Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → how tax resistance fits the bill → isn’t some government worth paying for? → can libertarians, peaceniks, anarchists, environmentalists, paleocons, and lefties get along?

It isn’t too often that someone from outside the war tax resistance movement looks in and says “y’all just aren’t standing up to power enough — don’t be such a bunch of appeasing weenies.”

Barry Loberfeld’s up to the challenge, though. He’s written An Open Letter to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, challenging them to support people whose consciences lead them to withdraw support from the whole government, not just that part of it that engages in foreign wars.

Loberfeld quotes the War Resisters League Appeal to Conscience in support of war tax resisters (the one that I critiqued here two years ago), and argues that if it asserts an individual right to “withhold his person and property from the war effort of the State” why stop there? Why not stand up for the right of individuals to decide wholly for themselves, using their consciences, the disposition of their person and property?

To put it as directly as possible, will the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee “publicly declare” its “encouragement of, and willingness to lend support to, those persons of conscience who choose to take this step”?

“The War Resisters League affirms that all war is a crime against humanity” — so reads its credo. But it is all-too-obvious that its supporters oppose only foreign militarism. They actually advocate domestic militarism, the deployment of armed forces by the State against its own citizens. Their “pacifist” position rejects retaliation by “the army” against invading soldiers, but sanctions the use of coercion by “the police” against people who have themselves committed no violence. How can we pretend that the violence of domestic militarism — even when we call this state coercion “socialism,” “progressivism,” “egalitarianism,” or any other inane misnomer — is not real violence? Are its weapons less real? Its jails? (Of course not, which is precisely why the Appeal acknowledges the “personal risks” of refusing to obey the orders of those who command the weapons.) And how could anyone justify this violence?…

I challenge the War Resisters League and its supporters to fully become good neighbors and really oppose “all war” — not only the war the State wages against other nations, but also the one it wages against its people and their lives and property. A world without domestic militarism is simply a world without violence. To imagine that it will also be a world without justice, prosperity, cooperation, and compassion, is to proclaim that violence the font of these values — as absurd, cynical, and ultimately obscene a statement as one could make.

I think that Mr. Loberfeld has some good points, but I also think that he is mischaracterizing the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee based on one document (and conflating it with the War Resisters League to boot). In my experience, NWTRCC is and historically has been a welcome place for anarchists and other people who oppose the current government entirely, as well as for those who are enthusiastic statists but oppose specific wars or war in general.

I suppose it could tighten its doctrine (though I think the statists might win out by force of numbers in such a battle at this stage) or splinter into statist and anarchist groups, but I don’t think that would help much.

What the many ideologies represented in NWTRCC can agree on is the need for conscientious people to reduce the amount of money that they’re paying for the government’s wars and bloated military budgets. And NWTRCC provides a good organizing focus and information clearinghouse for us.

Should statist war tax resisters become more skeptical of government in general and less supportive of it? Of course they should. But that’s going to take some convincing.

John Walsh at Counterpunch is urging his friends on the anti-war left to join forces with the active anti-war right and anti-war libertarian movements.

Why is the anti-war movement not having a greater effect? Why does the war go on with no end in sight? There are a number of reasons, not least the perfidy of the Dem establishment, but among the most important and least recognized reasons, I believe, is that we have a badly divided anti-war movement now. And I am not talking about past squabbles on the Left…

…[T]here is another wing or perhaps wings of the drive to end the war. These “wing(s)” are the traditional conservatives who often identify themselves as Republicans or Libertarians. I have found that even peace activists working on the staff of organizations like Peace Action are blissfully unaware of this part of the antiwar sentiment.… The timid rejection of the war in The Nation, all too much under the sway of the Dems, pales by comparison with the cover headline of The American Conservative some months ago which blared: “We do not need an exit strategy. We need an exit.”

Even more striking is the Libertarian opposition to the war to be found most notably in the online publication Antiwar.com, one of the best places to go on a daily basis to keep up with antiwar news and opinion.…

Lefties would do well to recognize that they share more with Libertarians than with the Democratic establishment.…

One may argue that the Libertarians, traditional Right and the Left do not need to come together, that each can fight against the war in its own way. But this is not adequate for several reasons. First, such separation is a set-up for a divide-and-conquer approach, at which the two War Parties are very adept. The Republicans can appeal to the Libertarians and traditional conservatives to support them as a lesser evil; and the Democrats can appeal to the Left to support them as the lesser evil. The net result is the dominance of the War Parties and the continuation of war, empire and the suppression of liberties embodied in the Patriot Act. And this tactic has worked well for the War Parties who have alternated in the making of war and supervision of the empire while the anti-war forces are left without a real political home. And without contact, each side is left with the stereotypes of the other, stereotypes that only reinforce their separation.

Second, at times the Left cannot reach people with an anti-war message, because of cultural factors or different philosophical outlooks. But very often these same people can be reached by others, especially by the Libertarians.

I like hearing this sort of thing. I think better cross-ideology alliance building would certainly help the anti-war and pro-civil-liberties movements. But I think also that the anti-war left is suffering from a reliance on unproductive tactics. So much of its energy goes into organizing large rallies and marches, for instance.

All of the marches and rallies since the start of the Iraq war have suffered from comparison with the huge worldwide demonstrations that took place when the war began. Nowadays the pressure is not being put on the government and the war makers, but on the rally organizers and participants — will they be able to raise sufficient numbers of people to make the news, or will they fail and demonstrate that the energy in the anti-war movement is fading?

And even if they succeed, all that happens is a bunch of peaceniks gather together holding signs and listening to the same familiar rants. Business as usual, in other words — everybody knows just how to react, the reporters can write it up in their sleep, and nobody at the Pentagon has to change their plans.

At least where I live, peace demonstrators aren’t really demonstrating much of anything. It’s such a frequent and unremarkable thing for people to march around holding signs and chanting that it doesn’t register as much more than the equivalent of a Columbus Day parade or a farmer’s market. People don’t ask themselves “what is so upsetting my fellow-citizens that they’re taking to the streets?” They ask themselves, “protesters in the streets? Is it a day that ends in ‘y’ again? I wonder if traffic will be bad on the way home.”

What does it demonstrate when the anti-war movement gathers together, again and again, to listen to speeches telling them that their opinions are correct, and to perform some mass action that they know from repeated trial is wholly ineffective at meeting their stated goals?

The “Movement of the Libertarian Left” has released a new edition of the Tax is Theft (and what to do about it) pamphlet, originally written by Samuel Edward Konkin Ⅲ.

Russell Kanning, editor of the Keene Free Press, and a war tax resister well-known in “Free State Project” circles (a project that is encouraging libertarian-minded people to move to New Hampshire in the hopes of forming a political critical mass), was arrested — twice — yesterday for visiting the IRS office in Keene, New Hampshire with the intent of handing leaflets to its employees.

The leaflets quote the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: “Anyone with knowledge of illegal activity and an opportunity to do something about it is a potential criminal under international law unless the person takes affirmative measures to prevent the commission of the Crimes.” The reverse side is a sample letter that IRS employees could send President Bush to announce that they are resigning their jobs.

“The U.S. government is killing people around the world to expand its power base,” Kanning said. “It is using our neighbors as cannon fodder and your money to accomplish the evil deed. They are building an empire on our backs and in our names. They are imprisoning or killing those that oppose them. Enough is enough.

“Gandhi called his non-cooperation with evil a campaign of civil disobedience. I am calling it ‘Tilting at Windmills’. An individual seems powerless against the lone global superpower, but it is the individual consent of everyone that empowers them. So the power is in our hands to bring down this rotten government.”

He was arrested by agents from the Department of Homeland Security and charged with distributing materials in a federal building and failure to obey a lawful order. After he was booked and released, he immediately returned to the IRS office to try again (without the leaflets, which had been confiscated). He was arrested again, this time charged with disorderly conduct.

“I never got to talk with the IRS workers,” he says, “but I did get to ask some Homeland Security guys to quit.”

On the other hand, I saw something encouraging last night on the left / libertarian synthesis front.

It was a documentary called Garbage Warrior, about an architect who is experimenting with using recycled, un­con­ven­tional building materials and innovative design and construction methods to make homes that use passive tem­per­a­ture-control, solar electricity, rainwater capture, and other techniques in order to be self-reliant and off-the-grid.

He’s taken his techniques to other countries to help people recover quickly and inexpensively from disasters like the 2004 tsunami.

He sees himself as an experimenter in new forms of building and architecture of a sort that will become more necessary as global warming accelerates. His apocalyptic global warming rhetoric and his en­vi­ron­men­tally-friendly solutions would make him a welcome guest at any en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist gathering.

But the middle of the movie shows the Garbage Warrior, Michael Reynolds, locking horns with the government — first as they take away his license, outlaw his buildings, and force him to pay tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours of pointless paperwork to the bureaucracy; then, as he tries to navigate the byzantine state legislature to get the law changed so that he can continue to work: not asking for taxpayer handouts or special favors, but just asking for permission to have some space in which to innovate and experiment without having to bow to convention-shackled bureaucrats at every step.

It’s like The Fountainhead for the Whole Earth set. Instead of a pontificating suit-and-tie übermensch building skyscrapers for capitalists, it’s a scraggly desert rat making “earthships” out of pressed earth, bald tires, and aluminum cans. En­vi­ron­men­tal­ists: show it to your libertarian friends. Libertarians: show it to your green buddies.

Tax Day reports and media mentions of war tax resistance are coming in from across the country:

• Members of the War Resisters League carried a War Tax Boycott banner through midtown Manhattan.
• Peace activists in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, held a penny poll outside the Federal Building.
• Tax resister Jon Klein is profiled in Richmond, Virginia’s Style Weekly.
• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was interviewed on Rob Lorei’s Radioactivity show. (Benn’s interview starts at 9:27)
  
• Paul Guggenheimer’s Dakota Midday radio show talked to a Tea Party promoter and to Lincoln Rice of NWTRCC about their Tax Day plans.
• Jesse Watson and Lew McGregor greeted last-minute filers in Rockland, Maine to let people know that there are alternatives to paying for war.
• Don Timmerman tells readers of the Superior [Wisconsin] Telegram why he and his wife resist their taxes.
• NWTRCC is publishing reports on local Tax Day actions as they come in.

And in other news:

• David Boaz of Cato @ Liberty calls for a campaign to unite the anti-tax and anti-war movements under a single “Stop the War, Stop the Spending” banner.
• Al Giordano looks at the “Tea Party” protests and compares them to Wally Nelson’s war tax resistance protests he used to cover as a reporter every April 15^th.
• Kathy Belge at Kathy’s Lesbian Life Blog writes about tax resistance for gay and lesbian couples.
• Brad Spangler of the Center for a Stateless Society gives the anarchist perspective on Tax Day with his audio op-ed “Taxation is Theft”.
• Christopher Beam, Slate’s “Explainer,” explains what happens if you don’t file your taxes:

  Probably nothing. If you’re self-employed without any major assets or loans, the odds of getting busted are extremely low. In fact, an estimated 7 million Americans fail to file their taxes every year, and in 2008 the IRS examined only 158,000 such cases. That comes out to a roughly 2 percent chance of getting caught. Even if the IRS does audit you, the agency probably won’t press charges. Instead, they’ll just file a tax return for you and charge you a fee for the trouble.

• When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took the reins at the IRS despite having neglected to pay $34,000 in his own taxes, a lot of people were miffed at the hypocrisy. But none had more cause than IRS employees themselves, who are saddled with strict, zero-tolerance policies against tax evasion that can cost them their jobs. And:

  IRS employees have reported that taxpayers are occasionally citing the Geithner case when they are asked to pay their tax bills. “It’s making the compliance conversation harder,” [Colleen] Kelley [of the National Treasury Employees Union] said.

• “An ABC News investigation has uncovered case after case of checks being stolen, manipulated and cashed by [IRS] contract employees responsible for processing them, resulting in delayed payments and heavily disrupted lives.”
• A Charles Adams speech about “Tax Resistance, Then and Now” was featured on The Lew Rockwell Show.
• Thomas L. Knapp reads the tea leaves and finds some hopeful signs over at the Center for a Stateless Society.
• Christofer, from Chicago’s Kairos community, reflects on his tax resistance and what it means.
• Conservative columnist Ross Douthat shares his impressions of the Tea Party phenomenon and compares it to the anti-war protests in the Dubya years. He concludes: “here we are in the sixth year of the Iraq War, and all those anti-war protests, their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on. So if you’re inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong to be alarmed.”
• Finally, Joe the Plumber appears to be following the Paris Hilton model of celebrity descent. The latest station on his trainwreck has him urging people to call a 1‒900 number to “vote” to abolish the IRS and replace it with the “fair tax” (a national sales tax) thus endorsing two scams for the credulous at once.

Some links that have caught my eye recently:

• The Green Zone: How a Greening Culture Cannot Ignore the Military. The elephant in the room during the debate over the environment and climate change and what-have-you is U.S. militarism. If “the largest source of pollution in the world is the military, particularly the military at war” then maybe environmentalists have something better to do than encourage people to change their lightbulbs.
• Tax resistance by American fiscal conservatives against taxpayer-funded bailouts and deficit spending continues to be an idea that has yet to come, though a lot of folks are meekly hoping somebody else will get the ball rolling. The latest of these ideas goes by the name “Operation Dep 9” and encourages folks to re-file their W-4 forms, claiming 9 allowances so as to reduce or eliminate federal income tax withholding (this is the same technique that many war tax resisters use).
• The proprietor of FSK’s Guide to Reality has written up some back-of-the-envelope theorizing about “tax resister insurance.” For those of you not patient enough to wait for such theories to incorporate on earth, I encourage you to look in to the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which, despite its possible theoretical shortcomings, is actually in operation.
• I haven’t had a chance to look at this closely, but it sounds interesting: Protecting Trust Assets from the Federal Tax Lien.
• Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society writes about Barter Networks and the Counter-Economy.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says that IRS agents are “not using collection tools, including tax liens, levies and property seizures, soon enough in many instances” and recommends that they clamp down sooner and more ruthlessly.
• Protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes”:

  China’s official Xinhua news agency said the local government’s plan to more strictly enforce payment of taxes from the furniture makers and dealers has been suspended in the face of the opposition. China’s furniture industry has suffered in the global economic downturn from a decline in demand from export markets. Thousands of similar protests over taxes, land disputes or corruption are reported in China each year.

The Progressive, in April, 1971, carried an article from Milton Mayer about tax resistance:

If You Want Mylai, Buy It

Young men are a dime a dozen. What the Army wants is a dime to buy a dozen young men with.

Either give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but stop asking, “What can an old man do?”

April 15 is the date. April 15 is the date you turn over a quarter of your income to Behemoth, and half to three-quarters of what you turn over goes to the Army to buy a dozen young men to populate (and depopulate) Perforation Paddy. “I sent them a good boy,” said Private Meadlo’s mother after Mylai, “and they made him a murderer.”

If you want it, buy it. If you don’t, don’t. But stop asking, “What can an old man do?”

If, like me, you had a good year and made more than $625 in 1970, the Internal Revenue Act requires you to file an income tax return. If you refuse (rather than evade) the requirement to file, you are still a felon, but you should notify Behemoth and all its minions lest you be hanged for the wrong reason. (The Act simply punishes “failure to file” and “failure to pay”.) I shouldn’t refuse to file, myself, but better men than I have taken the position that filing is more than a formality; the best of them, A.J. Muste, always filed an appropriately marked Bible instead of a return.

So, too, as the antics proceed, you will be asked (unless you have a readily attachable pay-check) where you stash your money so that Behemoth’s little boys in blue can go and get it. Here again I should comply, myself, lest Behemoth get the impression that I am playing a cat-and-mouse (or mouse-and-cat) game. But this decision, too, like whether or not to file a return, is probably a matter of temperament.

The purpose of taxation is to enable people collectively to buy what they want. Sometimes when some of them want a little something special and some of them don’t — for instance, throughways financed by tolls — those who want them pay for them and those who don’t want them don’t. But Mylai is financed by the general fund of the Treasury, on the assumption that everybody wants Mylai. Behemoth has no way of knowing that the assumption is false unless those who don’t want it refuse to buy it. A vote for Nixon (or Humphrey) or Johnson (or Goldwater) is a vote for Mylai. (“It was murder. We were shooting into houses and at people — running or standing, doing nothing.” — Sergeant Charles Hutts.)

The nation-state is not merely fallible; it is, as every Judeo-Christian (or Christeo-Judean) schoolboy knows, unholy because it divides the family of man into we and they. Only men are, or may be, holy in a world of nation-states, and they dare not perform an unholy act to preserve such an institution. Still the conscientious tax refuser is a conscientious citizen of the nation-state. He would gladly pay his taxes for the things all the people in it (including him) want. In Norway (in this respect the only even halfway civilized country in the world) the conscientious citizen may have his tax payment segregated for the support of the United Nations if he does not want to buy Mylai.

Bucking always for salvation, the conscientious citizen is nevertheless up against some serious objections to his refusal to send a dozen young men to the edge of the ditch in Mylai. The objections appear to be six in number:

Objection 1: The legal penalty of five years in stir and/or a ten-thousand-dollar fine. The U.S. Government has not yet pressed for the penalty in any case of tax refusal that I know of — partly, I suppose, because Behemoth does not know what to do about conscience, partly because the use of force, violence, and other lawful means of penalizing conscientious people always increases their number. (Better pretend they’re not there — up to a point.)

But the number is increasing anyway, and it is not unlikely that it is approaching that point. When it is confident that it has got its Haynsworth-Carswell Court, Behemoth may feel constrained some one of these days to press for the penalty. The tax refusal movement, for twenty years amorphous, is now coordinated by War Tax Resistance, whose address, I am reliably informed, is 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10017, and whose telephone number (212‒477‒2970) was discovered in the Manhattan telephone directory by a task force of forty FBI agents led personally by J. Edgar Hoover. Desperado Bradford Lyttle of WTR reports 181 active refusal centers across the country and estimates 15,000 refusers in 1970.

Answer to Objection 1: There are worse things than losing five years and/or ten thousand dollars, and Mylai is one of them.

Objection 2: The loss of job or reputation. Ten years ago (even five) many tax refusers lost jobs (or failed to get them) as a consequence of the invariable FBI “inquiry.” That’s less likely (but only less likely) now. Loss of reputation, on the other hand, has never appeared to be consequential; I have never known anybody to the left of Orange County, California, who thought that a tax refuser was anything worse than crazy, and even in Orange County they hate taxes.

Answer to Objection 2: There are worse things than losing a job (though that is easier for a light-fingered clown like me to say than it is for an honest workingman).

We proceed now from the nuts-and-bolts to the nitty-gritty, as follows:

Objection 3: Tax refusal is ineffective because “they” get the money anyway (by force, violence, or other lawful means).

Answer to Objection 3: True, true; but, then, so is everything else ineffective (including two victorious world wars to save the world for democracy). To man, all things are impossible. If whatever you do is ineffective, you might as well buck for salvation and do what is right.

Objection 4: Tax refusal is illogical: If you refuse to pay half your income tax, half of what you do pay will be used for Mylai, as will more than the other half (since Behemoth, when it seizes the other half by force, violence, and other lawful means will also seize twelve per cent per annum interest on it).

Answer to Objection 4: This is true only if logic is a brance of effectiveness — and even then it is only half true. Behemoth will lose money on the deal because it will have to spend more to collect it than it gets. In one instance I know of, where the refuser took his case “on up,” it must have cost $25,000 in salaries and travel expenses of Treasury and FBI dicks, district attorneys, assistant attorneys-general, judges, and court attachés to collect and hold on to $32.27 (and the refuser took his own expenses in the case as a tax deduction). It is true, none the less, that in the end Behemoth will get all the money it wants for Mylai, by raising this tax rate if necessary.

But there is another, and more significant, logic: the logic of symbolism (not to be confused with symbolic logic). The only action a man can take against the nation-state is symbolic. He can not prevent its depredations but only repudiate them persistently in the hope of (a) salvation and (b) the sympathetic infection of his fellow-citizens. It is not logical symbolically (for instance) to bomb the ROTC building, because people sympathize with the victim of a bombing, and, besides, Behemoth has all the ROTC buildings it wants and is always eager to build new ones and add the building costs to its Gross National Product billboard. (The Army doesn’t need ROTC buildings or ROTC except as a symbol of militarism; no European army would dare ask a university to disgrace itself by letting its students be marched around the premises.) What is logical symbolically is for students to sit nonviolently in front of the ROTC building and be hauled violently away. Tax refusal is logical symbolically.

Objection 5: Tax refusal is a disavowal of representative government.

Answer to Objection 5: It is, if, and only if, by representative government is meant majoritarianism and not representation at all. If you are an American citizen and you do not want Mylai and won’t buy it, you are not represented. The Congressmen (including the Senators) who deplore Mylai all buy it, without exception. The last one who wouldn’t was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who voted all alone against the second go-around of the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy. The conscientious citizen who does not want Mylai and will not buy it is driven to self-government by the failure of representative government to represent him.

Objection 6: Tax refusal is anarchy, and anarchy is the worst thing that can befall society.

Answer to Objection 6: Anarchy is not the worst thing that can befall a society; it is the second worst. The worst is tyranny, and the worst tyranny is self-evidently that which requires the innocent to kill the innocent. (“I love women. I love children, too. I love people.” — Lt. William L. Calley.) He who does not want and will not buy tyranny must, like George Washington, take his chances on anarchy.

So hopelessly unholy is the nation-state that it drives the conscientious citizen to anarchy and then accuses him of driving it to anarchy when he tries to disengage himself from its tyranny. In the interesting case of the $32.27 cited above, Attorney Francis Heisler was arguing for the refuser before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and one of the judges said to him: “Counsel, is your client aware that if this Court holds in his behalf the Court itself will be laying the axe to the root of all established government?” “I think he is, your honor,” Attorney Heisler replied.

The objections considered, we proceed to the obstacles. There is only one that appears to be insuperable: withholding, the worst crime ever committed against liberty by a good man. When Beardsley Ruml thought up “pay-as-you-go,” everybody cheered except the company bosses who had to do the detestable New Deal’s detestable bookkeeping for it. (Anybody remember when the Connecticut manufacturer, Vivian Kellems, led the Old Guard attack on Social Security by refusing to make the employe deductions?) Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. They can sue to recover — some have — but nobody has made it to the Supreme Court yet. Others reduce or eliminate the withholding by claiming excess dependents (the whole population of Vietnam, for instance) in calculating their estimated tax. Again, I suppose, a matter of temperament, and mine doesn’t happen to run that cat-and-mouse way — though their cause is just, and we have indeed made the whole population of Vietnam our dependents.

A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated. (Personally leading a task force of eighty FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover discovered the association by looking in the Philadelphia telephone directory, so there is no point in my denying it.) But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.

A few years ago a new form of refusal got rolling, available to people trapped by withholding. This was non-payment of the telephone tax (which goes into the general Treasury), on the ground that Chairman Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee had argued its necessity for continuance of the war against Mylai. I’m uneasy about the telephone tax refusal myself; again, I suppose, a matter of temperament. There seem to me to be two visible arguments, and one invisible, against it.

First, I can not bring myself either to do or not to do anything on the bases that what a Congressman says is true. And second, it seems to me that if you are going to fight City Hall you should go for the jugular. The income tax is the jugular. The telephone tax is one of those petty excises, no more significant fiscally, and no more to be singled out, Congressman Mills to the contrary notwithstanding, than the whiskey, movie, or airplane tax.

But the invisible, base-of-the-iceberg, stem-of-the-martini-cherry argument for paying the phone tax is, I’m afraid, one of craven convenience. If Behemoth were to put me in jail for five years for income tax refusal, I’d refuse to pay my telephone tax instantly. But living where and how I do, running a little back-bedroom sweatshop out in the country, I can’t make it very well (still worse, very sick) without a telephone. Discussing telephone tax refusal with some of my anarchist friends, I have discovered that some of them were for it because they didn’t feel quite up to going to the mat on the income tax, and still others because they understood that the telephone company, like Vivian Kellems, was no more enthusiastic about collecting the Mylai tax than they were about paying it and would not jerk the phone out for non-payment of the tax.

This last seemed to me to be a misreading of history. Unlike Vivian Kellems and the American Friends Service Committee — Right and Left united across the years by the mounting terror of the Middle — the telephone company has no principle except money; and Behemoth’s agent, the Federal Communications Commission, is where the money is. In the Communist countries like Spain and Greece and, come to think of it, every other country in the world, the post office operates the telephone and telegraph systems, whose profits subsidize the carrying of the mails; in the only truly free country in the free world the money-losing branch of the communications system is communized and the money-making branches are Government-protected private monopolies.

But telephone tax refusal caught on until, according to the calculation of War Tax Resistance, there are now more than 100,000 practitioners of it. For a couple of years nobody did anything about them. But reports have begun to filter in of Government agents swarming over refusers and, more ominously, of the jerking of telephones by the company on behalf of its protector, the Government. As the reports spread it may be anticipated that there will be a falling-away of telephone tax anarchists, as, I suppose, there will be of income tax anarchists when Behemoth decides that they are getting to be too much of a nuisance and starts throwing them into the pokey.

Until that time the only obstacle (not objection) to income tax refusal, other than withholding, is the harassment it entails. The smart way to live alongside Behemoth is not to attract his attention, and whoever attracts his attention is in for it. Twenty years ago he was paying his harassers $40 a day. It must be $80 now, or $100; there is nothing niggardly about Behemoth.

He sends two kinds of harassers around. The first is a ritualistic cut-out character whom it’s a positive pleasure to be harassed by. He is the warm handclasp type, around thirty-five and running to pudge from running around in his down-payment Impala. He wants to have a little talk with you.

“Homyonum’s the name, Mr. Murgatroid, from the Internal Revenue Service.”

(Warm handclasp.)

“Sit down, Homyonum, sit down, and tell me what I can do for you.”

“To be perfectly frank, Mr. Murgatroid, I think that I may be able to do something for you.”

“Well, now, Homyonum, that is nice — I never expected the Internal Revenue Service to do something for me. Do sit down and have a nice glass tea.”

(He will, and he does.)

“Mr. Murgatroid, we of the Treasury Department are actually your agents. We are here to help you.”

“How sweet of you, Homyonum. One lump or two?” (Two.)

“Mr. Murgatroid, I want you to know that I respect your position, but I think you are ill-advised to refuse to pay your income tax.”

“Homyonum, my boy, your advice is ill. Milk? Lemon?” (Milk.)

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Murgatroid?”

“Not at all, and do let me tell you why your advice is ill. If my position is, as you say, respectable, then yours is not, since the two positions are contradictory. Do you follow me?”

“I —.”

“What I am trying to tell you, Homyonum, since you respect my position, is that you are trying to tell me that I ought not to pay my income tax and neither ought you. You do want to be respectable, don’t you?”

A little more of this standoff, a warm handclasp, and Homyonum is gone wherever such people go nights and is seen no more. He makes his report, the report spends two or three months going through channels, and then Behemoth hands one of his judges a distraint warrant to sign and sends one of his blue-boys around to attach your unattached property (money in the bank, wages coming in, shoes off your feet) in the amount in which you are delinquent in buying Mylai.

The other kind of harasser is another glass tea entirely. He is tall, sallow, dour, ulcerated: a certified public accountant who doesn’t know anything about your income tax refusal (he says), but has been sent to audit your return. “I suppose,” he says, “that your name came up on a spot check. Of course you have all your records and a receipt for each expenditure — if I may just look at them.” At the end of two weeks, at $40, $80, or $100 a day, reducing the Gross National Product by that much, he has discovered that you owe Behemoth $1.14 (or Behemoth owes you $1.14; that’s not the point of it at all) and you and your back-bedroom are a shambles.

He turns up the next year, on the dot, to do it all over again, and then you know he is lying about the spot check (and even he beginst to suspect he is). Meanwhile, he has converted you into a fox. You spend half your life (at $40, $20, or $10 a day) keeping records of your expenditures. You spend the other half of your life like the mouse you were not going to play in the cat-and-mouse game, scurrying for loopholes down which you can hurry. You end up beating your wife, cursing your children, and, of course, kicking the cat. And that, not the $1.14, is the point of it. If Behemoth can make your life unbearable, you will buy Mylai.

It is the very devil to be harassed, but what did you expect — a valentine from Mrs. Mitchell? It’s like (or even as) Give-’Em-Hell-Harry used to say: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You harass them, and they harass you back, and they’ve got the big battalions on their side. (You know Whom you’ve got on yours.)

And you harass them back and they harass you back. Who said ineffective? Behemoth has the whole country, the whole world, computerized to take care of everything — everything but one man who says, No, sir, instead of Yes, sir. It takes one (count ’em, one) man to obstruct the machine by introducing the human element into it. The grind-organ monkey is suddenly a monkey-wrench. I put it to you: What more can an old man do? The machine has not been built yet, and won’t be, that does not come down with the gripes while it digests a human being.

Mind you, I am not advocating income tax refusal; not I. For all I know the advocacy itself constitutes a felony, especially if it creates a clear and present danger that the Army won’t be able to buy a dozen young men with machine guns at the edge of the ditch in Mylai. Operating on a very low and cautious level, I say unto you only, Give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but don’t ask, “What can an old man do?” If you want Mylai, buy it; if you don’t want it, don’t. That’s the free enterprise system, and do you believe in the free enterprise system or are you some kind of a Communist?

Operating on the highest level of all, under a law that even the Supreme Court (Girouard, etc.) admits is higher than the Internal Revenue Act, Jesus Christ was asked by the Pharisees whose the tribute money was, and you know what he said and you know that he said it perceiving their wickedness. (Matt. 22:18.) If you have to choose between Christ and the Pharisee who, like the Pharisee of old, occupies the highest seat in the Temple, you are in a tight spot. I’d play it safe myself: Better to do time than eternity.

A biographical note accompanying the article says that “Mr. Mayer began his own tax refusal adventures more than twenty years ago. (He is the anti-hero of the $32.27 case he cites in this article.)”

David R. Henderson gives a more complete summary, with a more complete guest list, of the recent gathering of people from across the political spectrum who want to create a broad antiwar movement that I mentioned last month.

It sounds like it was a fascinating meeting of the minds and that it went well. Henderson says, “I emerged with more hope for the antiwar movement than I’ve had in a while.”

Henderson has been working hard to establish and maintain a left/right/libertarian anti-war coalition in Monterey, California. It requires some delicate stitch-work, but is showing promise. I included some observations by Henderson about individual responsibility for state actions in a Picket Line entry back in 2006, and also in We Won’t Pay.

That emerging left/right/libertarian anti-militarist coalition now has a homepage. There’s not much there yet (some more write-ups of the inaugural meeting from some of the participants), but there’s an RSS feed if you want to be notified when things get moving.

Paul Buhle, whose anti-militarist activism goes back to his time with Students for a Democratic Society in the Vietnam years, writes of the group’s first meeting: “There never was such a boundary-crossing event before, at least not in my 50 year political lifetime or any historical incident that I can recall.”

Ruth Benn was on a special Tax Day edition of Joyce Riley’s “Power Hour” after show-me-the-law style tax protester Peter Hendrickson. The Benn segment starts at about 33:00.

NWTRCC is keeping tabs on Tax Day war tax resistance protests nationwide at its site.

Meanwhile, Fox News contributor Ellen Ratner takes a look at the fledgling TEA Party / CodePink détente.

The Spring 2010 national NWTRCC gathering in Tucson, Arizona has been, as usual, a fruitful mix of experienced war tax resistance veterans and enthusiastic, curious, and somewhat uncertain newbies.

The agenda was less heavy this time than in the recent past — no contentious issues like the Peace Tax Fund Bill to worry us, and an improving budget situation. This left us plenty of time both to talk shop and to learn from local activists about their areas of expertise.

Friday night

Friday night we viewed the new war tax resistance film Death & Taxes and heard from Steev Hise, who directed the lion’s share of the filming and gave us some insight into the process, and from a couple of us who were in the film.

Film sales have exceeded our yearly projections already, half-way through the year, and everyone seems to report that the film is effective in spurring enthusiasm for and curiosity about war tax resistance.

Saturday morning

The meeting began, as such meetings often do, with a go-around-the-circle round of introductions. This also included updates about what local war tax resistance and other activists have been up to in recent months.

Erica Weiland addresses the meeting

Clare Hanrahan and Coleman Smith reported on their successful south-east regional war tax resistance gathering that was held at the beginning of the year. The opening of a new regional gathering (there’s a well-established one in New England already) was a priority for NWTRCC and so we were pleased to hear both that this meeting went well and that the organizers plan to make it an ongoing thing.

A number of people reported that their local groups were smaller and less-active this year than in the recent past. Most attributed this to the general dip in progressive activism during the Obama-sedation period, with some saying that they’ve noticed progressive activists so eager to distinguish themselves from TEA Party activists that they don’t want to associate themselves with a group whose focus is on tax resistance and they meet our message with more than the usual reluctance and defensiveness.

Still, there were the usual penny polls, literature tables, redirection granting ceremonies, and rallies on Tax Day this year, competing with dwindling but still sizable TEA Party crowds (that sometimes dilute our message and other times provide a media springboard for it).

The Nuclear Resister

Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa, who edit The Nuclear Resister, were our hosts and local organizers in Tucson. Their newsletter covers and organizes support for imprisoned anti-war / anti-nuke civil disobedients, including the occasional war tax resister.

They spoke about their work and about anti-nuclear activism in general, such as the actions coordinated by an international coalition to focus on the 40^th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Opposition to nuclear power has been on the wane, both because few new nuclear power plants have started in the United States recently, and because nuclear power has been greenwashed as a potential solution for global warming and other consequences of hydrocarbon fuel. Jack thinks the greenwashing is hooey, that nuclear power — seen over its whole lifecycle — is neither energy efficient nor emissions-friendly, and that the nuclear power industry is tightly linked with nuclear weapons and that the real reason we have a nuclear power industry has much less to do with electricity than with maintaining an infrastructure, knowledge-base, and the raw materials for a perpetual nuclear arsenal.

There was also some discussion of the campaign to divest from Israel, modeled on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign directed against South Africa.

Border activism

If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ll know that government harassment of immigrants is a big issue in Arizona right now, as the state government just enacted legislation that it promises will usher in a more draconian crackdown on illegal immigrants. There have been calls to boycott the state, and so there was some embarrassment that our group had decided to go through with its meeting here.

On the other hand, we met in part, and many of us stayed the night during our stay, at BorderLinks, a group that specializes in ameliorating the effects of government policy in this area. So we helped to support this work, a bit anyway, by our housing fees. BorderLinks, at least, was glad we didn’t cancel our conference.

Reviewing a map of recent deaths of immigrants in the desert near the Arizona/Mexico border

This also gave us an opportunity to learn from local border-issues activists, who had no difficulty pointing out both the close relation between our groups (a number of border-issues activists are also war tax resisters), and that because of the increasing militarization of border enforcement, war tax resistance is directly applicable to their struggle.

The repulsive border wall, and increased border patrol enforcement in general, have not stopped people from crossing the border, but have merely forced the immigrant trails to be more arduous. Crossing the border has become more deadly as the safer routes become more difficult to pass. Humanitarian groups have responded to the crisis by trying to put bottled-water and first aid stations along the newer routes, actively patrolling to come to the aid of people who are lost, injured, or dehydrated, and setting up desert camps where people can stop along the way. Such efforts are, naturally, subject to sporadic government harassment.

What of the TEA Party?

Saturday afternoon I ran a War Tax Resistance 101 workshop for people who were just getting their feet wet or who were preparing to take the plunge. This group was eager and enthusiastic going in, and, I think, came out of the workshop even more so, and with some more practical pointers on how to take the next step, whichever step that is for them.

The afternoon session ended with a group brainstorm about the relationship between organized war tax resistance groups like ours and the TEA Party movement.

Ruth Benn addresses the gathering

Some of us see the TEA Party as an embarrassing distraction on Tax Day, and think it is important that we clearly distinguish our message from theirs so that war tax resistance doesn’t get confused in the public eye as some sort of TEA Party variant.

Others felt that there is enough common ground between war tax resisters and some portion of the TEA Partiers that we might be well-served by trying to do some outreach, which might hold the hope of introducing the tactic of war tax resistance to antimilitarist libertarians, isolationist paleoconservatives, and the other radical government skeptics who make up one tendency in the TEA Party. For instance, Joffre Stewart reported having recruited a new phone tax resister from within the TEA Party ranks at one of their rallies.

Your Picket Line international tax resistance round-up:

• Neue Rheinische Zeitung covers Germany’s Netzwerk Friedenssteuer, or “peace tax network.” This includes resisters like Dorothee Sölle, and like Brigitte Janus, who refuses to pay her taxes and instead submits to seizure. The article also briefly mentions the recent international conference in Norway. Sölle is quoted as saying of the war tax resistance movement: “Success cannot be our only criterion. There are things you must do so that you remain human.” (Or something like that. The quote is in German, which I do not understand.)
• The right-wing, decentralist Liberal Democratic Movement of Carabobo, Venezuela is hinting at a tax resistance campaign. Upset at deteriorating public safety and infrastructure, and alleging that local taxes are being siphoned off to wasteful federal spending and a bloated local bureaucracy, Enio Daza, autonomism director of the Carabobo branch of the party, suggested that locals organize their own, independent tax office, and pay their taxes there where they could exercise local control over the spending.
• A similar movement is brewing in Sicily, where a group of residents angered at government neglect of the sewer system, public lighting, the water supply, and waste collection, has proposed a tax strike.
• West Coast Cannabis profiles tax resister J. Tony Serra, who is also active in the cannabis legalization cause. He is skeptical of an upcoming California ballot initiative to legalize-and-tax marijuana. “Once it is legalized the greedy corporations will get their hands in it and it creates this corporate moral disability. Some large dispensaries already practice acts of corporate moral disability. I want it to stay with the mammas and the pappas. The small and unique places. I want the government out of my closet. It should be free, man. I am never for more taxes. I am a tax resister.”
• The Albert Einstein Institution has released a new, free booklet, Self-Liberation: A Guide to Strategic Planning for Action to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression. The booklet contains several selections by Gene Sharp and others about how to use “people power” in the form of nonviolent struggle against repressive governments.
• In the sort of scene that is coming, more and more, to characterize 21^st Century America, county health inspectors shut down a little girl’s lemonade stand for lacking a $120 permit, leaving her in tears. Now a group of free-market anarchists are organizing a lemonade-in in support.

Here’s some encouraging news: While the American left seems to be willing to give Obama a pass on the whole Guantanamo, assassinations, Iraq megabases, undeclared drone wars all over, ever-expanding military budgets, Afghanistan escalation thing, the American right may be starting to grow skeptical.

A couple of data points:

• Grover Norquist (he who so successfully holds legislators’ feet to the fire about their anti-tax-raising pledges) invokes the spirit of Ronald Reagan (specifically, his hasty retreat from Lebanon) in encouraging conservatives to start questioning America’s wars.

  Norquist said conservatives recognize the weakness of the arguments for the war, which is why they don’t often make them.

  He scoffed at the notion that fighting two wars was making American stronger. “Being tied up there does not advance American power,” he said. “If you’ve got a fist in the tar baby Iraq and you’ve got a fist in the tar baby Afghanistan, then who’s afraid of you?”

• A new poll finds support for the Afghanistan War is weak on the right. Two-thirds of self-identified conservatives polled think the U.S. should reduce troop levels in Afghanistan or withdraw completely, and fewer than half say they think the war was worth fighting.

Meanwhile, Obama squad member Jeh C. Johnson, now the Department of Defense’s general counsel, gave a speech at a Pentagon commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. claiming that King would support the war were he alive today.

The new issue of More Than a Paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter, is now on-line, featuring the following stories:

• No to War Again — a lead-off editorial about the evergreen resistance tactic of war tax resistance now that we’re confronting yet another war, this time in Libya
• Alternative Funds — Happy Birthdays — two war tax resisters’ redirection funds turn 40 this year
• Mikel Komba reports on the Global Women’s Strike actions in Wisconsin
• Some notes on tax law and IRS policy changes
• Jason Rawn and Jesse Watson advocate links between war tax resisters and permaculture groups
• Some ideas and actions, reports of the passing of three veteran resisters, and an update on imprisoned resisters Frank Donnelly and Carlos Steward
• Resources that will come in handy as you enter the season of tax protests and protests against military spending
• An invitation to the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in Berkeley and Oakland next month
• A profile of and by war tax resister Rod Nippert

There’s a myth about how Leon Czolgosz became an anarchist that goes like this:

Czolgosz came from a Roman Catholic family, but despite their religious beliefs, on their way back from celebrating the 1900 new year in Cleveland they stopped in at the modest home of a notorious soothsayer.

When they arrived, there was already a small crowd of people who had come to hear if the old man had any predictions for the coming century. He did. There was a woman leaning down with her ear to the old man’s mouth, listening to what he said and trying to translate the gist of it to the assembly.

“He says that mankind will be decimated by its rulers in the coming century — there will be great wars that kill millions of people.” She leaned down again. “Millions of people will be killed in these wars, but even worse slaughter will come when the governments of the world turn on their own people — they will literally decimate their people.” She leaned down again. “Literally ‘decimate’ — if the angel of death traveled over the world today and visited each person, man woman and child, and killed with its breath every tenth person it visited, it would extinguish fewer lives than the governments of the world will murder off of the field of war in the next hundred years.”

Someone muttered “anarchist” and turned on his heel and left with his family, and that’s when Leon became an anarchist. He shot and killed William McKinley, then president of the United States government, in 1901, and was executed that same year. As it turns out, the prophecy came true, fifteen years ahead of schedule.

Here are a couple of encouraging signs that the American anti-war movement might be coming back to life:

• A large coalition of anti-war groups are coordinating “a powerful and sustained nonviolent resistance” campaign beginning in October 2011 in Washington, D.C.. Under this umbrella you’ll find groups like ANSWER, CodePink, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Progressive Democrats of America, Veterans for Peace, and World Can’t Wait, and participants like Ann Wright, Bill Moyer, Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Cynthia McKinney, Dave Rovics, Derrick Jensen, Jodie Evans, Kevin Zeese, Medea Benjamin, Mike Ferner, Michael Lerner, and Ted Rall.
• Meanwhile, the Come Home, America coalition is trying to make anti-war isolationism respectable again by coalescing a set of anti-war groups from across the American political spectrum around a call to bring American troops home from unsavory foreign wars. “Signers include advisers to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton; former presidential candidates of the Libertarian, Socialist, and Green parties, as well as an independent, Ralph Nader; representatives of think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Independent Institute, the Future of Freedom Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Just Foreign Policy have signed on. And editors from a wide range of publications, including The American Conservative, Antiwar.com, Black Agenda Report, Black Commentator, FireDogLake.com, Liberty for All, Liberty for America, OpEdNews.com, The Progressive, Progressive Review, Raw Story, and Reason have all signed on.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Now’s a good time to sign up for the Fall 2011 NWTRCC National Gathering in Kansas City this November.
• The Tax Update Blog notes the rise in the number of Americans who are expatriating and renouncing citizenship. Joe Kristan attributes this to new government regulations requiring Americans who live and work overseas to report the details of their bank accounts to the IRS or face draconian fines.
• Robert Burrowes gives an update on the state of war tax resistance in Australia.

  War tax resistance in Australia is difficult not only because few people have the required level of commitment but also because of the government’s high level of control over tax payments (employers are required to deduct tax from income before the employee gets it and this is done in such a way that most employees get a refund after submitting their annual tax return).

  …the ATO has already used most of its powers against me: seizing my bank account (1984), garnisheeing wages (twice), bankruptcy (1991, effectively for life because I will not cooperate), a contempt of court conviction for refusing to cooperate with the bankruptcy trustee (1992) and seizure of my passport (1993).

  Burrows is now working on something called The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World which is due to launch this Armistice Day.
• NWTRCC has released a brief outreach flier about Anarchists and War Tax Resistance that tries to show how war tax resistance as a tactic fits in to anarchist activism.
• Some grist for the progressive mill: The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and Don’t Tax the Rich, Smash Their Privilege
• June Farrow, a 72-year-old from England, is resisting her council tax — or most of it anyway — on the grounds that she simply can’t afford it. “It didn’t bother me going to court because I feel that somebody’s got to speak up for all pensioners who often cannot speak up for themselves. They’ll probably send the bailiffs in, but I haven’t got anything in this house that’s worth anything. I’ve sold everything off to help me stay in my home, unless they’d like to take the dog — she’s the only valuable thing I’ve got.… They’ve told me that if I spend my savings — another £3,000 — I will get benefits. I don’t want benefits. I’m an independent person and I like to try and look after myself. Hundreds of pensioners are in the same position as me and the law has got to be changed.” Here’s another, more detailed article about the Farrow case.

Speaking of council tax resisters, here’s another one, from last year:

Courier refused to pay council tax while travellers camped at layby

Protester could have bank account frozen

A north-east man who staged a council-tax protest against travellers camped illegally near his home has been told his bank account could be frozen and his property seized.

Billy Thomson told Aberdeenshire Council he would not pay his council tax while travellers were camped in a layby at Garlogie.

Now, the authority has called in sheriff officers, who have threatened to freeze the self-employed courier’s bank account and seize property from his home in an attempt to force him to pay the £700 bill.

The 59-year-old first took a stand against the authority when caravans were parked in the layby on the B9119 Aberdeen to Echt road for nearly a year in 2005.

When the travellers left he began paying his council tax again, but stopped in 2008 when travellers camped there for about four months.

The layby has since been shut to prevent travellers from returning.

Mr Thomson, of Garlogie Cottages, said he respected travellers’ rights, but criticised the council for “persecuting me, but not them”.

He said: “While the travellers were parked there no one could use the layby, and it had been a well-used service.

“I decided that from then on, when these people are parked there without paying council tax, neither would I.

“I know a lot of travellers — they are decent people and I respect their choice of lifestyle, but Aberdeenshire Council has shown double standards.”

Mr Thomson said he first received notice that Aberdeenshire Council was seeking the unpaid tax when he received a letter from the authority earlier this year.

He said he took the letter to the council’s Inverurie office seeking an explanation as to why the authority was seeking payment from him but not the travellers, but “never got a straight answer”.

“I cannot see any difference between me not paying my council tax and the travellers not paying it,” he said.

A spokesman for Aberdeenshire Council said: “We take the recovery of council tax very seriously and we continue to make efforts to collect tax which has not been paid.”

For those of you who don’t speak English as the English do, “travellers” I think refers to either vagrants, gypsies, or Irish Travellers; while a “lay-by” is something like a highway rest stop.

Here’s another example:

Protest at bumpy road danger zone

A former landlady who claims her life is being made a “misery” by unfinished speed bumps is making a council tax protest.

June Robinson has canceled her council tax direct debit in a bid to make council bosses listen to her pleas for help.

The 62-year-old is kept awake by traffic bumping over four unfinished speed ramps at the junction of Beach Road and Beach Avenue in Cleveleys.

She said: “It’s made my life a misery. It’s been going on 10 weeks — bang, bump everyday. I wake up at 5am with the bangs. I’ve got a crack in my bedroom because of the vibrations.…”

These all have in common a mode of tax resistance that’s relatively rare in the United States — refusing to pay a tax because the government is charging too much or providing too little in return, as though the government were a subscription you could cancel when you decided it wasn’t worth the cost (would that it were).

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• A Ron Paul Republican going by the name Simon Rierdon has decided to shrug, saying “the past two tax seasons when I’ve had to fork over thousands of dollars to a government that I don’t think is legitimate, and even more, murderous, has made me rethink my priorities.”
• A liberal group going by the name War Costs is swimming upstream against the tide of military contractor lobbyists and trying to put America’s cancerous military spending on the agenda of the Congressional deficit committee.
• Speaking of putting military spending on the agenda, you might consider dropping this article in the inbox of your climate activist friends. It talks about the impact of America’s military adventures on climate-changing atmospheric emissions. “The Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements” and uses an enormous amount of fossil fuel. According to the article, the war in Iraq itself was a bigger contributor to annual CO₂ emissions than 139 of the world’s nations.

I’ve lately been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Blood of Others. In general I seem to be able to get a better feel for French existentialists from their fiction than from their essays and lectures — at least where Camus and Sartre are concerned. De Beauvoir is considerably less coy here than they were, in their novels, about making her fiction primarily a way of illustrating existentialist philosophy. For example, this scene, in which Hélène ponders with her lover the question “why do we live?”:

“When I was small, I believed in God, and it was wonderful; at every moment of the day something was required of me; then it seemed to me that I must exist. It was an absolute necessity.”

I smiled sympathetically at her. “I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.”

“But when we know that we’ve found them ourselves, we can’t believe in them. It’s only a way of deceiving ourselves.”

“Why? You don’t find them just like that — out of thin air. We discover them through the strength of a love or a desire, and then what we have found rises before us, solid and real.”

or this argument:

“People are free,” I said, “but only so far as they themselves are concerned; we can neither touch, foresee, nor insist on them using their liberty. That is what I find so painful; the intrinsic worth of an individual exists only for him, not for me; I can only get as far as his outward actions, and to him I am nothing more than an outer appearance, an absurd set of premises; premises that I do not even choose to be…”

“Then don’t get excited,” said Marcel; “if you don’t even make the choice, why punish yourself?”

“I don’t choose to exist, but I am. An absurdity that is responsible for itself, that’s exactly what I am.”

“Well, there must be something.”

“But there might be something else…”

or this steamy existentialist love scene:

“I need you because I love you,” I said.

You were in my arms, and my heart was heavy on account of those cowardly festive echoes and because I was lying to you. Crushed by all those things which existed in spite of me and from which I was separated only by my own anguish. There is nothing left. Nobody on that bed; before me lies a gaping void. And the anguish comes into its own, alone in the void, beyond the vanished things. I am alone. I am that anguish which exists alone, in spite of me; I am merged with that blind existence. In spite of me and yet issuing only from myself. Refuse to exist; I exist. Decide to exist; I exist. Refuse. Decide. I exist. There will be a dawn.

So, yeah… it gets a little heavy-handed at times. But sometimes a lay-it-on-thick melodrama is the best way of getting a philosophy across.

Coincidentally, de Beauvoir also features in a recent op-ed by Ross Kenyon from the Center for a Stateless Society. Kenyon is responding to Ron Paul’s recent appearance on The Daily Show in which Paul tried to sell his idiosyncratic libertarian-leaning Republican presidential candidacy to Jon Stewart’s largely liberal fan base.

If you believe that the global environment is in dire straits of a sort that are going to require drastic, compulsory, large-scale changes, you may ask incredulously how a small-government, regulation-loathing libertarian thinks they can handle it. Isn’t a libertarian paradise just one in which people are free to dump their sewage in the well (or, in Stewart’s question: dioxin in the river)?

Paul’s answer: “I think the environment would be better protected by strict property rights. I was raised in a city, in Pittsburgh, where the sewers were the rivers and the corporations did it in collusion with the government… All you have to say is you have no right to pollute your neighbor’s property, water, air, or anything and you wouldn’t have the politicians writing the laws and exempting certain companies. They come, they write the laws, then they exempt themselves and then they trade permits to pollute the air.”

This isn’t really a small-government solution at all, but one that takes environmental regulation out of the hands of bureaucratic regulators (who are easily captured by the industries they regulate) and puts it in the hands of judges who decide lawsuits based on actual damages and the laws in force. This might in fact be a better way of regulating something like dioxin in the river, but I have a hard time seeing it working for regulating auto emissions or fighting global climate change. There are lots of problems with bureaucratic regulators, but there are also lots of problems with judges and tort law. Simply kicking the ball from one to the other doesn’t solve anything. Paul’s call to simplify the law to a “thou shalt not pollute thy neighbor’s property” is better, but unrealistic and oversimplified. What counts as pollution, who counts as “thou,” and what counts as property are all political questions that are subject to the same political warping that plagues current regulations.

But I digress. Here’s what Kenyon has to say on the subject:

Ron Paul claimed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on September 26^th that market discipline is stricter than government discipline. This claim depends upon a number of institutions being set up wherein the true costs of production and consumption are actually being internalized by those doing the producing and consuming rather than being spread between hapless taxpayers as they currently are.

Now, Ron Paul definitely thinks these institutions should replace our current framework as one can see if one watches the extended interview. In it he elaborates upon his position regarding how he believes stronger property rights and a free market would serve environmental ends. The merit of this ecological argument will not be examined in this op-ed; however, this abstraction of the market needs to stop immediately.

We are “the market.” We are all “market forces.” We are the ones Ron Paul is proposing to have more power to discipline wrongdoers via torts, direct action, voting with our dollar, and protest. Libertarians do not believe in delegating this authority away from ourselves as that act of concession will lead to regulatory capture and the centralization of power and economy. The market is absolutely not an external process we can afford to just sit back and watch transpire before us.

The “market” itself is conventionally viewed as a concept which symbolizes the aggregation of all acts of production and consumption committed under the institutions of private property and its subsequent division of labor and the price mechanism. When this process is unhindered by unwise barriers (government-enforced or market actor-endorsed) it generally allows for people to clear goods very successfully and to great material gain for all participants. However, the acts of producing and consuming in and of themselves have no moral content. All a free market means is that what is effectively demanded will be efficiently supplied, and if we demand garbage then we will have garbage. This freedom to choose connotes the responsibility to choose well or the world in which we might live may not be very much better than the one we have now.

Simone de Beauvoir writes astutely in The Ethics of Ambiguity, “…the present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action; we can not avoid living it through a project; and there is no project which is purely contemplative since one always projects himself toward something, toward the future; to put oneself ‘outside’ is still a way of living the inescapable fact that one is inside; those French intellectuals who, in the name of history, poetry, or art, sought to rise above the drama of the [age of World War Ⅱ], were willy-nilly its actors; more of less explicitly, they were playing the occupier’s game. Likewise, the Italian aesthete, occupied in caressing the marbles and bronzes of Florence, is playing a political role in the life of his country by his very inertia. One can not justify all that is by asserting that everything may equally be the object of contemplation, since man never contemplates: he does.”

This freedom to choose is seen by most people with the same immobilizing terror which the existentialists rhapsodized upon. If we want our freedom to choose poorly, we must be wise enough to choose well. Faced with the responsibility to pay attention to the world around us and actually decide for ourselves what to support with our money and moral approval; with what to cherish and what to rally against for the sake of one’s principles, it is no real surprise that people generally favor delegating their role as a punishing or rewarding market force to someone with political power. “I have to think?! Get this terrible burden of responsibility away from me!”

Freedom is work, and there is no abstracting one’s self out of the market as if it were some independent process outside of ourselves that “will take care of everything.” The market is us. Push us toward a better world by demanding wisely if you can bear it, as anyone who would dare call themselves an adult should be prepared to do. Otherwise, we truly are not ready for the freedom Ron Paul and our American platitudes have prepared us for.

Kenyon made a similar point in a recent rejoinder to a common libertarian argument about sweatshop labor. In the argument he is responding to, sweatshop (and other degrading or dangerous) labor, while it may look unsavory, is perhaps the best option for those involved in it — that is to say that the available alternatives are even worse. If we were to boycott sweatshop-produced products or insist on only purchasing “fair trade” products, the unintended results of this would be to push the sweatshop laborers or “unfair trade” workers back on their next-best opportunities — that is, on options that are even more degrading, dangerous, or unremunerative.

The usual left-libertarian argument against this is that the fact that these awful alternatives are the only ones available to the workers is not a natural fact of the free market in operation, but is the result of a long history of abusive collusion between business and government to restrict the rights of workers and the availability of resources.

That argument has the advantage of being correct, informative, and revealing, but has the disadvantage of skirting the issue of what the ethical thing is to do in the here-and-now with regard to sweatshop (etc.) produced goods. Boycotting them may very well screw the workers who are making them without necessarily doing anything to alleviate the conditions that make sweatshop labor relatively appealing to them. Sweatshop advocates, in contrast, can point to examples in which countries seem to have passed through a phase of sweatshop-dominated industry on their way to something better. Maybe, they suggest, supporting sweatshops is counterintuitively the best way of making them obsolete.

Kenyon responds:

If the market is to be free so that what is demanded is supplied, then we should accept the responsibility to demand in the marketplace production models which foster a fuller and more complete conception of human dignity than work in a sweatshop typically allows.

…I have come to believe that libertarianism is primarily cultural. If we want to be free from government regulation of our values and the perilous centralization of power which typically ensues then the responsibility will fall directly upon us to choose wisely and regulate the market ourselves via voting with one’s dollar, torts, direct action, and protest or the world which we will create under freedom may not be very much better than what we have now. We cannot abstract ourselves out of the market by saying things like, “we’ll just let the market take care of it,” because we are the market. If we don’t take our charge seriously of what to condemn and support financially and morally, then why are we even bothering with this freedom thing? If I wanted to just sit back and delegate all of my responsibility regarding what should be happening in the world to external forces then my selection of libertarianism as a philosophy would be a terrible mistake.

…[I]f there is no government but only the market, and we actually are the market, then it is up to us to create a better and more virtuous world. No one else is going to do it for us.

We don’t always have to just buy the cheapest goods. In fact, I think we as libertarians ought to make a commitment to being very conscious regarding what we consume, effectively shifting the demand curve toward more human dignity, which is constantly undervalued by virtually everyone. The signals that one sends in the marketplace clearly communicate what sort of world one wishes to live in and what one actually values. If one wants the freedom to choose poorly, one should take seriously the responsibility of choosing wisely. Otherwise, we aren’t ready for liberty, and it probably wouldn’t be worth the struggle anyways.

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
• Some news briefs, including these notes of particular interest:
  • 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.
• A profile by and of war tax resister Lauren Tepper

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• Kathleen DeLaney Thomas thinks the key to the government collecting more tax money is to devise new ways to make people feel guilty about evading their taxes. She calls this technique raising “The Psychic Cost of Tax Evasion” in order to reduce the expected gains of evasion. Papers like these can sometimes be read between-the-lines or at a bit of an angle to hint at techniques that dissidents can use to encourage tax resistance, either by reducing the psychic cost of tax evasion, or by increasing the psychic cost of tax compliance.
• The president of Veneto, Luca Zaia, and Roberto Maroni, president of Lombardy, both prominent Italian Northern League politicians, have continued that party’s tradition of big talk about tax resistance with a vow to resist taxes if the national government cuts health-care spending in the regions. The presidents claim that their regions have slimmer, more efficient governments and have reined in health-care costs more than those in the south of Italy, and that they shouldn’t be punished for this by having their health care subsidies reduced.
• Patrick Howley, a “political reporter” with a conservative bent, has reacted to the “IRS Scandal” that the American right-wing is all excited about by going on a one-man tax strike. “I did not pay my taxes this year. I just didn’t have the money,” he wrote. “Now I will not pay my taxes until every single Lois Lerner email is released and the people who planned and carried out this governmental travesty are held accountable.”
• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC writes about the war tax resister presence at the recent climate change march in New York City.

The latest NWTRCC newsletter is out, with content including:

• Outreach notes as war tax resisters represent at the Veterans for Peace Conference in North Carolina, the Southern Movement Assembly in Georgia, and the Climate March in New York
• A letter from imprisoned counter-recruitment activist Norman Lowry
• News for resisters about IRS “frivolous filing penalty” threats, difficulties appealing the IRS’s “dummy returns,” a new income reporting loophole resisters may be able to take advantage of, and guidance about how many W-4 allowances to claim
• Clark Hanjian claims in these omnimilitarized times, “There are no civilians.”
• Ideas and Actions including a variant on the traditional “penny poll,” a list of some upcoming events of note, and an invitation to give NWTRCC feedback on its website
• Some new resources and books that are available from NWTRCC
• Some debate about climate change and of how NWTRCC fits in to the modern environmental movement
• Erica Weiland on how police militarization makes Ferguson a war tax resistance issue

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

War Tax Resistance

• Erica Weiland notes that while there may not be an ongoing military draft conscripting soldiers in the U.S., if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you have already been drafted.
• Peg Morton writes of the opportunity she had to help the war tax resistance of John Lindsay-Poland through her participation in the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an interview with long-time anti-nuclear activist Frances Crowe. In that interview, she touches on her war tax resistance:

  I no longer pay federal taxes, but I do file. I set up a trust, and put everything in my children’s names, so I own nothing. But the government does take money out of my social security, and I donate a sum equivalent to my federal taxes to charity.

  So, I try to put a third of my “tax money” into repairing the damages of war — I’ve been helping a woman go to school in Afghanistan, and I gave a thousand dollars for her to pay for tuition this year. I do things like that, and help this cancer clinic in Iraq. And a third goes to peace centers in this country. It costs me money, but it’s worth it for my conscience.

• American Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak explains how he came to take his stand, and how his Meeting supported him when he went to jail for it:

• Henry Braun, a poet and Vietnam-era war tax resister, died recently. “In the 1960s, he organized poetry readings against the Vietnam war and participated in the War Tax Resistance movement. He was convicted of tax evasion because he chose to give a portion of his taxes to the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital and to the city’s public schools.”
• War tax resisters who hope to get some legal blessing for their stand have traditionally appealed either to the legislature (by lobbying for something like a “peace tax fund” bill), or to the courts (by trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation recognized as a protected right). But Leigh Osofsky, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami, reminds us that the executive branch, too, has discretion in how it enforces the tax law — refusing to enforce some parts of it and enforcing other parts of it in selective or spotty ways.

Other Links of Interest

• Colin Donoghue’s meditation on “The Root Injustice, & A Real Way Forward to a Sustainable Society” tries to unravel the tangle that happens when people try to promote progressive ends by means of an inherently inegalitarian, coercive, privilege-entrenching institution like government.
• The latest numbers suggest that a record number of people will renounce their U.S. citizenship in 2014.
• After a New York Times exposé about the IRS’s use of civil forfeiture to seize money from innocent people, the agency released a statement announcing that it would be reforming its use of the practice.

A new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter is out, with content including:

• Jason Rawn shows how war tax resistance can fit into a campaign of climate-oriented divestment.
• Sue Barnhart memorializes the recently passed war tax resister Peg Morton.
• International news concerning peace tax fund promoters in London, a global campaign on military spending congress in Berlin, and war tax resisters doing direct action at a barracks in Bilbao.
• A profile of war tax resister Anne Barron.

Some links from here and there:

• There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter out, with content that includes:
  • Joining an “Extinction Rebellion” protest — Ruth Benn says that while XR is “a little too focused on its own brand” there may be some common ground to be found with the climate emergency protesters and the war tax resistance movement.
  • Mennonite Church creates a “Peace Tax Fund” — a report back from the Mennonite Church USA national gathering, where a war tax redirection fund was relaunched.
  • Joseph Olejak reflects on what he did when his war tax resistance led the government to revoke his professional license.
  • Suzanne Belote Shanley and Brayton Shanley of the Agape Community interviewed.
• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael E. Bowman is back in the news. Among the latest details are that Bowman was first targeted by the IRS because of his involvement in a tax protest scheme cooked up by Joseph Saladino. He is trying a Religious Freedom Restoration Act defense (which is also a long-shot contemplated by some U.S. war tax resisters), and is also putting forward the theory that because he got away with not filing returns for eighteen years, he therefore had a reasonable belief that what he was doing was lawful. Bowman has had some success in court in the past, with a judge ruling that his actions of cashing his paychecks rather than depositing them (so as to avoid IRS levies) did not constitute criminal evasion.
• The IRS seems to be getting more aggressive about trying to get passports revoked from people who have large tax debts. Under the law, if a taxpayer owes more than $52,000 and isn’t doing anything about it, the agency is supposed to inform the State Department. The State Department is then required to not issue or renew a passport to the scofflaw, and may also revoke their existing passport. The IRS is trying to convince State to put that “may” to use. The agency says it plans to send out Letter 6152 (“Notice of Intent to Request U.S. Department of State Revoke Your Passport”) to some tax delinquents, after which it will lobby the State Department to take stronger action (of this advice State can still, as far as I can tell, take it or leave it).
• Attacks on traffic ticket radar robots continue, with French resisters disabling them as quickly as the government can prop them back up. Attacks have also taken place in recent weeks in Germany, England, and Spain.

In other news:

• At the NWTRCC national conference this month, attendees considered whether or how war tax resistance harmonizes with environmental activism.
• American war tax resisters also made their presence felt at the School of the Americas Watch gathering and the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.
• Attacks on traffic-ticket-generating radar cameras continue, most recently in Italy and France, and in Latvia, Russia, France, and Reunion.