Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
the danger of “feel-good” protests →
“symbolic” tax protests? →
the “Peace Tax Fund,” legal conscientious objection to military taxation →
back-door judicial peace tax fund in the U.S.? or in Bolivia?
For some time now there have been difficult-to-substantiate rumors that conscientious objectors to military taxation in Italy have been redirecting their taxes from the military to non-violent civil defense organizations without a “Peace Tax” law in place, but with the approval of judges who accepted their conscientious objection and their sincere efforts to pay their taxes in a way that does not violate their beliefs.
Now there are signs that a method of conscientious objection to military taxation may sneak in to the United States in a similar judicial back-door fashion.
Leo J. Volpe was a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ who was convicted of draft evasion in .
He and three other Jehovah’s Witnesses unsuccessfully claimed that they, and all Jehovah’s Witnesses, were “Ministers of Religion” and therefore exempt from military service.
In , Volpe also stopped paying federal income tax.
He spent four months in prison in after being convicted of tax evasion.
Volpe later founded his own small religious group, now known as The Restored Israel of YAHWEH, in which he played the part of an incarnation of the prophet Jeremiah and spent a lot of time speculating about the End Times.
The mysterious number 666, for instance, is a cipher combining the names “United States America,” “Union Soviet Socialist Russia” and “Pope Paul.”
Conscientious objection and war tax resistance are among the tenets of Volpe’s group:
In a former member, rattled by news coverage of the Branch Davidian massacre in Waco, left the group and ratted them out to the IRS.
In , three members of the group were arrested and charged with “conspiring to defraud the United States for the purpose of impeding, impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful government functions of the IRS in ascertaining, computing, assessing, and collecting taxes; Tax Evasion; and Failure to File Tax Returns.”
The prosecution and IRS agreed that they would consider the idea.
On , the judge will consider whatever they come up with and will make his own decision.
It’s certainly possible, even likely, that the prosecution agreed to consider the judge’s proposal out of tactical politeness but that they will not actually be willing to support something so unusual.
On the other hand, they may see this as a win-win and let it slip through, especially since otherwise the defendants are likely to resist any remaining taxes and penalties with the same righteous vigor with which they resisted the taxation in the first place.
Susan Pace Hamill, a law professor at the University of Alabama, has spent a lot of time trying to persuade people that Jesus (yes, the Jesus) had a strong opinion about tax policy that just happens to coincide for the most part with the sentiments of liberal Democrats.
Seriously.
Check this out:
I… provide a complete theological framework that can be applied to any tax policy structure.… I prove that tax policy structures meeting the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics must raise adequate revenues that not only cover the needs of the minimum state but also ensure that all citizens have a reasonable opportunity to reach their potential.
Among other things, reasonable opportunity requires adequate education, healthcare, job training and housing.… I also establish that flat and consumption tax regimes which shift a large part of the burden to the middle classes are immoral.
Consequently, Judeo-Christian based tax policy requires the tax burden to be allocated under a moderately progressive regime.
I discuss the difficulties of defining that precisely and also conclude that confiscatory tax policy approaching a socialistic framework are also immoral.
Inspired perhaps by the mighty guffaw that Hamill’s scholarship gave me, I decided to take another look at what Jesus actually said about tax policy.
I wasn’t able to find the verse where he says “give unto Cæsar what Cæsar needs to provide job training and housing to those of his subjects in Judaea who need an opportunity to reach their potential” but I’m no biblical scholar.
In in Bolivia, a Jehovah’s Witness named Alfredo Díaz Bustos was drafted into the military and attempted to avoid military service as a conscientious objector.
The authorities, recognizing no conscientious objector exemption, granted him an exemption certificate that classified him as unqualified for service, but demanded a special “military tax required of persons declared exempt from military service.”
He asked to be released from this requirement for the same reasons of conscience that did not allow him to serve the military directly.
This was denied.
Bustos then appealed to international law, in this case the American Convention on Human Rights.
Incredibly, it worked! The government of Bolivia backed down and released Bustos from any obligation either to serve in the military or to pay the exemption tax.
Furthermore, the government agreed to formally recognize the right to conscientious objection to military service.
With that in mind, I noted a handful of confrontational real-world protests that seem to be reaching for new tactics and new targets, and which seem worth keeping an eye on:
It’s a long shot, but Jenkins hopes to take advantage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and of his painstaking research into the history of American government accommodation of religious scruples to make an argument that will succeed where others have failed.
Daniel Jenkins is trying again, with a new set of arguments that I’ll try to summarize here.
Take note: I’m not a lawyer, so I may be missing a lot of legal nuance.
Jenkins’s examination of early war tax resistance in America, “The Liberation of Nathan Swift,” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.
In , Jenkins withheld part of his federal income tax from the IRS, putting it instead in an escrow account and informing the IRS that he would surrender it to them on the condition that the money would only be used for non-military spending.
In , the IRS sent Jenkins one of their intent-to-levy letters and Jenkins filed a Collection Due Process request.
The IRS quickly denied relief, so Jenkins appealed to the Tax Court, which shot down the appeal in , adding a $5,000 “frivolous filing” penalty to boot.
Jenkins then appealed to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. , that court upheld the Tax Court’s ruling, and Jenkins asked the Supreme Court to take his appeal.
The state of law and precedent is, as far as I can tell, something like this:
The First Amendment says, in part, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” So people whose religious beliefs prohibit their participation in certain government programs have asked the courts to exempt them.
For instance, in Wisconsin v. Yoder (), the Supreme Court ruled that a state compulsory education law violated the freedom of religion of the Amish people who challenged the law, “for the Wisconsin law affirmatively compels them, under threat of criminal sanction, to perform acts undeniably at odds with fundamental tenets of their religious beliefs.”
A challenge to tax laws came a decade later.
In U.S. v. Lee (), the Supreme Court ruled that the Old Order Amish could not use the same argument to get out of paying Social Security taxes because:
While there is a conflict between the Amish faith and the obligations imposed by the social security system, not all burdens on religion are unconstitutional.
The state may justify a limitation on religious liberty by showing that it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest.
And
The tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge it because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief.
Because the broad public interest in maintaining a sound tax system is of such a high order, religious belief in conflict with the payment of taxes affords no basis for resisting the tax.
I would have thought that even this would have blasted a big hole in the argument that the uniform application of the tax laws is “essential” and that “[t]he tax system could not function” without it.
After all, if the tax system survived the legislative exception Congress carved out for self-employed Old Order Amish, there’s no reason to expect that it would collapse under the burden of a court-carved exception for the non-self-employed variety.
But the Supreme Court thought otherwise.
And that seemed to pretty much shut the door.
But in Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which instructed the courts to apply “strict scrutiny” to cases “where free exercise of religion is substantially burdened” by the government.
So conscientious objectors to military taxation started trying again.
In , the 2nd and 3rd Circuit Courts of Appeal turned down appeals that recrafted the old conscientious objection to military taxation legal arguments to see if they could be slipped in under the new Religious Freedom Restoration Act standard.
Both circuits said “no dice,” and in the Supreme Court decided not to review these decisions.
And that’s where that stood.
In , the Supreme Court decided Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal.
União do Vegetal is a religious group that uses ayahuasca in their ceremonies, a hallucinogenic tea that contains dimethyltryptamine, a substance banned by federal law.
The group challenged the application of that law to the participants in their ceremonies, basing their challenge on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The government responded that, as with the tax law in Lee, the uniform enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act was essential to an overriding governmental interest.
Last year the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that the government was wrong, and that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires the government to carve out an exception to the Controlled Substances Act to accommodate the religious practices of União do Vegetal because the government had failed to show that the uniform enforcement of the Act was sufficiently essential to a sufficiently compelling governmental interest.
So when Jenkins filed his 2nd Circuit appeal, he used the O Centro ruling to try and distinguish his 1st Amendment / Religious Freedom Restoration Act arguments from those that the same circuit rejected in .
One problem with this, that the court pointed out when it rejected Jenkins’s appeal, is that when the Supreme Court decided O Centro, it explicitly distinguished the case before it from the tax case Lee.
The Court said that in contrast to the current case, Lee showed “that the Government can demonstrate a compelling interest in uniform application of a particular program by offering evidence that granting the requested religious accommodations would seriously compromise its ability to administer the program” and that the tax code was such a program.
Jenkins hopes he can convince the Supreme Court to take another look at Lee, which was decided on Constitutional grounds, and see if its logic still holds up under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act’s standards.
He wants the court to view the question this way:
Does Lee, or the logic of the circuit courts that relied on Lee, give the IRS a blanket exemption from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when the Act itself does not allow for such an exemption?
If not, then his case should be decided on the merits, which requires a closer look at the extent to which his religious beliefs are violated by the law, and the extent to which accommodating those beliefs would compromise the IRS’s ability to collect taxes.
He’s got another argument, too, that’s very interesting, but I’m on much shakier ground in trying to summarize it because it relies on the Ninth Amendment, where even lawyers and judges fear to tread.
This amendment reads:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This could mean anything or nothing, depending on who you ask.
Jenkins hopes that there’s a majority on the Supreme Court who are ready to give the Ninth Amendment some teeth.
Appealing to the Court’s conservative majority, Jenkins, in his Supreme Court petition, encourages them to interpret this amendment as über-conservative jurist Robert Bork suggested:
Ninth Amendment scholars propose giving content to its promise to preserve unenumerated rights by looking to this country’s history and tradition.
For example, in The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (The Free Press ), Robert Bork observes that “[t]he Ninth Amendment appears to serve a parallel function [to the Tenth Amendment’s guarantee of federalism] by guaranteeing that the rights of the people specified already in the state constitutions were not cast in doubt by the fact that only a limited set of rights was guaranteed by the federal charter.”
Jenkins then goes on to argue that “that the individual right of religious conscience not to be compelled to participate in or support military activity was well recognized at the founding of this nation.
For example, the New York State Constitution of , which predates and is independent of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, expressly protects persons with ‘scruples of conscience’ from forced military service and requisition for armament.
The constitutions of other colonial states also contain liberty of conscience guarantees and religious exemptions from the ‘bearing of arms’.
This constitutional right of conscientious objection was preserved by the states at least until the formation of the first permanent national army.
It was also preserved and protected by the actions of the early Congress and by the Civil War Congress that instituted the first federal universal military service draft.”
Jenkins has done an impressive amount of research into the history of conscientious objection to military taxation in the United States (see, for instance, The Liberation of Nathan Smith).
With this, he hopes to prove that conscientious objection to military taxation was among the “rights… retained by the people” at the time the Constitution was ratified.
But for this to work as a legal argument, the Supreme Court not only has to find this evidence compelling, but has to accept Jenkins’s invitation to wade into the Ninth Amendment — something that Court has generally been averse to.
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
