, where we become ineffective in changing the greater community toward peace?
“In my case, using the banks to keep small amounts of money to pay by check and debit card, makes my life easier and I am more productive in the work I do on behalf of creating a more just and sustainable society.
Its not hard to change banks periodically if you want to do that to keep the IRS from pilfering your accounts since they are often months and even years behind in their collection process.
Just make sure you have a good reason to change banks, other than evasion of IRS collections, like the bank service fees are too high or their percentages of interest are no longer high enough or you have moved, etc.
“I am aware of the Federal Reserve fiat money situation and yes, in an ideal world, ‘Stop Using Banks’ and trading in silver and gold coins might be preferred.
But this discussion needs to focus more on strategies for keeping our money out of the reaches of the IRS and not on just blanket statements that are not always practical to most WTRs.”
Heather Snow agrees: “Keeping small amounts in the bank is so much easier to pay bills… all the bills are connected to banks.
I mean, living without a bank, is like living without a car.
Almost impossible.
That’s how the feds want it.
I don’t keep all my money in the bank, and enjoy having cash on hand.”
Dana Visalli adds: “[I]t is possible with small banks that have no branches to have an account in somebody else’s name, or more meaningfully, someone else’s SS#.
There can be two signers on the account but they only take the SS# of the first person.
Apparently this option does not exist with banks with branches; only dog knows why this is the case.
“When the IRS seized my account some years ago, the bank president came up to the teller window and explained this technique to me!”
Randy Belmont responds: “Actually, not using banks is really not that hard.
Cash checks at the local corner store or bar.
You can pay many utility bills directly at local drug stores and purchase money orders for other bills.
You can also recycle checks because all checks are drafts for money.
Example: You have a bill for $100.00 owed to ABC Co. and a check made out to you for $75.00. Sign and write pay to the order of ABC Co. on the back of the check and purchase a money order for $25.00. Send both of these to ABC Co. and your bill is paid.
Additionally, if the check is bad the issuer of the check and not yourself is liable.
You can also purchase a pre-loaded debit card for internet purchases etc. at 100s of stores.
I understand that we all must use Federal Reserve Notes to survive, but it is not hard to ween yourself from the constant use of banks.
If you must keep an account keep very little in it and cash your checks for cash and use the methods I described above.
Additionally, you will never have an overdraft or bounced check fee again.”
Larry Rosenwald: “We keep our money in a local bank (two branches).
I love Dana’s story about the bank president!
But here’s a question.
As noted in an earlier exchange with Carol Moore, I think of war tax resistance as an act of civil disobedience, and in that context — and for other reasons — I am not trying not to be penalized; rather the being penalized is for me part of the civil disobedience.
I hate being levied, I should make clear!
But I understand being penalized as part of the process, and when I’m penalized, when we’re levied, I take that occasion to publicize what we’re doing.
I’m guessing from the responses to this thread, and from other threads, that other readers of this list don’t think of wtr as civil disobedience, or think of civil disobedience in a different way, and I’d be interested in understanding these other conceptual frameworks better, if readers would be willing to comment on them.”
Dana Visalli again: “Interesting note Larry, thanks. I’m sure it is the case that everyone interprets their ‘resistance’ (I like to think of it as ‘complete refusal’) to pay for the insanity of war.
“For one think it is quite important for me to keep my financial resources away from the IRS because they will use that money to kill people.
So, when they did seize my account and get $4000 some years ago, that was a sizable amount that went to war (I know we generally calculate about half goes in that direction).
It is a real, literal, tangible issue to me; I don’t want any of my resources to go to war (not to be too pure here, I do drive my car quite a bit… petroleum is quite a war-related problem…).
“It’s certainly an issue that if the IRS does seize a large sum then the mechanics of living become problematic.
I’m sure that’s what Diogenes was getting at when he said ‘People don’t own possessions, possessions own people.’
He apparently lived in a barrel in the town square for quite a while.
I’m passionate… but not that passionate.
“Also, if one can retain one’s resources, one can redistribute them.
Some years ago I gave $1000 to the town community center for their new roof; when I handed the cash to the manager I stipulated that I was going to point out in a letter to the editor why I could afford to give away a thousand dollars when I don’t have a lot of money.
I would like to get up to giving away ¼ of what I make (total taxes are about ¼ of income), but I’m not there.
It is however a real pleasure to give $100 here and $100 there; if the IRS got at my funds that would be impossible
“I’m 61 and I think I can get social security next year.
Surprisingly, they are offering me something like $600 a month (I’ve paid very little into the system in my life).
My favorite idea is to take the money and then donate it to groups working on the aftermath of American war-making, or the many exemplary groups I met in Afghanistan when there in March, trying to educate street children or take care of old people with almost zero resources (speaking of this there are two good essays at CommonDreams right now by Kathy Kelly and her co-workers, who are in Afghanistan as we speak).
I know not everyone could afford to do this, but in my case I think I can make some money until I’m at least 70 selling at farmer’s market and doing other work.
“So… I had no intention of ending up an anarchist, but the Politics of Obedience are too much for me.”
Ginny Sсhnеider adds: “Aside from the Federal Reserve tie, imagine how the banks are investing your money!
Likely these investments uphold the military-industrial complex — just what you are working to overcome.
Credit Unions and newer, socially-responsible bank like institutions might be better alternatives even while you wait for the IRS to seize your money from an account.”
Ed Agro says: “I think I’m somewhere else entirely.
This isn’t surprising; I think if 100 resisters-refusers-redirectors got together & beyond our standard slogans, there’d be 100 different reasons.
“I do know I’m not as attached to independence as Dana; but on the other hand I can’t quite see Larry’s putting up with seizure as civil disobedience.
“If we cannot point out a palpable relationship between making the collection of taxes difficult and a turn away from war, where is the salience of the disobedience?
Is it even civil if it’s an individual or a small-group action with no hope of provoking change?
We cannot show the salience theoretically, and worse, our experience over our years of refusal don’t show it empirically.
It’s not at all obvious that even were there a mass refusal of ‘war taxes’ (which would mean at the very most half of the population, as it has been shown over & over that at least half of our fellow citizens love the government’s wars) that the government would be less inclined or less able to wage war.
The draft resistance movement in the 1960s and ’80s were successful enough to worry the military-industrial complex; so now they buy their soldiers, and as we see there are plenty who will take them up on it.
This is just to say that consumer capitalism’s genius is its ability to absorb and commodify almost any dissent, particularly when that dissent expresses itself as dissatisfaction.
“I’m not saying that either Dana’s or Larry’s different conceptualizations of citizens and subjects are not worth following to their deedful conclusions, but only that perhaps neither of these are resistance.
It’s been interesting and very useful for me to note and remember that their different actions both result in a very good thing: conversation with neighbors, co-workers, officials… There, perhaps is the nub of what we’re doing.
It’s the most we can expect out of WTR, and it’s not a small thing in these timid times.
“Long ago I took a job precisely so that my WTR could be as ‘effective’ as possible in that the substantial risk of seizure at least would give the resistance a voice, and for years I enjoyed sticking it to the IRS with many an antic scheme.
(I particularly enjoyed taking as business losses the time I spent in antiwar work.)
In the end, though, the thing that I cam away with wasn’t the accounting of who was ahead, or the best way to protect my money.
(Though I have to agree with Dana: without a very good reason to let the IRS get much more than I refused, I could get really bummed out.)
Rather I finally came to see that this was indeed a species of tilting at windmills since except insofar as I wrote to various presidents & secretaries of state — and even then with no apparent effect — the IRS was if not a windmill, at least a coffee mill into which my resistance was soon ground up.
The occasional agent who looked with sympathy on my stance — really, I could’ve gotten more mileage for my ideas with less work by way of a letter to the editor.
“I don’t know how I’d feel about all this were I still in the labor market, though I like to believe I’d still be happily reckless.
But this feeling that WTR is less than cogent has had one good effect.
It’s led me to thinking over the years about why, exactly, civilization is so screwed up.
This in turn (and I have to admit, helped along by a good social-security situation) has led me to a preference for a frugal life.
“Yet… Maybe a disadvantage of a frugal life is that it turns not to include tax liability.
Though the relationship isn’t as ‘functional’ as we like to believe, ‘war’ taxes are associated with state violence; so I do miss (or think I miss) the occasion to refuse them.
For that reason I find myself inordinately attached to refusing the phone tax, the only one to which I’m liable and to which with a certain amount of mental gymnastics I can associate with war.
Why do I bother, after these long-winded arguments for ineffectiveness?
The only reason that makes sense to me is that I enjoy the ritual.
Like voting, which ritual I also enjoy even though in the large it apparently doesn’t accomplish anything meaningful either.”
was the first full day of the joint National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Fall gathering / 25th annual New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters in Boston.
The gathering began, as many such meetings do, with introductions.
To mix things up, we first spent some time getting acquainted with our neighbors and then went around the circle introducing each other and briefly summarizing some of their recent war tax resistance-related work.
This gave us a great overview of the variety of such activism.
For example, I introduced Andrea, who has spent the last several years concentrating in her work on the plight of political prisoners and on prison reform.
She is now starting a worker-owned cooperative and is intentionally designing its operating charter so that it will function to help facilitate the war tax resistance of those of its worker/owners who are resisters.
After introductions, people shared some of the challenges and boosts they had encountered in their recent war tax resistance practice.
Some examples I remember:
Several people remarked on how doing war tax resistance as part of a community of resisters — or even with just a single buddy — can help everyone involved, not only in their own practice but in some way making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Larry Rosenwald talked about how he refuses to pay his taxes, but doesn’t take steps to resist the inevitable IRS levy that follows.
Instead he uses the occasion to publicize the fact that he’s been levied and to explain why he resists (often in the form of an op-ed essay).
One person suggested that a winning message for reaching out to young people is “you’ve already been drafted,” meaning, of course, that though there’s no military conscription, the tax system forces us all to be galley slaves rowing the ship of state.
Bob Bady recalled that back when the IRS was trying to seize his house, he asked Ernest Bromley how he’d dealt with the stress when the IRS tried [unsuccessfully, see The Picket Line, ] to seize his house.
Bromley answered: “I just assumed it was God doing it and accepted it; that freed me up to do what I had to do.”
That threw Bady for a loop, but he says with some more perspective he gets it: “The things I spent years worrying about losing turned out to be no big deal.”
Clark Hanjian said that in his experience, we have a lot more allies than we might think.
When he, sometimes with trepidation, has to explain his resistance to someone like a potential employer, he finds that surprisingly often they respond not with bewilderment or hostility but with a sympathetic nod and a “that’s a good idea.”
[Clark asked me to correct the record: “It made me chuckle when I read the phrase ‘sometimes with trepidation,’ since I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘trepidation’ in reference to myself, and especially not in reference to my WTR.
On the contrary, I usually try to take a fearless (some might call it careless) approach to my WTR.
I recall my comment was in response to a woman who spoke about her fear of WTR, so perhaps some notes got interchanged?
Anyway, the only reason I mention this is because I think that part of the benefit of sharing our stories with others is to reduce fear.
I thought maybe you might want to revise this account so we don’t introduce fear into a story where none exists.”] (Case in point: on night we went out for beers after the meeting and got into conversation with the shift manager at the pizza pub, who then spent the next fifteen minutes at our table talking about a documentary on Afghanistan he’d recently seen and ended by telling us how important he thought our work was.)
One resister mentioned that when he went to court to be sentenced for civil disobedience (I forget whether it was tax resistance related or not; I think not), the court was packed with supporters who quietly stood up when he was being sentenced, and how important this support had been to him.
One resister read about how a local school was suffering from funding cuts, and so sent her tax payment directly to the school that year instead of to the IRS, and wrote them a letter explaining what she was doing and why.
Another talked about her struggle to withdraw from California’s CalPERS state employee pension system, out of disagreement with the military industry investing of that system.
A low-income / simple-living resister talked about how after an expensive emergency medical treatment, she wrote polite letters to the various medical staff who had treated her expressing her gratitude and explaining that she would be unable to immediately pay their bills (and why) and asking to work with them to come to an agreeable and possible payment plan.
Most either forgave the bill entirely or reduced it to an immediately-payable amount.
One even said that her letter had been appreciatevely passed around and posted in the office for others to read.
Another remarked that as a child of Holocaust survivors who owes his existence to noncooperators who took risks to shelter his parents, he comes to war tax resistance through asking “how can I thank those people in some small way?”
From here, we broke up into two groups to discuss more specific tactical challenges, opportunities, and inspirations.
The larger group was for people who earn a taxable income and use a variety of strategies to resist some or all of the taxes due.
The smaller group, that I joined, was for those of us who earn an income below the federal income-tax threshold as a method of war tax resistance.
Many of those in our group expressed that they were partially motivated to choose this tactic because it challenged not only taxes but our larger complicity with the warfare state by means of our participation in the consumerist/capitalist economy.
“I’m a war tax resister not just because of war,” Juanita Nelson said, “but what leads to war.”
Many also felt that this was a particularly easy form of tax resistance, and one with many fringe benefits.
Some expressed what I certainly found to be true: that while we may have less income than we could, we feel more wealthy in terms of non-material goods, and we appreciate being able to put more of our time and energy into non-money-earning activities.
This ease, and the fact that this form of tax resistance is relatively non-confrontational, was also seen by some as a drawback.
Some felt guilty when comparing their resistance to those resisters who risk fines and property seizures and prison.
Others missed having a dramatic opportunity to say “No!” on April 15th.
On the other hand, some liked the fact that this form of resistance was an ongoing, every-day, lifestyle change.
One said that the sort of constant attention it requires was a way of praying for and receiving the “daily bread of insight” that nourishes her practice.
One conferee worried that this form of resistance tended to be too solitary, and that it didn’t lend itself immediately to the sort of collective action necessary to push for change.
She recommended that we integrate consciousness-raising sessions about community and about attitudes toward money into our practice.
We also discussed a lot of practical challenges: what sorts of tax credits and deductions are available and how to apply for them; how to reduce big-ticket expenses like rent and transportation; how to afford health insurance, or how to best live without it; how to live on a low income while at the same time paying down student loan (or other) debt; whether it makes sense to resist the income tax with this method and the payroll tax by refusing to pay; whether it is hypocritical to accept government services or assistance while trying to avoid supporting the government, or whether it would be a “foolish consistency” to try to completely turn your back on government benefits; what to do when the law starts to require you to take minimum pension distributions.
Looking over the day’s schedule
After this session, the meeting split again, into smaller groups, deliberately divided up so that people from any particular region were scattered among the various groups.
Then each group brainstormed on the topic of how to strengthen the war tax resistance movement, and how to do better outreach particularly among specific groups like “youth, people of color, anarchists & political radicals, women, environmentalists, libertarians, faith communities, LGBTQ, working class / underpaid, and folks with disabilities” — many of which have been underserved by our outreach thus far.
Following this brainstorming, we met again, this time grouped by region, to share some of the results of the brainstorming.
Some of what stood out to me from this discussion:
We might all benefit from some skills training in basic icebreaking and pressing the flesh.
The normal bell-curve of how comfortable people are reaching out to strangers is not ideally-tuned for outreach, and it is adjustable by some training.
One person made a big push for community television as a possible outlet for getting the word out.
I was skeptical (who watches community television?) but by producing such shows you can also become better acquainted with video production in general, which can have benefits beyond community television.
We might get more out of our actions if we also capture them on video.
Our movement has an image problem.
We’re typecast as “aging hippies” and this interferes with our ability to bring in people from different demographics.
Some of the things we do to create a comfortable space for ourselves at meetings like this (the way we run meetings, the songs we sing, the food and drink we prepare, the extracurricular activities we offer) do not necessarily feel welcoming to people who don’t already fit the stereotype or who don’t want to be identified with it.
One way of making our meetings more inviting to people outside of the usual suspects is to spend some time at meetings of activist groups of a different flavor.
One Boston-area group, recognizing that it had gotten into a pale-granola rut, sent emissaries to more diverse activist groups in the area and reformulated their meetings and other activities to better fit with the scheduling, amenities, location, and other expectations of a larger variety of people.
One person mentioned the challenge presented by the fact that April 15th is no longer such a climactic public event.
With more people filing electronically rather than taking that last-minute trip to the post office, Tax Day rallies are less effective.
Maybe we should try to compose some sort of viral email to circulate in early April to take the place of our post office banner waving?
Another attendee expressed that she felt that poor people were more and more connecting the lack of opportunities in their communities with the enormous military budget and imperial priorities, and thought that we could do fruitful outreach that way.
Other groups that people thought might be ripe for our message were Palestinian rights activists (who are already very conscious of the connection between U.S. tax dollars and the repression of Palestinians), and people in the “Time Bank” and other alternative currency movements.
After this we again split up into sessions, one with a South-East regional focus, another to plan next year’s New England gathering, and one (that I joined) to do Q&A for new resisters.
It was a short Q&A session — not our usual workshop — but we had an experienced resister there representing each of the three major divisions of resistance: below-the-tax-line resistance, filing but not paying, and not filing.
Questions were asked and answered, concerns addressed, scenarios teased out.
All in all a very well-run and well-hosted meeting, with most of the credit going to the New England gathering.
is our NWTRCC business meeting at which we will consider proposals, adopt a budget and objectives for the coming year, pick a spot for the next gathering, and take care of other such business.
Then we’ll have a counselor’s training session with some help from our legal advisor.
But more on that tomorrow…
Ed Agro started things off by bemoaning the current lack of “political salience” of war tax resistance, and wondering “what it might take to turn (or re-turn?) wtr into something resembling a social movement… What do we mean by a ‘movement’ and how does it differ from the wtr community that now exists?”
Larry Rosenwald suggests that in order to become a real movement, we need to reach agreement on a set of principles and guidelines, to resolve “the relation between wtr as civil disobedience, committed publicly, and wtr as a mode of life in which one simply doesn’t owe the government any money,” to “seek to exert influence, even power… to win, that is,” and to give a collective answer to the question: “What changes in governmental behavior would it take [for] us to stop doing war tax resistance?”
Dana Visalli is skeptical of the value of “movements,” saying that “we are confronting an issue of consciousness… it seems to me to be an issue of waking up, and only individuals can do that.”
I suggest a couple of possible paths to movementhood: 1) a “revival” of enthusiasm in the anti-war movement like the “come-outer” abolitionist movement in American protestantism, 2) a populist tax resistance campaign from outside the anti-war movement that leads to a sympathetic reaction by anti-war activists. I suggest we more aggressively confront “complacency and feel-goodism in the peace movement.” I also am skeptical of Larry’s call for us to come to agreement on the details of our methods and goals: “I doubt we could come up with a fixed answer… even in the small circle of a NWTRCC gathering that would satisfy everyone, and an attempt to do so might divide us rather than strengthen us.”
Larry responds, seconding my call for confronting a complacent peace movement, suggesting that the emergence of a populist, TEA-party-like tax-resistance movement is unlikely, and addressing my skepticism about his call for tighter definition of the tactics and goals of war tax resistance. He identifies three tendencies among resisters: 1) people who have embraced radical simplicity to avoid paying taxes but without engaging in confrontational civil disobedience (“it’s not, in Thoreau’s sense of the word, ‘friction’”), 2) people who refuse to pay taxes due and then do whatever they can to prevent the government from seizing the money (“For them, holding on [to] the money is a victory, being found and levied is a defeat”), and 3) people who refuse to pay taxes due and who see being found and levied as “like being arrested for civil disobedience” and a vital part of the action (“when the penalty is exacted, we can throw a party, tell our friends, write our bank administrators or our employers or colleagues, make it even more public than it was before”). He also says that having explicit goals or demands is perhaps crucial for war tax resistance to become a movement: “When the Montgomery bus boycott began, among the first thing the organizers did was to stipulate what changes would cause them to stop boycotting.”
Ed Agro writes about doing outreach to encourage war tax resistance from a non-pacifist perspective — “an audience for WTR that’s been given short shrift, perhaps unconsciously, by activists moved by personal conviction so strong that it leads to a too-quick devaluing of other, different convictions” — and says that the experience of his local WTR group shows the strength of ideological diversity.
Larry Rosenwald then asks: “if one isn’t what Ed calls ‘a radical pacifist’ (I myself am), what justifies doing war tax resistance? And if one is of two minds, supports some military actions, opposes others, what results does that have in how one practices wtr?”
I try to answer Larry’s question: “[I believe] that whether or not a person should use violence in some situation is something that that person needs to carefully decide on a case-by-case basis and not by applying a pre-made doctrine. Paying taxes, though, means that you’re not making considered decisions about your participation in war and peace, violence and nonviolence, and so forth — instead, you’re leaving those decisions up to politicians. These politicians are, almost by definition, morally repulsive creatures. They cannot be trusted with such decisions, and to allow them to make these decisions for you is morally reckless.” Then I add this challenge: “I’d turn the question around and ask the ‘radical pacifists’ how they can justify taxation of any sort (many do, to my surprise). If you wouldn’t support violence even to stop a Hitler, how can you justify using violence to collect money for any of the far less crucial things government does?”
A new edition of More Than a Paycheck,
NWTRCC’s newsletter, is now on-line, and features the following:
A war tax resistance manifesto by Larry Rosenwald, and responses from Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, Karl Meyer, and Bill Glassmire.
(I’ll have more on this in a future Picket Line entry… stay tuned.)
Buyer Beware, a poem on military spending by Marge Piercy
The IRS has gotten in the habit of sending out “frivolous filing” notices to anyone who writes them a letter explaining their reasons for tax resistance (or even in response to letters from non-resisters who are just paying under protest). These notices are accompanied by a $5,000 fine — a fine that, by law, must be paid before it can be appealed. The IRS is only authorized to assess such fines in response to a tax filing that is incomplete, inaccurate, and that involves some frivolous legal stance, so it is pretty clearly overstepping its bounds here: but because a resister must pay the fine in order to appeal it, and most war tax resisters are unwilling to do so, this puts them in a bind. One resister, Steve Leeds, got such a frivolous filing notice and then, instead of paying the fine and formally appealing it, he complained to his congressional representatives about the IRS’s abuse of the law. One of his representatives then contacted the IRS, which then caved — sending Leeds an apology.
If the IRS attaches a levy to your salary, it will leave you some portion of your salary to live on while it sucks away the rest. How does it determine how much to take? Is it based on your base salary, or on what’s left over in your check after deductions for 401(k) contributions, insurance premiums, commuter checks, or what have you? Turns out the answer is the latter, but only if those deductions were already in effect at the time the levy was received by the employer.
A book review of The Green Zone by Clare Hanrahan — this book looks at the environmental impact of the U.S. military, which is exempt from laws and treaties designed to protect the environment, and, according to the author, is “the largest single polluter of any single agency or organization in the world.”
War tax resistance ideas and actions, featuring a penny poll in Oregon, a protest in Washington D.C., and the upcoming New England gathering of war tax resisters.
NWTRCC News — a behind the scenes look into operations at NWTRCC headquarters.
I pointed out some discussion that was taking place on the wtr-s email discussion group about the possibility of turning the loose affiliation of American war tax resisters into something more like a war tax resistance movement.
To summarize: Larry is trying to describe a war tax resistance movement that would be able to exert political power and act as a “counter-friction” (in Thoreau’s sense of the word) against the war machine.
He thinks in order to do this, resisters need to narrow down the large variety of techniques they use to a subset that has the following characteristics:
It is illegal (that is, actual civil disobedience)
It is public (not just trying to avoid taxes and stay under the radar)
It is accompanied by a common set of clear and specific demands for change on the part of government
He is critical of the sort of war tax resistance that is primarily conscientious objection rather than protest.
If a resister is satisfied merely to wash his or her hands of militarism by personally not paying for it, without making his or her resistance confrontational, Larry thinks, the resister is missing an opportunity to make the resistance make a difference and to make a noble individual stand stronger by making it part of an effective collective movement.
That at least is my understanding of what he means.
I have some doubt about whether such a movement would be practical to organize or would be politically effective at this stage of the game.
I also think that the variety of methods of war tax resistance is one of the strengths of the movement, such as it is, today — it gives people more options and is respectful of people with a variety of lifestyles, risk tolerances, and goals.
I worry that trying to narrow down these options to a subset of “real” war tax resistance varieties might weaken the movement rather than strengthen it, by making it seem less possible or attractive to some potential resisters.
(For some other perspectives on the proposal, see the responses by Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, Karl Meyer, and Bill Glassmire in the latest issue of More Than a Paycheck.)
For us, tax resistance is, among other things, a struggle.
And as we struggle against militarism, this struggle must be nonviolent.
It contains within itself a model of the society that we are aiming for.
Here we express some of the characteristics of our struggle:
Collective
Because we want to transcend the very noble and respectable personal and
individual choices in order to constitute a group of disobedient activists.
Public
Because in the face of institutions we must make very clear our
intentions for what we are putting into practice.
And in the face of public opinion we must act in the streets, write in the press, demonstrate, bicycle from Vitori to Nanclares, etc.…
Active
In this way, through tax resistance, we also reclaim the right of all
people to participate in democratic life in a profound and responsible way, without losing track of the serious problems that affect humanity, in the neighborhood around us [“el barrio de al lado,” probably an idiom I’m unfamiliar with —♇], in social services.
Because in tax resistance we are required to go beyond opinion, that we stop to take a stand against military spending, the manufacture and trade in armaments, against the military.
A topic so grave cannot be left in the hands of the professional chatterboxes that join the legislature.
And by means of tax resistance, together we contribute to the citizenry a small seed for growing a deep democracy, one that is participatory and as direct as it is possible for us to imagine.
Non-violent
We struggle against an unjust order of militarist violence, but always
we do so without using violence, preferring the strength of our reason.
We strike out against the state of affairs, while valuing people.
Constructive
Our objective is to transform state policy, the use made of public
funds, in order to employ them effectively in the regulation of social conflicts.
If we do not advance toward this goal, we do not find our work useful.
We intend to convert the military power into the popular power of civil society.
Illegal
Tax resistance is a form of struggle that consists of disobedience to an
unjust law that promotes violence as a way of resolving conflicts.
There are many historical examples of disobedience to unjust laws.
Must we ask for a law that would legalize the right to conscientious tax resistance?
Here there are not many who ask for this.
If such a law were made, military spending would not go away, but would be further legalized.
The total revenue from the state would not diminish military spending.
They will not make the law that we want.
So meanwhile we will publicize the justification for disobeying unjust laws.
Educational
The tax resistance campaign will be more effective if the relationship
between the ends and the means used are consistent; if we perform all actions such that we clearly demonstrate what we hope will follow and explain our reasoning; if we will open real and possible paths to social transformation even for people who are less committed.
We will continually reflect on what we do and on alternatives we propose.
My investigation of the “one-man revolution” a while back has been picking up some attention here and there on the net.
Unfortunately, these days a lot of this buzz is coming from various social media discussion fora that don’t give me a working referrer link I can use to eavesdrop on how the conversation is going.
But the article also started some back-and-forth at the wtr-s email list.
In the conclusion to my Picket Line post, I’d regretted that there wasn’t much evidence of either Thoreau or Hennacy having to defend their enthusiastic case for the “one-man revolution” against an incisive critic.
The wtr-s discussion fills in some of this gap.
Larry Rosenwald, who has been a strong advocate for more-strongly coordinated and organized action in the American war tax resistance community, put in his two cents, making a couple of good points:
There are some good examples of real, positive change taking place through organized, collective effort, where it is hard to imagine a one-man revolution strategy having similar effects — for example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Montgomery Improvement Association that kept it going; or the abolitionist movement.
The assertion that “political revolutions that are not also accompanied by individual revolutions don’t make enduring radical change — they just change the faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving the corrupt structure intact,” is too strong.
Sometimes even an ordinary political revolution promises to be worth the trouble, and it would be a mistake to wait for a perhaps more-perfect but also less likely “enduring radical change.”
Larry also echoed Pam Allee’s point that the one-man revolution and the organized political revolution don’t have to be antagonists: “a ‘both-and’ approach to solutions is preferable to an ‘either-or.’ ”
I think there’s a lot of truth in these points.
Thoreau, with his one-man revolution, turned out to be very influential, and I think it cannot be denied that through his essay on civil disobedience he has had an enormous effect on the world.
But I think Gandhi was being ridiculous when he credited Thoreau for ending slavery in America.
It is difficult to know how much credit to give to one-man revolutionaries.
The nature of how they do business rarely leads to dramatic large-scale victories of the handshakes-and-peace-treaties sort.
Their influence is more subtle and less acute.
It is hard to imagine the success of abolitionism in the British Empire without the well-organized, persistent, patient, flexible abolitionist movement there.
But on the other hand, it is hard to imagine the success of abolitionism in the American Quaker church without one-man revolutionaries like Benjamin Lay standing barefoot in the snow outside of the meeting house to dramatize the suffering of slaves still held by Quakers.
But maybe this says more about my imagination than about the relative strengths of the tactics.
Some other criticisms of the one-man revolution that occurred to me:
If being organized and coordinated is such a tactical drawback, how come the people who are organized and coordinated to do wickedness seem to be so successful?
(My guess is that Hennacy/Thoreau would respond that it’s difficult to do good as an organized collective, but not so difficult to do evil that way.
Doing good means hitting the bullseye; doing evil you can just land the arrow anywhere.
If you’re aiming a bow by committee, you’re unlikely to hit your target, but if you’re aiming for evil, you might not care so much in what direction you miss or how much.)
The one-man revolution can degenerate into a fakir-ish narcissism, concentrating on ever-finer gradations of self-perfection that have diminishing practical returns.
I’ve covered a few cases here at The Picket Line of people who have gone on ethical perfectionism binges that seem to have ended up doing more harm than good — for instance the self-immolation of Jeff Knaebel or the catastrophic renunciation of the Boekes.
And I’m sure this doesn’t exhaust the list.
My sympathies lie more with the one-man revolutionary camp, but I’m not a very good organizer, so I wonder if I am being biased by my own frustrations in trying to use organizing and coordinated action, and not by actual inherent flaws in the tactic.
NWTRCC has posted some documents from ’s New England war tax resistance regional gathering, including:
It is all well and good to consider the impressive variety of tactics that historical tax resistance movements have used to supplement their campaigns, but how do you go about choosing the right set of tactics that will do the most good for your campaign in the here-and-now?
This has lately been a frequent topic of discussion in American war tax resistance circles.
Some American war tax resisters have been pushing to convert us from being a coalition of people with a common interest in war tax resistance into an actual movement that has precise goals, particular tactics designed to meet the goals, metrics to measure success, and so forth.
(If you’d like to review some of the back-and-forth on this topic, take a look for example at The Picket Line entries for , , and , Larry Rosenwald’s War Tax Resistance Manifesto, and some of the wtr-s email list threads starting in .)
So far, these efforts have floundered in their attempts to move from this sensible-sounding idea towards an implementation that actually defines which goals and which tactics and which criteria we’re all supposed to unite behind.
Why might this be so?
Why has it proven difficult for a group of people with such a specific and unusual preoccupation as war tax resistance to make headway towards agreeing on something seemingly so basic as which goals they are pursuing?
There are several varieties of war tax resister
It turns out that there are distinct varieties of war tax resisters, and that while unsurprisingly they have a shared interest in the nitty-gritty of tax resistance and a shared dislike for militarism, when it comes to motives, goals, and tactics these varieties are in important ways very different.
There are four varieties of tax resister:
conscientious objection
A tax resister who is motivated by conscientious objection wants his or
her conscience to be free of the stain of complicity with what the government does with the tax money.
Such a resister doesn’t necessarily care if the government knows about his or her resistance, and doesn’t necessarily feel like he or she needs to be part of a movement — resisting taxes is the right thing to do, resisters like this feel, and they’d do it even if they were alone.
civil disobedience
A tax resister who is using tax resistance as a form of civil-disobedient
protest is trying to amplify the effect of his or her protest by breaking the law, publicly, and inviting the legal consequences.
It is a way of communicating the strength of the resister’s objections, and his or her willingness to sacrifice for these beliefs.
If the government responds by seizing the tax money, that doesn’t necessarily represent a defeat, since the tax resistance is more about taking a principled oppositional stand than about the actual money involved.
nonviolent conflict
A resister who hopes to use tax resistance to reduce the resources
available to the government and thereby force it to change its behavior (or perhaps even to replace it or force it to relinquish control), is using tax resistance as a form of nonviolent conflict.
Such a resister needs lots of comrades to join in the struggle, and prefers tactics that cost the government the most.
legal test-case
Some tax resisters resist because they conclude that the tax they are
resisting was enacted illegally, or is imposed by an institution without the proper authority to do so, or that it is being illegally applied to them.
They resist in anticipation of such a legal theory being found to be correct, and for the tax to be legally abolished.
In the war tax resistance movement you find this in resisters who argue that the Nuremberg Principles say taxpayers are legally obligated to avoid paying for aggressive war and war crimes, or that the option of conscientious objection to military taxation is a human right.
Many other tax resistance movements do not have the same variety
These varieties are not unique to war tax resistance.
They are found in all of the tax resistance campaigns I have studied.
But most of those campaigns have been dominated by a single variety, and so it has been much easier — almost second-nature — for them to decide on their goals.
For example, Quaker war tax resisters in the early years of the United States were almost exclusively motivated by conscientious objection.
Their goal was to have a conscience clean of involvement in shedding the blood of others, and they developed techniques that satisfied this goal.
Tax resisters in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain wanted to demonstrate the self-serving hypocrisy of a male-exclusive government that treated women as people when it came time to tax them, but as non-people when it came time to ask for the consent of the governed.
These resisters courted arrest and property seizure and used such events as opportunities for protest.
They are classic civil-disobedient protesters, and their tactics reflect this.
Tax resisters in the movement pressing for the Reform Act of wanted to “stop the supplies” — that is, withhold enough money from the government that it would be crippled and would be forced to grant the movement’s demands.
This is why they augmented their tax strike with a run on the Bank of England.
They were using tax resistance as part of a campaign of nonviolent conflict meant to force political change.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago refused to pay while they pursued a legal challenge to property assessments that had left many wealthy and well-connected property owners exempt.
(They won their case, which found the assessments — and therefore the taxes based on them — to be invalid.)
The challenge for American war tax resisters is that their “movement” is not any one of these things, but is an unstable amalgam of elements of all four.
Some resisters are conscientious objectors, some are civil disobedients, some are nonviolent resistants, some hope to legalize war tax refusal, and some straddle two or more of these varieties.
Because of this, there is little agreement to be had once you get past the tactic of tax resistance itself.
This could change.
If the number of war tax resisters were to grow much larger for some reason — for instance because of an unpopular war, a religious revival that emphasizes pacifism, or a revolt against government spending that highlights Pentagon profligacy — perhaps the swelling of the movement would make one variety or another overwhelmingly predominate, and such a movement could more easily unite behind particular goals and tactics.
Another possibility is that a subset of current American war tax resisters who are united by all being of one variety decides to unite on their own behind a particular campaign with goals and tactics that are appropriate to them.
If they have success with their approach, they may find that some of the resisters who currently find homes in the other varieties will come to find that approach more to their liking, or will find ways to make it compatible with their own.
These varieties are not entirely distinct
You may notice that the varieties I listed are not entirely distinct.
For example, some of the women in the Women’s Tax Resistance League pursued legal challenges that made them seem very much like people in the legal test-case category.
Some of the property tax resisters in Chicago were also motivated by a civil-disobedient protest against corrupt and big-spending government.
It is possible for a war tax resister to belong to two, three, maybe even all four categories simultaneously.
And many of us in the war tax resistance movement are motivated by more than one of these categories of resistance, or may find ourselves migrating from variety to variety over time as our motivations change.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.
You cannot just haphazardly mix-and-match motives, goals, and tactics and expect to come up with something that makes sense (unfortunately, I sometimes see war tax resisters try).
Consider these examples:
“I resist taxes because I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government. I hope to convince many people to take this stand, and so I am very public about it. I am willing to risk government retribution by doing things that make my resistance more disruptive to the state. I hope that if enough people join me, we will rise up to reorganize society in a less violent way.”
“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way, so I withhold €84 from my income tax bill and give it instead directly to the Ministry of Education. If enough of us do this, maybe one day the schools will have all the money they need, and the army will have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy another tank.”
In the first example, the resister talks about his or her motives (“I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government”) sounding like someone motivated by conscientious objection, but chooses tactics (“I am very public… I am willing to risk government retribution by [being] more disruptive to the state”) that sound like they spring from civil disobedience as protest, and has a goal (“we will rise up to reorganize society”) that involves ambitions of using tax resistance as nonviolent force to cause governmental change.
And that’s fine. None of this is contradictory or incompatible.
You can be motivated by conscientious objection and decide to use tactics of civil disobedience to pursue a campaign of nonviolent resistance.
But the second example is more problematic.
The resister again sounds like he or she is motivated by conscientious objection (“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way”) but the tactic chosen, to withhold and redirect a symbolic portion from the tax bill, is incompatible with the motive.
Someone whose conscience will not allow them to contribute to killing in any way, if that person considers their taxes such a contribution, will be just as unwilling to pay the second €84 as the first €84, and of course each € after that.
Furthermore, this resister’s goal — to make the military have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy a tank — is also not compatible with that symbolic tactic.
So a resister like this is incoherent and confused, and is therefore less effective and less persuasive.
Different varieties of resister evaluate tactics differently
Evan Reeves with his 5,574 checks
Remember Evan Reeves?
He’s an American war tax resister who decided to protest the connection between taxes and war by paying his taxes, but in a unique way: he wrote 5,574 checks, each one for ⅟5,574th of his tax bill (about 96¢), and each one bearing the name of a different war victim in the “memo” field.
This was an innovative, creative, interesting tactic — but if you try to imagine how it appears from the vantage point of war tax resisters in each of the varieties I described, you’ll get some idea of how difficult it can be to pick a tactic that pleases everybody.
Here is one way I have imagined four resisters evaluating Reeves’s tactic:
“That wouldn’t work for me. If I pay my taxes, in any form, I help to pay for war. If I did this, at the same time I was expressing sympathy for 5,574 war victims, I’d be paying for their victimization.”
“That’s a great way of making the connection between taxes and the victims of war, and it’s very media-savvy as well. Not only that, but you may get some people at the tax office to scratch their heads and put two and two together. The only thing that would be better is if it were illegal, so that it put you in clear opposition to the government.”
“How much does it cost the government to process a check? If it’s more than 96¢ you may have struck upon a way for people to withhold resources from the government without risking legal sanction. It’s worth investigating further.”
“I don’t get it. How does this get us any closer to legalizing conscientious objection to military taxation? The whole point is that you shouldn’t have to pay those taxes in the first place.”
There’s also a fundamental ideological divide at work
Another thing that can make it difficult for American war tax resisters to agree on tactics and goals is that there is a fundamental disagreement among these resisters about whether the U.S. government is salvageable.
Many American war tax resisters believe that their government is, by and large, a force for good that ought to be preserved and strengthened, and that its militarism is a flaw that for the time being and in some contexts necessarily puts conscientious people in opposition to it.
Our goal, such resisters believe, is to reform the government by removing this flaw so that it can do the good work it ought to be doing without tangling us in its bloody errors.
Many other American war tax resisters believe that their government is, by and large, a force for evil — an irredeemable tool of militarism whose primary function is violence.
They believe that conscientious people like themselves ought to be wholly in opposition to it, should withdraw allegiance from it, and hope to replace it with something else entirely.
I see this divide come into play frequently among American war tax resisters.
It makes a big difference when evaluating tactics because resisters in one camp will ask “but how does this weaken the government?” while resisters in the other camp will ask “but how can we do this without weakening the government (or seeming to ally ourselves with enemies of the government)?” and immediately they’re at loggerheads.
There are war tax resisters who can say, almost in the same breath, that people ought to refuse to pay their taxes because so much of the federal budget is for war, and that corporations ought to pay more taxes because they have a responsibility to help pay for government programs. At first this didn’t make any sense to me at all, but then I came to realize that if you believe that government is essentially good, though terribly flawed, and if you are a tax resister as a mode of civil-disobedient protest, it’s not contradictory to want to resist taxes yourself (to amplify your protest) while hoping that corporations pay more taxes (so the on-the-whole benevolent government can accomplish more) — misguided, perhaps, but not contradictory.
In conclusion…
Anyway, I bring all this up in part because I think it helps to explain why some of the arguments that occupy the modern American war tax resistance movement never seem to go anywhere, but also in part because I want to prepare people who read about my catalog of tax resistance tactics.
It is very unlikely that all of the tactics on the list will appeal to you.
Some of the tactics will seem to you to be bizarre, counterproductive, or irrelevant to the sort of campaign you are hoping for.
This is because tax resistance is a tactic that belongs to movements of many sorts, with many motivations, and many goals.
Which tactics will best harmonize with tax resistance will depend on the variety of tax resistance campaign they are part of.
I tried to get a little buzz going in American war tax resistance circles by highlighting my articles on
Larry Rosenwald wondered whether it was worthwhile to try to pick tactics that appeal to all factions of the modern American war tax resistance movement.
Might it not be better, he suggests, to select the most powerful tactics, even if they’re ones that not all resisters will be interested in signing on to?
He may be right about that, but the example he chose to illustrate it — “the peace tax legislation activism that’s the heart of many European war tax resistance initiatives, and the American campaign for a peace tax fund” — strikes me as the least powerful and among the most divisive of the possible tactics we could be considering.
This just goes to show how difficult it may be to get the movement, such as it is, to rally around a particular set of effective tactics.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
American Quaker war tax resistance reemerged in the Friends Journal in , with some real live resisters telling their stories and sharing the processes by which they had developed their methods of resistance.
The issue had several mentions of war tax resistance.
Editor Vinton Deming’s lead editorial concerned his annual confrontation of the “agonizing question” of what to do at tax-filing time.
Excerpt:
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
For many years I sought ways to protest.
I started by submitting a letter with my 1040 objecting to the large sums going to the Pentagon and the neglect of other needed programs. No one responded.
At other times I requested a refund so I might send a sum to a human service program not being adequately funded.
Nice idea, I thought, but IRS didn’t think so.
One year they told me the request was “frivolous,” and they tried to penalize me for asking.
My lawyer got them to drop the matter.
Then about 15 years ago I stopped filing a tax return altogether, choosing instead to write a letter to the president explaining why I was not willing as a Friend to pay for things like B-1 bombers, cruise missiles, or Star Wars.
The latter approach clearly got the attention of IRS officials.
Suddenly I was “playing in the big leagues.”
The government took me to court on two occasions and threatened to do the same to my present employer unless my back taxes, interest, and penalties were paid at once [see ♇ ].
Reluctantly, and after much soul searching, the Journal agreed to pay.
I released them to do so, being convinced we had resisted as long as we could and had explored all legal means.
Friends rallied to support us with financial gifts to help pay the large debt.
In I made my last monthly payment to the Journal.
I continue to struggle with IRS on this matter, which dates back to my tax resistance of .
The government disagreed with our math for what we believed was actually owed in back taxes.
My lawyer is maneuvering to try to prevent IRS from seizing my Individual Retirement Account, an argument to be decided by a judge later this year.
In more recent tax years I have filed and paid, trying to claim as many exemptions as possible and to limit the government’s take.
I have lobbied for the Peace Tax Fund Bill and supported others who are resisting.
David Shen also wrote of his war tax resistance in that issue.
Excerpts:
For 12 years, I have withheld a portion of my income tax from IRS.
I refuse to give money to the military to kill people.
There is too much need around us.
For the last three years, I have given this portion to My Brothers’ House, a homeless shelter my Quaker meeting supports in the inner city of Philadelphia.
Each year at tax time, I sigh deeply.
I know IRS may punish me.
And I know I stand on the side of life.
For these 12 years, IRS and I have been corresponding politely.
They send me notices; I write back.
Since I received notices of intent to levy and since they have not levied, I assume I have been lost in their millions of files.
I was surprised, then, when my college employer received the levy on my salary.
My first talks with IRS, lawyers, and F/friends left me feeling depressed and helpless.
IRS would get what they thought was theirs.
Then God intervened.
Inadvertently, my lawyer angered me.
In my anger, I took a position of reducing my wages to a level IRS could not levy.
(By law IRS must leave me a wage to live on.)
I had not considered it before, since doing so would cost me $2,200 — more than the levy’s $1,200.
I think Shen is being too modest here in giving God the credit for a bold decision that came direct from Shen.
I approached the college dean, my superior.
“Reduce my wages,” I said, “so IRS cannot satisfy its levy.”
But the dean shocked me.
Her superior, the vice president, would not allow me to reduce my wages.
I had to quit or pay the levy.
That sounds very familiar.
When I first started resisting, I went in to the human resources department of my employer to ask if reducing my salary below the tax line was an option.
They told me it was out of the question.
My response was to resign and become an independent contractor.
Shen took a different tack:
After a conversation with one of my students, I decided to continue teaching and pay the levy.
I would, however, also continue learning about love and Truth.
Could I reach administrators, I wondered, if I used Gandhi’s principle of selfsuffering?
I would direct suffering to me, and not to the college, by teaching at reduced income rather than quitting and leaving the college with 80 angry students.
I met with the administrator who wrote my paycheck, the department chair, the dean again, and then the vice-president.
Three respected my position (the vicepresident didn’t reveal his stand).
The payroll administrator blurted out, “Isn’t there a legal way you can do this (pay income tax without paying the military)?”
When I met with the president of the college, six weeks had passed and the levy was almost fully paid.
He was busy.
He startled me by agreeing with my right to take my position, and he would seek how I could do so at the college.
Two weeks later, he informed me he could not find a legal way to accommodate me.
I, though, was thrilled.
In our two conversations, the president and I connected.
We talked about my tax situation for 20 minutes and unexpectedly talked about his and my family for 90 minutes.
He was late for one of his appointments.
As I waved goodbye, he asked, “Stop in for coffee again, will you?”
What did I learn?
I am poorer by $1,200, but I am richer in intangible ways.
I feel in the flow of God’s will for me and feel connected to people — F/friends who support me and opponents who respect me.
I am invigorated and happy
It must be comforting to feel that “God’s will” is responsible for all the difficult and fuzzy decisions you make.
Whether you zig or you zag, whether things turn out well or ill, God’s in charge and if you’re willing to give Him all the credit, He’ll be glad to take all the blame.
The same issue published part of an interview that Susan Van Haitsma conducted with Paula Rogge .
Excerpts:
What were the motivating factors in your decision to become a tax
resister?
Deciding to refuse to pay taxes for war was a slow, gradual process for
me… As I grew older and attended Illinois Yearly Meeting, I heard more about tax resistance.
I met two men who had served time in prison for refusing to pay war taxes or resisting cooperation with the Internal Revenue Service.
I saw them as very committed people with a lot of integrity, and I could see that the yearly meeting supported them.
So, at some level I felt that tax resistance was the logical extension of my pacifist views, and I knew there was a community of support for tax resistance among the Friends and the wider peace community as well.…
How did you go about your tax resistance?
That first year, I think I owed one dollar.
I refused to pay the dollar
and sent a letter to the IRS explaining my position.
The next year, I increased the number of withholding allowances on my W-4 form so that I owed the IRS at the end of the year instead of vice-versa.
I began by refusing to pay 40–50 percent of my federal tax money because at the time, that was the approximate percentage being used to fund current and past wars.
Then, over time, I realized that of the 50–60 percent I was paying, 40–50 percent was still being used for military purposes, so I stopped paying the whole kit and caboodle.
I stopped paying all taxes because I had no control whatsoever over how the money was being spent.
In the last several years I’ve also stopped paying social security taxes because the government borrows from those funds to help cover the deficit, indirectly financing the defense system.
So, it’s been a gradual process of taking my tax resistance further and further.
I’ve always filed, and the IRS and I have always agreed about how much I’ve owed (now over $60,000 including penalties and interest).
At this point, I don’t feel led to stop filing.
For myself, I feel better being open about it, but I realize many tax resisters don’t file, and I respect their reasons for going that route.
Have you redirected your tax money?
The first couple of years that I did tax resistance, I put the money
aside in a bank account, assuming it would be seized.
It wasn’t seized right away, however, and I’m afraid the money was spent without having been donated as it should have.
But I learned, and since then I’ve made sure the amount of money owed in taxes and social security is donated every year to charitable groups.
I’ve had a lot of fun giving this money away.
Sometimes when I have sent the contribution, I have included a note explaining that the donation represents refused war taxes, and I have received supportive notes in return.
It’s a very empowering feeling to know that my money is doing some good.
Have there been special ways in which you would say your life has been
affected positively by your practice of tax resistance?
When I finished my residency, I worked in a migrant clinic for two years
in the Rio Grande Valley in Harlingen, Texas: a very conservative community.
The second year I was there, I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper explaining that I was a war tax resister and why.
The newspaper editor phoned me to make sure I really wanted the letter printed!
I said yes, and they did print it.
I was afraid of the response I might get from the community, but I felt it was important to be public about my stance.
After the letter was printed, the other doctors in Harlingen actually became much friendlier and began to take a certain interest in me.
I don’t think any of them agreed with the tax resistance, but they seemed to respect my position.
Several nurses and a nuclear medicine technician I hadn’t known before introduced themselves and expressed their support of my war tax resistance.
I didn’t get any negative reactions.
In , I began a medical family practice in Austin, Texas, along with another doctor.
The first year into the practice, the IRS sent notice that my wages would be garnisheed.
I asked that my salary be lowered to $100 per week, as that is the amount exempt from levy.
In order to supplement this reduced income, I began to work moonlighting jobs in various agencies: the city Health Department, Planned Parenthood, and the State Commission for the Blind, for example.
I had to find new moonlighting jobs every two years or so because that was about the length of time it usually took the IRS to catch up and begin attaching wages again.
Something good happened as a result of this.
I’ve had to explain to all potential employers that at some point the IRS would begin to levy my wages and when that happened, I would no longer be able to work for them.
When I explained this to the Texas Commission for the Blind during my interview, for example, they were quite taken aback, and I thought I probably wouldn’t get the job.
But, a few weeks later, they did hire me!
The woman who hired me said she understood why I was doing tax resistance and that she agreed with my convictions.
I came to feel a real sense of support and community there.
In , the
IRS
seized your automobile.
Could you describe what happened?
Well, some time before the car was seized, an
IRS
agent, accompanied by a law officer, came to our clinic to pay me a visit.
I could tell they were nervous and even a bit hostile.
But as we sat and talked, and I explained why I simply could not pay for war, I could see them both soften a little.
Toward the end of the interview, the officer began asking questions about our practice and commented that it was unusual for us to be located in such a poor neighborhood.
As they were leaving, I complemented the officer on his cowboy boots — he had on some kind of exotic boots — and I think he was tickled pink that I had noticed them.
He told me where he had gotten them.
It was kind of a humorous exchange and I felt very good about that.
We had related as people.
I figured that since my wages had become uncollectible and I had no bank account, eventually my car would be seized.
But even so, the morning it happened, it came as a bit of a shock.
My IRS agent came to the bouse and, poor woman, she was just shivering in her shoes, she looked so nervous.
She placed a sticker on the car and then asked if she could use my phone to call the tow truck!
I decided that they were going to tow it one way or another, so I invited her in to use the phone.
I had a sick patient in the emergency room at the time, so I took a taxi to the hospital right away.
Having a patient to worry about took my mind off the car long enough to ease my worry about the situation.
Then friends came forward and loaned me their cars without my having to ask.
A month following the seizure, the car was auctioned.
About 20–30 Quakers and other friends came and protested the auction, asking potential buyers not to bid on the car.
At least one potential buyer was convinced to refrain from bidding, but a used car dealer did, in the end, buy the car.
A week following the auction, a doctor I had once worked with phoned and said that he wanted to buy the car back from the car dealer and donate it anonymously to our practice.
That was such a wonderful surprise.
I was very moved because I respected him very much as a doctor.
I talked the offer over with friends.
Though I didn’t want the money going, even indirectly, to the IRS, I did want this doctor to have an opportunity to support the whole cause of war tax resistance, and this was his way of contributing.
I decided to accept the car.
It came back with new tires, looking much cleaner than it had before it was seized!
A friend of the doctor had also done a tune-up on it — and it was great.
I think the best part of this story is that when I tell it, people chuckle.
You see, it’s such a good example of how limited the power of the IRS is in the face of creative resistance.
It’s also an example of how our needs are often met in unexpected ways when we take a stand for peace.
I think these three experiences in particular — the return of my car, receiving the job at the Commission for the Blind, and the reaction to the letter in Harlingen paper — were all occasions when I felt that speaking out for truth actually opened doors and tore down barriers between other people and me.
When I was willing to take a stand for what I felt was right, I discovered a community of support I hadn’t realized existed.
Perry Treadwell also wrote about his war tax resistance in that issue.
Excerpts:
Today I received another one of those white envelopes from the Internal Revenue Service — the ones that tell me I failed to pay $35 in or $106 in and now I owe a lot more in penalties and interest.
I file them away with the other ones from .
But this time their arrival reminded me of an anniversary of sorts.
It has been .
I refused to pay for people to kill other people.
I resigned my tenured university position [see ♇ ] and drastically simplified my lifestyle so the fruits of my labors would not be used for war.
I still get that little twist in the stomach when those IRS letters come.
Sometimes the IRS actually raids a bank account or Individual Retirement Account.
However, I know that Friends are there should I ever need their support in not cooperating with a government whose only answer to conflict is violence.
I have been able to simplify my life to a point where I am below the taxable level.
Friends’ support has helped.
The richness of my life is proportional to my friendships.
That is what I have learned in , and that is what I pass on to others.
The issue had an obituary notice for Jane Palmer which noted that she “chose to live in accordance with the Quaker peace testimony and purposefully limited her income to avoid paying taxes that supported war efforts,” and one for Mildred Teusler Ringwalt which mentioned “her refusal to pay the portion of her income taxes she believed supported such [war] efforts.”
One of the events at the Friends General Conference Gathering in — the “Henry J. Cadbury Event, sponsored by Friends Journal” — was “an original production in story and song about the war tax witness of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner from Colrain, Massachusetts.
The stage performance won a favorable review from those who crowded the auditorium (despite the heat and lack of air conditioning!).
A video of the show was made and will be available at a later date.”
At the Illinois Yearly Meeting in (according to a Journal article ), “Sebrina Tingley explained not just the nuts and bolts of war tax resistance but also the spiritual call to do so” and “Bill Ramsey (American Friends Service Committee) told of his personal experiences involving war tax resistance.”
The lead editorial of the issue was all about the Peace Tax Fund Bill and an effort to get 10,000 people to write letters to Congress supporting it.
“The Peace Tax Fund Bill,” according to one supporter’s letter, “when it becomes law, will give us our religious liberty.
We’ll be able to pay our taxes in good conscience since we’ll be allowed to pay for peaceful projects rather than for war.”
Two letters-to-the-editor in the issue reacted to that project: one, by Marge Schier, thanking the Journal for aiding the cause — “We’re even more sure now that we can do it!”
— and the other, by Elizabeth Campuzano, giving the gist of the letter she had sent: “I told them that I voluntarily live below the federal poverty limit in order to avoid paying income taxes for war.
I told them that if this bill passes, I will raise my income in order to pay for education, road and bridge repairs, anti-monopoly enforcement, etc.” She added: “I think this is one of the greatest things FJ has ever done!”
International news
“a Spanish war resistance sticker: peace (paz) and bread (pan), not bombs”
A report about the previous year’s Canadian Yearly Meeting in the issue mentioned that “[t]he ad hoc committee on war tax concerns has found a method which potentially will allow Canadian Yearly Meeting to redirect the military portion of employees’ income tax remittances to the federal government’s Debt Service and Reduction Fund.
This is not an entirely satisfactory solution, but perhaps a first step.”
’s Canadian Yearly Meeting (according to a story in the issue) “reached joyful unity in a decision as an employer to stop remitting to Revenue Canada the military portion of taxes for those employees who request it.”
This decision follows several years of study, prayerful consideration, and the attempt during for use of legal means of expressing our conscientious objection to paying for the military.
The remittance will instead be paid into Conscience Canada, with consideration given to establishing in the future a specific trust fund.
The Fifth International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns was held in Spain in and was covered in the Journal in a report by Steve Gulick.
Excerpt:
About 70 activists from all over Europe and a number of other parts of the world gathered in Hondarribia, Spain, , to charge our batteries, to compare conditions in our various countries, to get to know each other, and to carry on business.
It was inspiring to meet, get to know, and work with war tax resisters and peace campaigners from all over Europe and from the United States, Canada, Peru, Iraq, and Palestine.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee raised money to make it possible for the Palestinian, Elias Rishmawi from Beit Sahour, West Bank, to attend.
The Iraqi and the Peruvian attenders are currently living in Europe.
One problem with the gathering — similar to the War Resisters International gathering that I attended in — was the difficulty of getting a diverse attendance.
Folks from India were unable to attend, for example, in part because of the distance.
I attended as a delegate from the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Other attenders from the United States were David Bassett and Marian Franz (National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund), Susan Quinlan and Larry Rosenwald (National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee), Cynthia Johnson (Women Strike for Peace), and Gerri Michalska (Pax Christi) — which gave some of us from the U.S. movement the opportunity to get to know each other.
The conference issued a number of public documents — the most important being the bylaw of a new non-governmental organization which will have consultative powers with both the UN and the European parliament: Conscience and Peace Tax International.
The role/goal of the organization will be to espouse the cause of those who take stands of conscience in relation to military expenditures — and also military service and issues of conscience and civil and human rights more generally.
A report back from the Germany Yearly Meeting mentioned war tax resistance matter-of-factly:
In our commitments to projects such as “alternatives to violence,” civilian peace service, war tax refusal, and in our decision to give financial support to the setting up of a Quaker Center in Moscow, Russia, we express that we not only ask ourselves “how do we see God?” but also “how do we do God?”…
Here are some items of note that have come to my attention in recent weeks:
I wondered if this might happen: One of the weirder aspects of Obamacare is that the individual health insurance mandate is to be enforced by adding a penalty to the income tax of any individual who fails to get health insurance — but for public relations reasons the IRS is forbidden to use its usual methods of liens, levies, seizures, and the like to chase down this penalty if the taxpayer refuses to pay it.
So now, Obamacare foes are starting to whisper about this cheap-and-easy civil disobedience opportunity.
Though “whisper” isn’t really the right word when you’re talking about Rush Limbaugh.
Are Cryptocurrencies [like Bitcoin] “Super” Tax Havens? asks Omri Y. Marian of the University of Florida.
Marian concludes: “Significantly, cryptocurrencies possess all the traditional characteristics that tax havens do; Earnings are not subject to taxation, and taxpayers’ anonymity is maintained.… Thus, cryptocurrencies have the potential of defeating the recent successes of governments in battling offshore tax evasion.… while governments have paid some attention to this issue, they have so far failed to identify the acuteness of the potential problem.”
Among the things the so-called government “shutdown” brought us was a halt in almost all IRS levies and liens for the duration.
The agency had plenty on its plate before the shutdown, and now it’s already behind in regearing for tax season.
France enacted a populist measure to throw a 75% marginal tax on incomes above €1 million.
Professional soccer teams, whose players may earn large annual incomes but usually over a short viable career, have decided to protest by going on temporary strike, effectively eliminating a round of matches this year — the first time teams have done anything of this sort .
I’m through with symbolic, feelgood, bumper-sticker activism; I’ve taken Phil Ochs’s I Ain’t a-Marchin’ Anymore to heart and I’ve left the “peace parade” marches and rallies with their tired chants and terrible speakers behind.
I take a practical approach, learning about the tax laws and about how to live well by being down-to-earth and sensibly frugal.
How do I feel about my life now that I’ve gone from a $100,000-a-year urban playboy lifestyle to living on around $12,000?
Money Magazine profiled me briefly, for an article they put out on how to avoid paying taxes.
They concluded that their readers probably wouldn’t enjoy what they called the “ascetic lifestyle” that comes along with my technique.
If this is “asceticism,” asceticism is very underrated.
The life I’m leading now is fuller and more enjoyable than ever; I have less anxiety (and less guilt about my taxes) and I feel like I have integrity, and I’m genuinely living a life of abundance.
For one thing, by being willing to take in less income, I am able to work fewer hours.
It turns out that those free hours are much more valuable than the money for which I’d been trading them (and the more practice I get in living vigorously, the more valuable my free time becomes to me).
Now, more of what I do with my life is for goals I think are valuable, useful, and interesting; much less is what I have to put up with for a paycheck.
I don’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy for abundance and fulfillment.
But what I’ve learned is that by taking a more direct responsibility for your life and your effect on the world, by radically reassessing how your activities relate to your priorities, and by backing away from the consumer and job cultures, you can make your own life better and reduce your complicity in making other people’s lives suck.
Some links of interest that have flashed by my browser in recent days:
In “I Gave My Waitress a ‘Libertarian Tip’: Taxation Is Theft!” Ed Krayewski considers the tactic of leaving cash “gifts” when paying for restaurant meals with your credit card, rather than adding a “tip” to the bill, as a way of trying to keep the tip from registering as anyone’s taxable income.
“I resist taxes because I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government. I hope to convince many people to take this stand, and so I am very public about it. I am willing to risk government retribution by doing things that make my resistance more disruptive to the state. I hope that if enough people join me, we will rise up to reorganize society in a less violent way.”
“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way, so I withhold €84 from my income tax bill and give it instead directly to the Ministry of Education. If enough of us do this, maybe one day the schools will have all the money they need, and the army will have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy another tank.”
