How you can resist funding the government →
getting under the income tax line →
arguments against this method
I spent with friends and family in my old home town.
Some of the time was spent talking about my experiment, which was something a lot of people were curious about and had been mulling over.
The main sticking points that were keeping people from wanting to join me were three:
Most felt that a gesture like mine wasn’t likely to have much of an effect, and so wasn’t worth the fuss.
Alas, this argument can be applied to just about any form of activism — in a nation of millions, even a very motivated and effective person can only have so much of an effect.
That is a good excuse for doing nothing, but not a good argument for doing nothing.
Besides, my argument is that by being a taxpayer, you aren’t doing nothing, but are in fact contributing a great deal to the active work of the state.
Some felt that I was assuming too much responsibility — that I shouldn’t feel guilt for how my taxes are spent because I effectively have no say in this.
This is another example of what I consider to be a good excuse but a bad argument.
It takes a nation of millions to threaten the world with a vast nuclear arsenal (for instance).
A handful of evil-minded people can’t do it themselves.
We all have to pull together to make it possible.
The government has made it easy for us to grab the oars and pull, but we still have to decide whether or not to do it.
Finally, there was the general impression that what I am doing is a great sacrifice, and that they would want to see some extraordinary reasons in favor of taking such a radical and difficult step before they would consider doing it.
I’m hoping to prove them wrong by my example.
I think that the life I live after reducing my income and eliminating my federal income tax burden will rival or surpass in its largeness and vibrance the life I lived as an well-employed taxpayer.
Time will tell.
Claire Wolfe gave The Picket Line a plug a while back that was full of praise for my project.
“I wish that the anarcho-theorists who know exactly how life ‘ought’ to be conducted in Libertopia — but whose own daily lives are filled with tax-paying and other forms of going-along-to-get-along with the state — would take more of a lesson from Dave Gross,” she wrote.
In a subsequent post, she added some nuance to that position:
“I do go on about the virtues of dropping out and not paying the effing state to commit foul deeds.
And I have no use whatsoever for people who talk the ivory-tower theoretical talk of freedom but don’t walk the right-down-here-on-the-gritty-ground walk of freedom.
But that’s not to say I imagine that everybody out there with a good job and a hefty tax bill ought to be cringing in guilt.
Every subversive, underground movement (which freedom is, and must be, these days) needs its moles, too.…
“I do believe that dropping out and refusing to fund the growing police state is the most moral individual choice.
But it’s not necessarily the most practical choice.
And if we’re really to have a freedom movement and not just a bunch of ragged individuals, we need our ‘mole’ brothers just as much as we need any other sort of freedom partisans.
The only deep sin against freedom is the sin of hypocrisy — of talking the talk when you don’t even make an effort to walk the walk.
But the walk can be walked down a lot of different paths.”
John Venlet at Improved Clinch has started a heated discussion about The Picket Line.
One writer insists that “there’s nothing wrong with paying ransom to the state when it advances your pursuit of your values.…
If Gross is happy with his choice that’s great, but I often detect more than a whiff of pride in self-sacrifice from folks advocating similar paths and I find nothing admirable in self-sacrifice.”
A similarly-themed discussion is ongoing over at The Claire Files Board.
One commentator takes issue with my feeling complicit with the government by paying taxes.
“If a petty thief or mugger manages to steal $20 from you, then buys a knife with the money and slits fifty throats with the knife will that be your fault too?” he asks.
A concerned Picket Line reader writes:
I’ve been reading your posts now for a while and the last one really got to me.
The Annual Report.
What I find terribly hard to comprehend is the apparent acceptance that you display as regards the fact that you are totally a slave and completely subject to the instructions of others.
This just baffles me.
You accept all of these rules and regulations, or seem to, with nary a flutter of indignation at the very least that your entire life is subject to someone else’s scriblings.
You seem to define your life by them.
How is it that you are so comfortable with others defining how much of your life force you are allowed to keep and yet you seem offended that these same people are making the same choices about others?
Is it really that much of a difference between taking the life force of a person living in Iraq and taking most of the life force of another living in San Francisco…?
Where do you draw the line on naked aggression?
And how do you define that location?
Some of this I think hinges on what you mean by “acceptance.”
I “accept” that if I see someone else playing with a toy I would like to play with I can’t just go over and grab it out of their hands.
I also “accept” that there are people in the world who will take advantage of the opportunity to rob my home if I leave the door unlocked.
In the first case, I’m agreeing to a code of conduct or a social norm; in the second case, I’m just acknowledging a fact about the world around me, without agreeing to it.
I accept that some people, operating with the impunity they believe a government can bestow, may kill me, imprison me, torture me, or steal from me, and that they have also set down conditions that I must follow to avoid these fates — for instance, to pay tribute and to conform to their more-or-less arbitrary whims.
This you characterize as “acceptance that” I am “totally a slave and completely subject to the instructions of others.”
I’d drop the “totally” and “completely” and I think I’d use another word than “slave” too — but I think I get what you’re driving at.
But note that I mean this “acceptance” in the “acknowledge” sense, not the “agree” sense.
I acknowledge that this is the case and that I can’t just wish it away.
Step two is to figure out what to do about it.
I would like to be free to be an honorable person without being slave or master, victim or executioner.
There’s no magic spell that will make this happen.
Every path I take has trade-offs.
If I decide to maximize my freedom by living my life my way without regard for what the government commands, I risk the retribution of the government which is powerful enough to, and is inclined to, take away the freedom and “life force” of people who try that path.
If, on the other hand, I try to minimize that risk by paying the government what it demands and by obeying its commands, I’ve stunted my freedom in the cause of preserving it.
The middle ground between these extremes, where we all live, is occupied by uncomfortable compromises that keep freedom-loving people as close to freedom as we think we can get under the circumstances.
So much for the trade-offs we make to maximize our freedom.
There’s also a second dimension on which these trade-offs can be judged.
Our choices also may feed and strengthen (or starve and sap) the apparatus that is determined to make us a slave or a master, a victim or an executioner.
It costs the government to rule over people.
It is only able to rule because it is profitable to rule — in other words, subjects produce more for the State than it costs the State to enforce their subjection.
I intend to be one of the many counter-examples to this general rule.
If I weren’t paying as much attention to the law and to keeping my income low and qualifying for legal deductions and credits, but I were paying more money to the Treasury, I might feel freer, but I’d be making government that much more profitable and thereby contributing to the evil I was trying to avoid.
I’d be less victim, but more executioner, and not really any freer, at least not in the way I consider to be important.
So that’s one explanation for why I’m doing things the red-tape way.
There may be better methods to meet my goals than the ones I’m using.
I don’t claim to have found the one ideal spot in that “middle ground.”
For instance, I might find that moving into the underground economy makes more sense, and I’m willing to entertain the argument that I’d be more of a drain on the State if I were to go on public assistance or even if I were to go to “prison.… the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor.”
I haven’t made my particular choice because I’m “comfortable” with the demands of a parasitical State but because it’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far for keeping as much freedom as I can while contributing little to support the State.
Also, I do think there’s a significant quantitative difference between being under the thumb of Uncle Sam here in San Francisco — which, unjust though it is, is a relatively comfortable species of that ubiquitous variety of injustice — and being under the thumb of military occupation in Iraq.
If it weren’t for the fact that the injustices are conjoined (that is, it is the U.S. government’s parasitizing of Americans that enables it to bomb Iraqis) I would postpone trying to get the government off our backs here to try to stop its savagery there.
I hope that answers your question or at least gets us a little closer to an answer.
If you really think that by making yourself worse-off, you can wean the State from its violent cycle, by all means go for it.
I just don’t think it works.
Almost every transaction in which you participate is taxable, so as long as you spend those notes you’re simply choosing a different form of taxation!
If withholding $17.76 from your tax return this year makes it easier to sleep at night, by all means, do it.
But don’t be fooled into thinking that you’re going to stop the State by so doing.
If you’re withholding your taxes, you’re not going far enough.
I think victory is freedom from the State.
Symbolically fighting the State with its own laws isn’t going to get anyone very far because it’s only possible to de-fund the government if it were using legitimate currency, which it is not.
And even if it were, there simply aren’t enough tax protesters in existence to starve the State by withholding some nominal sum, and therefore their efforts are misguided.
The principal argument, though, is that you can’t de-fund Leviathan by withholding from the State the very fiat money the creation of which it controls!
Because the government operates on monopoly money backed only by the people’s general faith in that fiction, I understand that the only way to bring down the system is to stop having faith in that fiction, to stop using that money, and to practice counter-economics.
There probably are enough resisters to begin a counter-economy, which has greater chance at succeeding, if you define success as “freedom from the State.”
I think we probably agree more than we disagree when it comes right down to it, but I’m too impatient to wait for the perfect solution.
I’m eager to start right now with less-perfect but still practical solutions, hoping that although “there simply aren’t enough” of us to defund the government right now, thanks to me there’s one more than there used to be, and in order for that “enough” to ever come about, people like me will have to decide, one-by-one, to be the next not-yet-enough one.
Milton Mayer, whose book On Liberty I reviewed , was a war tax resister.
In his essay The Tribute Money (The Progressive, ), he explained why.
Excerpts:
I cannot see why I should not persist in my folly.
Like every other horror-stricken American I keep asking myself, “What can a man do?
What weight does a man have, besides petition and prayer, that he isn’t using to save his country’s soul and his own?”
The frustration of the horror-stricken American as he sees his country going over the falls without a barrel is more than I can bear just now.
He tries to do constructive work, but all the while he is buying guns.
I have thought as hard as I can think.
I have thought about, for example, anarchy.
Not only am I not an anarchist, but I believe in taxes, in very high taxes, and especially in a very high graduated income tax.
I realize that a man who believes in taxes cannot pick and choose among them and say he will not spend 50 per cent of them on guns just because he doesn’t need guns.
I realize that anarchy is unworkable and that that is why the state came into being.
And I realize, too, that the state cannot be maintained without its authority’s being reposed in its members’ representatives.
I realize all that.
But in this state — and a very good state it is, or was, as states go, or went — I cannot get anybody to represent me.
My senators will not represent me.
My congressman will not represent me.
I am opposed to taxation without representation.
Were I God I would turn Milton into a pillar of salt for how many times he looked back behind him on those patriotic liberal platitudes (“its members’ representatives”) and rose-lit recollections (“a very good state it is, or was”) as he was walking away to dissidence.
Don’t tell me that I am represented by my vote.
I voted against the national policy.
Having done so, I am constrained in conscience to uphold my vote and not betray it.…
If my offense is anarchy — which I dislike — I can’t help it.
If the preservation of society compels me to commit worse evils than anarchy, then the cost of preserving society is too high.
Society is not sacred; I am.…
Would that he would extend the realm of the sacred so as to let other people participate in it, rather than making his conscience king of his own money while advocating “a very high graduated income tax” for others.
My first responsibility is not to preserve the state — that is Hitlerism and Stalinism — but to preserve my soul.
If you tell me that there is no other way to preserve the state than by the implicit totalitarianism of Rousseau’s “general will,” I will reply that it is the state’s misfortune and men must not accept it.
I have surrendered my sovereignty to another Master than the general will — I do not mean to be sanctimonious here — and if the general will does not serve Him it does not serve me or any other man.
In so far as there is any worldly sovereign in the United States, it is not the general will, or the Congress, or the President.
It is I.
I am sovereign here.
I hold the highest office of the land, the office of citizen, with responsibilities to my country heavier, by virtue of my office, than those of any other officer, including the President.
And I do not hold my office by election but by inalienable right.
I cannot abdicate my right, because it is inalienable.
If I try to abdicate it, to the general will, or to my representatives or my ministers, I am guilty of betraying not only democracy but my nature as a man endowed with certain inalienable rights.
I have thought about all this, in the large and in the little.
I have thought about my wife and children and my responsibility to them.
War will not even save them their lives, not even victorious war this time.
And it will lose them their most precious possession, their souls, if they call a man husband and father who has lightly sold his own.
I have thought of the fact that better men than I, much better men, disagree with me.
That grieves me.
But I am not, in this instance, trying to emulate better men.
I have thought about my effectiveness.
A man who “makes trouble for himself,” as the saying is, is thought to reduce his effectiveness, partly because of the diversion of his energies and partly because some few, at least, of his neighbors will call him a crank, a crook, or a traitor.
But I am not very effective anyway, and neither, so far as I can see, is anyone else.
If anything is effective in matters of this sort, it is example.
I go up and down the land denying the decree of Caesar that all able-bodied men between eighteen and twenty-five go into the killing business and urging such men as are moved in conscience to decline to do so.
If a million young men would decline, in conscience, to kill their fellow men, the government would be as helpless as its citizens are now.
Its helplessness then would, I think, be at least as contagious abroad as its violence is now.
Other governments would become helpless, including the Russian, and thus would we be able to save democracy at home and abroad.
Victorious war has failed to do it anywhere.
But how can a million old men who themselves will not decline to hire the killing expect a million young men to do it?
How can I urge others to do what I do not care to do myself? …
Of course the government doesn’t want me for military service.
I am overage, spavined, humpbacked, bald, and blind.
The government doesn’t want me.
Men are a dime a dozen.
What the government wants is my dime to buy a dozen men with.
If I decline to buy men and give them guns, the government will, I suppose, force me to.
I offer to pay all of my taxes for peaceable purposes, the only purposes which history suggests will defend democracy; the government has, I believe, no way, under the general revenue system, to accept my offer.
I like the out-of-doors and I do not want to go to jail.
I could put my property in my wife’s name and bury my money in a hole or a foreign bank account.
But I am not Al Capone.
I am… an honest man.
And I am not mathematically minded; if I did try deceit, I’d be caught.
There is only one other alternative, and that is no alternative either.
That is to earn less than $500 a year and be tax-free.
I’d be paying taxes anyway on what I bought with $500, but that doesn’t bother me, because the issue is not, as long as I am only human, separation from war or any other evil-doing but only as much separation as a being who is only human can achieve within his power.
No, the trouble with earning less than $500 a year is that it doesn’t support a family.
Not a big family like mine.
If I were a subsistence farmer I might get by, but I’m a city boy.
I would be hard put to answer if you asked me whether a man should own property in the first place, for a government to tax.
If I said, “No, he should not,” I should stand self-condemned as a Christian Communist.
It is illegal, under the McCarran Act, to be either a Christian or a Communist, and I don’t want to tangle with both the Internal Revenue Act and the McCarran Act at the same time, especially on the delicate claim to being a Christian.
Still, the Christian Gospels are, it seems to me, passing clear on the point of taxes.
When the apostle says both that “we should obey the magistrates” and that “we should obey God rather than man,” I take it that he means that we should be law-abiding persons unless the law moves us against the Lord.
The problem goes to the very essence of the relationship of God, man, and the state.
It isn’t easy.
It never was.
History, however, is on the side of us angels.
The primitive Christians, who were pacifists, refused to pay taxes for heathen temples.
They were, of course, outlaws anyway.
The early Quakers, who were pacifists, refused to pay tithes to the established church and went to prison.
But the war tax problem seems not to have arisen until , when a considerable number of Quakers refused to pay a tax levied in Pennsylvania for the war against the red Indians.
The Boston (and New York and Baltimore and Charleston) “tea parties” of the 1770’s were, of course, a vivid and violent form of tax refusal endorsed, to this day, by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Seventy-five years after the Revolution, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because the government was waging both slavery against the Negroes and war against the Mexicans.
Thoreau was put in jail overnight, and the next day Emerson went over to Concord and looked at him through the bars and said, “What in the devil do you think you’re dong, Henry?”
“I,” said Thoreau, “am being free.”
So Emerson paid Thoreau’s poll tax, and Thoreau, deprived of his freedom by being put out of jail, wrote his essay on civil disobedience.
Seventy-five years later, Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay and worked it into a revolution.
It could happen here, but it won’t.
The place was propitious for Gandhi, a slave colony whose starving people had no money or status to lose, just as the time was propitious for Thoreau, a time of confidence and liberality arising from confidence.
Totalitarianism was unthinkable and parliamentary capitalism was not in danger.
The appeal to the rights of man was taken seriously, and McCarthyism, McCarranism, and MacArthurism were all as yet unborn.
I doubt that anybody will be able to bring me more light in this matter than I now have.
The light I need will come to me from within or it won’t come at all.
When George Fox visited William Penn, Penn wanted to know if he should go on wearing his sword.
“Wear it,” said Fox, “as long as thou canst.”
I hasten to say that I feel like Penn, not like Fox.
I know I can’t say that you ought to do what I can’t do or that I’ll do it if you do it.
But I don’t know if I can say that you ought to do what I do or even if I ought to do it.
I am fully aware of the anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 percent of the 50 per cent I do pay is used for war.
I am even fuller aware of the converse anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 per cent of the 50 per cent I won’t pay would be used for peaceable purposes.
In addition, if the government comes and gets it, and fines me, as I suppose it might, it will collect more for war than it would have in the first place.
Worst of all, I am not a good enough man to be doing this sort of thing.
I am not an early Christian; I am the type that, if Nero threw me naked into the amphitheatre, would work out a way to harass the lions.
But somebody over twenty-five has got to perform the incongruous affirmation of saying, “No,” and saying it regretfully rather than disdainfully.
Why shouldn’t it be I?
I have sailed through life, up to now, as a first-class passenger on a ship that is nearly all steerage.
By comparison with the rest of mankind, I have always had too much money, too many good jobs, too good a reputation, too many friends, and too much fun.
Who, if not I, is full of unearned blessings?
When, if not now, will I start to earn them?
Somebody will take care of me.
Somebody always has.
The only thing I don’t know is who it is that does it.
I know who feeds the young ravens, but I know, too, that the Devil takes care of his own.
