How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns
While I was working my way through the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience and trying my hand at some amateur translation, interesting links were accumulating in my bookmarks.
I’ll share some of these today:
The erosion of the IRS budget and the expansion of its responsibilities has led to a drop in revenue from its collections/enforcement branch.
“Diminished enforcement could also affect voluntary compliance over time,” according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report that revealed the numbers.
The IRS has shed about 8,000 jobs , the report said.
It comes as the IRS is taking on big new responsibilities implementing President Barack Obama’s new health care law, with congressional Republicans wanting to cut the agency’s budget even more.
Dublin household and water charge strikers are fighting back against government attempts to install water meters that would enforce the new tax.
This video demonstrates how resisters have poured concrete blocks to prevent the installation of the meters:
War tax resister Ed Hedemann appeared on Breaking The Set to explain “how Americans can stop financially supporting the military industrial complex by withholding taxes”:
I have released my book 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns as a free, on-line e-book.
I updated it with some examples from campaigns that erupted since its original publication.
I also changed the title to the snappier Tax Strike Tactics.
A tax resistance campaign will be more successful if it takes advantage of the rich resources history provides.
But there are better and worse ways to go about that.
Superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful activist movement.
There are four common varieties of tax resister with distinct goals.
Learn what to do if your campaign contains resisters of multiple varieties who, as a result, may find it hard to agree on tactics.
As an example of such a conundrum, consider the modern American war tax resistance movement, which is challenged by containing resisters of all four varieties.
Your tax resistance campaign is less likely to succeed if it limits itself to tax resistance.
To be most successful, your campaign must deploy an appropriate and effective set of tactics on a number of additional fronts.
You also must decide whether to make a commitment to nonviolence.
Beware of the temptations to petulant protest or to make a fetish out of getting arrested, which can distract a campaign from its proper goals.
The heart of a tax resistance campaign is its resisters.
A successful campaign encourages, supports, and sustains these resisters, and facilitates their resistance.
Tactics in this category are also opportunities for people who are sympathetic to the campaign but who are unable to resist paying taxes themselves.
People who cannot resist taxes directly can support those who can and do.
For many tax resistance campaigns there is strength in numbers.
When enough people resist, the government’s ability either to fight back or to ignore the problem falters.
Successful tax resistance campaigns make it easier for people to begin resisting, and they also develop ways to reduce attrition in the movement.
Governments combat tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns with a variety of weapons.
They may arrest and detain resisters, seize and sell their property, declare them outlaws, exile them, and so forth.
Your resistance campaign should anticipate that as it becomes more successful, the government will use increasingly fierce and desperate methods to fight back—and you should be prepared to adopt tactics that limit the effectiveness of these countermeasures.
When you introduce new resistance techniques, you stay one step ahead of government countermeasures, you keep your movement from growing stale and becoming “yesterday’s news,” and you bring in new resisters who find the new techniques more appealing or practical than the old ones.
Communicating well can be crucial to the success of your campaign.
Evaluate your tactics with an eye not only to their primary effects, but also to the message they send.
In some cases, the message is the primary effect of the tactic (even when this is not what you had in mind).
Good communication helps you recruit resisters and blunts the effects of the government’s countermeasures.
It can also help your campaign develop the support and sympathy of non-participants, and even of former antagonists.
What does victory look like?
In some tax resistance campaigns, it seems obvious: perhaps it is the abolition of an odious tax, or the overthrow of the government, or the recognition of the rights of the disenfranchised, or a particular change in state policy.
But in some cases it is not so obvious, and in other cases the obvious answer isn’t necessarily the best one.
There are even campaigns in which the resisters don’t seem to have given much thought to victory at all—as though they were resigned to being a perpetual opposition movement.
Perhaps, contrary to what the organizers of the world are always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to organize at all.
You don’t need to build a majority, or a critical mass, or a disciplined revolutionary vanguard.
Just get your own house in order and commit yourself to your own one-person revolution—that’s the most crucial, practical, and effective thing you can be doing right now.
So while the previous chapters have concentrated on tactics that help tax resistance movements succeed, this chapter will consider how tax resisters can succeed even without being part of a movement.
Now it’s time to apply what you’ve learned to strengthen your own tax resistance campaign.
In this exercise, you’ll methodically and carefully examine your campaign, looking at its strengths, its weaknesses, its vulnerabilities, and its potential.
You’ll then choose some new tactics to strengthen your campaign on the fronts where it is weakest or most vulnerable.
