Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Canada →
Doukhobors in 1906
Remember the Doukhobors?
That group of Russian Christian anarcho-pacifist iconoclasts that were forced
into exile in the late nineteenth century? Leo Tolstoy championed their case,
and with the help of British Quakers, their community migrated to exile in
Canada.
Well, they had a bit of trouble accommodating themselves to the Canadian
regime too, as this news item (from The Montreal Gazette, ) shows:
Won’t Pay School Taxes.
Education Begets Evil in Children, Say the Doukhobors.
Langham, Sask., . —
The Doukhobors have flatly refused to pay school taxes on their lands, saying
that, as they have always refused to have their children educated, lest they
learn evil things, they will not pay money for school purposes. The
authorities here are puzzled themselves to know how to get the tax from them.
The Doukhobors have very thoughtfully lost no time in taking their crops from
the land within the Langham school district.
One way to resist taxes — or to resist the sort of property seizure that governments sometimes inflict on tax resisters — is to hide assets so as to remove them from the reach of the tax collector or assessor.
Here are a few examples:
Charles Merrill, who resisted his taxes as a way of protesting for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States, had an appropriately flamboyant asset-hiding strategy.
“I have buried $2 million worth of gold coins in the desert…” he said.
“My partner doesn’t even know where it is at.
If the IRS allows me to file a joint federal income tax form like any other married couple, the money is there to pay.”
Lately, wealthy Italians have taken to avoiding the prying eye of the revenue agent by parking their yachts in foreign Mediterranean ports.
As of earlier , some 30,000 berths had gone empty in Italian ports, which not only foiled the tax collector but “cost the Italian economy some $350 million in lost revenues from marina fees and services, and fuel sales.”
When Doukhobor refugees in Canada refused to pay school taxes on their farmland, reasoning that since they refused to send their children to wicked Canadian schools, they shouldn’t have to pay for them, they anticipated that the government might resort to seizure and “very thoughtfully lost no time in taking their crops from the land within the Langham school district.”
Edward Koryto standing in the rubble that used to be his home
Another, more drastic way of keeping the tax collector from your door is to demolish your house.
Michigan factory worker Edward Koryto did that in to a home he had spent seven years building from scrap lumber when the tax assessors nearly tripled its assessed value, which raised the property taxes due on it by 150%.
Later in this series, I’ll also cover taxpatriatism and mass-migration as a way of fleeing the tax collector, which is a similar strategy, and barricades as a means of keeping assets safe from the tax collector, which is another.
