We believe that there are three crucial weak points in the Administration’s war strategy.
The Bush Administration cannot fight this war without taxpayer funding, soldiers willing to die, and the ability to contain domestic opposition to acceptable levels.
Alas, although they have identified these three weaknesses, the first of which is taxpayer compliance, their attack only really addresses the last two:
The anti-war movement should focus its energies on increasing the war’s unpopularity, particularly by emphasizing the horrific loss of life on all sides; by highlighting the war’s escalating financial cost, and the consequences of war spending for our communities; and by disrupting the Pentagon’s ability to recruit new troops.
It’s getting harder for the anti-war movement to ignore the connection between the taxes they pay and the policies they abhor, but this has yet to translate into concrete calls for tax resistance.
For those of us in the tiny war tax resistance movement, now is a good time to redouble our efforts to highlight this contradiction and to show activists a way out of it.
I reviewed the “A Global Call for Non-Violent Civil Resistance to End the US-led Occupation of Iraq” campaign .
I’m happy to report that they’ve come out in support of the tactic of tax resistance: “Tax Resistance is Nonviolent Civil Resistance”.
“I was particularly drawn to this out of my frustration for not being able to do anything about this situation,” says Aptos resident Samantha Olden.
“I am too busy trying to make ends meet to march on Washington or organize rallies.
This is a way that logistically every American can protest.”
That’s a good point.
The war tax resistance movement often struggles with how to convince activists to take on the difficult task of war tax resistance — but in reality, once you eliminate all the useless things like marching around with a sign, chanting slogans, voting, or writing to politicians, the potentially useful things you’re left with are almost all difficult, dangerous, time-consuming, or at best have little hope of immediate success.
That’s just how it is.
If you want a quick-and-easy battle, play Parcheesi instead.
Of the useful, practical, effective things you could be doing to fight the good fight against war & empire, tax resistance is one of the easiest and one of the most accessible.
You can resist taxes from your living room, sitting on the couch in your jammies watching teevee, and the government will even send you the forms to do it with free-of-charge.
Some people think that a good tactic is to withhold some amount of their taxes due, in order to prevent the government from using that money to finance its empire-building.
This is a symbolic gesture, at best, because it’s not going to prevent the government from monetizing more debt and stealing the value of your savings through inflation.
Consider withholding all or part of your Federal Income Tax until US troops are withdrawn from the Middle East.
Tax-resistance is a time-honored and courageous form of protest (purely symbolic because of borrowing and deficit spending, but I can look at myself in the mirror because I don’t contribute any of my money to the war machine).
I’ve seen this argument before, and it really frustrates me.
It’s like a military commander saying “well, if we confidently defend our left flank, the enemy will just attack us from the right, so we might as well not bother.”
The government has many tools that it can use to raise funds to buy what it wants, or, hell, it can just steal what it wants if it comes down to it.
But each of these options has a set of costs to the government, and at any time, the government will likely choose from these many options the one that costs the least (give-or-take government stupidity, inefficiency, lack of foresight and so forth).
It’s a perfectly reasonable thing for anti-government activists to want to restrict these choices or to try to make the choice that is currently most favorable to the government less so.
If the government is currently funding something with tax dollars rather than with seigniorage or debt, it’s presumably doing this because, for whatever reason, it finds it advantageous to do so.
If we can make the government fall back on its second-best choice, one that costs the government more — that counts as a (small, partial) victory.
It’s going to take a lot of such small, partial victories to add up to any big wins, but that doesn’t mean that such victories are failures or “purely symbolic” things.
Making the opposition expend ever more resources to meet its goals is the slow, steady path to victory.
This sort of “it’s only symbolic, it’s not really important” thinking is usually accompanied by gestures of capitulation.
Mr. Z goes on to say that “all efforts to resist paying a portion of one’s income taxes are essentially futile, because one is still paying all other forms of taxes…” In other words, I may as well not fight the battle, because even if I win, I still won’t have won the war.
Mr. Z’s call for anarchists to “lead the way for ‘off the books’ transactions, making them more available” is followed not by some good examples of how he does this, but with what seems to be a demand that these anarchists be more-or-less completely victorious in this task before he joins them: “Find me a way to buy my house, agorist-style, and I’ll listen.”
(Cindy Sheehan, on the other hand, lists a number of actions individuals can take, and notes that “Nothing will change as long as we sit around wringing our hands and whining that there is nothing that we can do about the mess we’re in.”
That’s more like it.)
