Stephen Ruth discovered that Suffolk County officials had unsafely manipulated the timing of traffic lights to trick drivers into running red lights and increase the revenue from the ticket-issuing red-light cameras.
He was so furious that he not only blew the whistle, but he cut the wires to the cameras to foil the scheme.
American war tax resister Frances Crowe is 98 years old.
That didn’t stop her from getting arrested in a civil disobedience action against a planned natural gas pipeline.
She was convicted, and is now refusing to pay the fine.
Welt wonders where Thoreau would find himself in today’s political landscape, and concludes: “He belongs to nobody; he cannot be monopolized by any party. ‘The only obligation which I have a right to assume,’ said Thoreau, ‘is to do at any time what I think right.’ Ideologies, even progressive ones, bothered him.”
The Den Plirono movement is still sending out its Harry Tuttle-like engineers to reconnect the power to families who have lost electricity for failure to keep up with the tax hikes the government has added to utility bills.
Some recent news related to tax resistance:
ESat reports on a tax strike in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, saying more than 500 merchants have been jailed for tax refusal, and others have closed their shops rather than pay.
Tax compliance in the United States has long relied on information from centralized intermediaries — the financial institutions, employers, and brokers that help ensure income is reported and taxes are paid.
Yet while the IRS remains tied to these centralized entities, consumers and businesses are not.…
The government of India abruptly stopped acknowledging large-denomination
rupee bills as legal tender .
This was meant to disrupt the underground cash economy, and force people
with large cash reserves to show themselves.
It seems to have worked.
The government reports receiving 25% more income tax returns this year
than last. Governments around the world are toying with ways to
discourage cash in favor of more-easily traced and surveilled methods of
payment.
The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram was formed in
, and wasted no time claiming to
govern and tax the region. Recently, representatives met from 46 villages
that the Corporation has brought under its thumb. They unanimously voted to
refuse to pay property tax to the MCG,
saying that it lacks authority to tax them.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher whose books I’ve appreciated (see ♇ 18 August 2008 and 11 January 2011), has apparently taken on the job of writing an ethics advice column for The New York Times Magazine.
In a recent column, he attempts to answer “Is It O.K. to Protest Trump by Withholding Taxes?”
He concludes that no, it isn’t, and rambles on with some unsophisticated claptrap about democracy and civil disobedience.
I have yet to read a newspaper “ethics” column that was worth reading.
Something about the advice column format seems to make philosophers lazy.
