To what extent does paying taxes to the government make you responsible for what the government does?

Responding to a Picket Line post a few days back, FSK wrote:

If you pay taxes, you are as responsible for war as the soldier who kills people. If you pay taxes, you are directly responsible for every bad thing government does. Paying taxes is immoral.

On the other hand, John T. Kennedy once argued to me:

Paying taxes doesn’t make you a collaborator any more than handing your wallet over to a mugger does.

Over the past few days, I’ve gone back through historical debates about tax resistance to try to understand how both of these extremes — and many points in-between — have been attacked and defended over time.

I underestimated just how much of a project this was going to end up being. I had to take detours into complicated legal and philosophical discussions of complicity and responsibility. I’m still nowhere near done yet. If you’re curious, you can watch me taking notes on a wiki, and you can add comments if you’d care to.

As I mentioned yesterday, a frequent point of contention in debates about conscientious tax resistance is whether (and if so, to what extent) paying taxes makes a taxpayer complicit in the deeds of the government.

Different people have taken positions at either extreme (not at all complicit, absolutely complicit) and at various points in the middle, and have deployed persuasive arguments and metaphors to argue their cases.

I’ll explore some of these arguments today. I’m going to start off with some discussion of law and legal culpability.

The Nuremberg Principles

One reason a discussion of legal theory is important in what initially seems to be a discussion about moral, not legal, responsibility, is the Nuremberg Principles. The people who drafted these Principles were trying to articulate what they supposed to be universal, eternal, and self-evident crimes. (This was meant to solve the problems of jurisdiction and ex post facto law in the trials of Nazi war criminals, and also to formally outlaw such things as aggressive war.)

The Principles state, in part,

• “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity [elsewhere defined] is a crime under international law.”

and

• “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

A number of war tax resisters have taken these Principles as an inspiration, and some have even adopted the conceit of saying that they are afraid that if they pay taxes they may risk being prosecuted under the theory the Principles articulate.

The United States government is certainly guilty of the crimes listed under that first bullet point, so — leaving aside the practical difficulties involved in holding anyone accountable for complicity with the United States government at this stage of the game — what must one do if one wants to avoid such complicity? Must one resist paying taxes, for example?

Larry Rosenwald is one war tax resister who believes the answer to that question is an unequivocal “yes”:

To pay war taxes is to acquiesce in building weapons of mass destruction… what international law as derived from the Nuremberg principles arguably defines as a crime… It is, simply, a wrong act for any pacifist, any adherent of international law, any person fundamentally opposed to American policy; and I do not understand what keeps such people from refusing taxes…

And he’s not alone.

Conspiracy theory

I quoted blogger FSK yesterday as saying, “If you pay taxes, you are as responsible for war as the soldier who kills people. If you pay taxes, you are directly responsible for every bad thing government does. Paying taxes is immoral.”

This representation bears some resemblance to the legal concept of conspiracy. One set of jury instructions about conspiracy put it this way:

[W]here several persons conspire or combine together to commit any unlawful act, each is criminally responsible for the acts of his associates or confederates committed in furtherance of any prosecution of the common design for which they combine. In contemplation of law, the act of one is the act of all. Each is responsible for everything done by his confederates, which follows incidentally in the execution of the common design as one of its probable and natural consequences, even though it was not intended as a part of the original design or common plan.

There are a couple of glaring problems with stretching the concept of conspiracy to cover taxpayers. For starters, it seems hard to take seriously once you consider all of its ramifications.

For instance, I don’t think FSK really believes what he’s saying he believes. He’s said on other occasions that he has an above-ground job at which taxes are withheld from his paycheck, and that while he’d be willing to take a job in the underground or “agorist” economy in order to avoid these taxes, he wouldn’t be willing to take a pay cut to do so. Can it really be true that as a taxpayer he feels “directly responsible for every bad thing government does,” — as responsible as the people who directly carry out those bad things, but that he feels so blasé about this that he wouldn’t stop doing it if it cost him any money?

His excuse may be that he has to earn a living, but how is this different from the same excuse given by a soldier, Senator, or bureaucrat — assuming you believe, as FSK says he does, that a taxpayer is just as responsible as they are for their actions?

Secondly, to prove “conspiracy” in the legal sense, you have to show that the parties to the agreement agreed to work together to achieve some common end, and that either the end itself, or the methods they chose to reach that end, were illegal. This isn’t as hard to prove as it might sound at first. You don’t necessarily have to prove that the conspirators actually met or signed onto a formal plan. As one set of jury instructions put it:

[I]t is not necessary to constitute a conspiracy that two or more persons should meet together, and enter into an explicit or formal agreement for an unlawful scheme, or that they should directly, by words or in writing, state what the unlawful scheme was to be, and the detail of the plans or means by which the unlawful combination was to be made effective. It is sufficient if two or more persons, in any manner, or through any contrivance, positively or tacitly come to a mutual understanding to accomplish a common and unlawful design.

and another:

[A]ll who take part in a conspiracy after it is formed and while it is in execution, and all who, with the knowledge of the facts, concur in the facts originally formed and aid in executing them, are fellow conspirators. Their concurrence, without proof of an agreement to concur, is conclusive against them. They commit the offense when they become partners to the transaction or further the original plan.

Do taxpayers meet this sort of qualification? If you’re putting on your prosecutor’s-hat, you can probably look at these instructions and say, sure, I could make it stick. But if you’re defending the taxpayer against a charge of conspiracy, you’ve got a good trump card to play: In short, if my client is accused of illegally conspiring with a government, by paying taxes to it — how can you suggest that there was some sort of “agreement” or “mutual understanding” if the government had to threaten my client to comply? That doesn’t sound like an agreement to me. My client isn’t an accomplice, but a victim!

Duress — How much can it excuse?

But just how good of a defense is it to say that you were paying taxes under duress? Can such an argument always relieve you of all responsibility, or does it only work when certain conditions are met, or only relieve you of a certain amount of responsibility? How much compulsion must the government use before it absorbs responsibility? Is there a threshold? Does it depend on what they’re trying to absorb responsibility for?

It couldn’t be the case (could it?) that the government could “force” you to murder someone by threatening you with a $25 fine for refusing — and that the government could take all of the guilt off your shoulders in this way.

Alas, in the debates about tax resistance, usually government compulsion is seen as an all-or-nothing sort of thing, and questions like these go unanswered.

William Lloyd Garrison said at one point that willingly paying taxes to a government that upholds slavery was wrong, but that to acquit yourself it is sufficient for you to announce that you are not cooperating willingly, and to strike an attitude that is consonant with that declaration:

[A man] may consent peaceably to yield up what is demanded of him, but not without remonstrance, and only as he would give up his purse to a highwayman. He will not recognize it as a lawful tax — he will not pay it as a tax — but will denounce it as robbery and oppression.

Tolstoy agreed, emphasizing that although it was wrong to voluntarily pay taxes, under the Christian non-resistance principle that he (and Garrison) adhered to, it was also wrong to resist the government in seizing taxes:

A religious man may not resist by force those who take any of the fruits of his labour — whether they be private robbers or robbers that are called “the Government”…

The proper thing to do when the government comes calling, in this school of thought, is to refuse to pay voluntarily but to submit peacefully to distraint of property. But J.G. James argued against such passive tax resistance, by saying:

It may well be questioned if the payment of rates or taxes is voluntary at all, since the account is presented in the form of a demand, and not a polite request. Inasmuch as payment is compulsory in any case, is not Passive Resistance merely an awkward, expensive, and an inconvenient mode of payment for all concerned?

It’s easy to confuse these two cases:

1. in which someone actually forces you to do something (such as forcing you to stay in prison by locking the doors)
2. in which someone threatens you with unpleasant consequences if you do not do something.

In the first case, you don’t have alternatives to choose from, so you don’t have any blame for what you’re stuck with. In the second case, though, your options have merely been changed. You still have a choice to make, and that choice can be praiseworthy or blameworthy. Hannah Arendt wrote:

…in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.” And while a temptation where one’s life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.

If the tax collector says “give me your money or else,” that isn’t the end of the inquiry, but the time to say “or else what?” and then to weigh the options. If I believed FSK’s argument that what the tax collector was saying was “be directly responsible for every bad thing government does or else” I’d be asking my “or else what?” with bluff-calling incredulity.

When you eat a Chiquita you’ve done your part

Can you be found legally guilty for payments you made under duress? You certainly can, under some circumstances anyway. Look at what happened to Chiquita (you know, the banana company).

Chiquita had been operating in Colombia and, as a cost of doing business there, had to pay taxes to some of the governments that control parts of the country. Three of those governments were designated as terrorist organizations by the United States government, which has passed a law prohibiting anyone from funding such organizations anywhere. In addition, there is an international agreement (as of 2002) that prohibits funding terrorist organizations. It says:

Any person commits an offence within the meaning of this Convention if that person by any means, directly or indirectly, unlawfully and willfully, provides or collects funds with the intention that they should be used or in the knowledge that they are to be used, in full or in part, in order to carry out:

(a) An act which constitutes an offence within the scope of and as defined in one of the treaties listed in the annex; or

(b) Any other act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.

(On its face, this would seem to prohibit paying taxes to the United States government, but seeing as the government is a signatory to this agreement, and seeing as all of the signatories are governments, I’m sure there’s a loophole.)

In any case, Chiquita pled guilty in a plea bargain and was hit with a $25 million fine.

But I’m not sure if this really is relevant to the topic at hand. Note that Chiquita was not charged with conspiring with these Colombian terrorist groups — wasn’t charged as a co-conspirator or accessory in their crimes — but was charged with a distinct crime of providing funds to terrorist organizations. On the other hand, that crime may itself just be a sort of legal shorthand that amounts to essentially the same sort of thing. I haven’t investigated the legal theory behind it.

It’s Caesar’s fault

J.G. James was a believer in law and government, and so he felt that when taxes or tax expenditures conflicted with conscience, the proper response was to do what could be done within the law to rectify the problem, but to go no further:

[I]t is the duty of a conscientious citizen to pay an unjust charge if he has tried in vain to prevent the measure passing into law, on the ground that he is no longer responsible for the expenditure of public funds, after he has done his utmost to control that expenditure by legalized means

This argument, that once the money is out of your hands you are no longer responsible for how it is spent, comes up frequently in debates about tax resistance — often even from tax resisters themselves, when trying to explain the limits of their resistance.

For instance, John H. Dadmun was a conscientious objector during the American Civil War who, in addition to refusing to serve in the military, refused also to pay someone else to serve as a substitute in his place (which was at the time a legal alternative to service). This was because, he said, “that is the same as to go myself.”

But he was willing to pay a militia exemption tax (though it would take him some time to raise the money). Someone chided him about this, noting that “the government can take the money and get a substitute.” Dadmun responded:

“It might do so, but there is no provision into the law to carry that into effect; and furthermore, the Marshal has told me it had not been so used, but must be paid into government and he could not trace it further…”

Eventually…

[T]he brethren gave me almost a hundred dollars, and others lent me for Christ’s sake, not knowing whether I would be able to pay or not, and thus I was able to purchase my liberty, and satisfying the government, by “rendering Caesar his own,” with image and superscription thereon; and if he makes a bad use of it, he is responsible; as I have no further control of it.

G.W. Gillespe, another Civil War-era conscientious objector, had a nearly identical stand:

[T]he idea of hiring a man to kill for me would implicate me in the crime; so I refused to give even five cents for a substitute.

If I had had three hundred dollars, I could conscientiously have given it to Caesar as a last resort, to get exempt from the bloody field of carnal strife. Some tried to persuade me that it was just as bad to pay the money as to hire a substitute, as the money was for that purpose. The difference is great. The Lord will not hold me accountable for the mischief that money, taken from me by force, would do when employed by others. Caesar demands taxes of us; we pay them, according to the instruction and example of our Lord. We render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and Caesar hires a man to shoot his enemies for him; are we to blame? By no means. But to hire a man to fight in my place, would be like hiring a thief to steal in my place. Both guilty.

Rendering unto Caesar

Here we hit one of the big stumbling blocks that Christian tax resisters have run into. The New Testament is distressingly explicit, in Romans 13:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.… [I]t is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

If Jesus wanted us to know that we should resist taxes to governments that were going to apply the tax money in sinful ways, he was given every opportunity to make this clear when he was asked: “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Instead, he responded with the koan “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” which confused everybody at the time, and the meaning of which continues to defy consensus today.

The best the resisters could come up with to justify their position was either a confidently asserted, if somewhat strained reading of the “Give to Caesar” koan (one war tax resister insisted that Jesus delivered his koan during a time of peace in the Roman Empire, so Jesus was by no means countenancing war taxes), or the story from Acts 5 in which the apostles defied the law and continued to preach the gospel according to God’s explicit command. Asked to explain themselves,

Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than men!”

Most Christian tax resisters took the “Give to Caesar” koan and certainly the Romans passage to mean that God does indeed command us to pay taxes, even to unjust governments, but took the Acts “We must obey God rather than men” statement to provide an occasional override: Essentially “render unto Caesar and submit to the government, unless that means disobeying God.”

T.S. Grimké put it this way:

[If the ruler] require me to pay taxes, although one object of the taxes be the support of idolatry, or the waging of war, I comply, simply because he has a clear right to levy taxes, and the responsibility of applying them is with him, not with me. He is lawfully possessed of the power on the principle of civil obedience, as taught us in the New Testament; taxes are among the usual and necessary instruments for the administration of government; the use to which he shall apply them, is not my province, but his: he requires nothing unlawful of me, and therefore I comply.

Here then is the distinction. If he commands what is unlawful, as a means for the attainment of even a lawful end, I refuse obedience. But if he commands what is lawful, intending when the command has been performed by me, to employ the fruit of my obedience in the accomplishment of unlawful purposes in which I have no hand, I obey, because he requires of me only what is rightful. I have nothing to do with his motive or his object.

I would illustrate this by the case of a debt. I am indebted to another. He demands payment. I am not at liberty to refuse, because I happen to know, or have reason to believe that he will employ the money, when paid, for unlawful or immoral purposes. This follows from the principle already stated. My duty is very clear, to pay the debt: the use of the money, when paid, is at once his right and responsibility. This may be aptly illustrated by a modification of the case stated. I am indebted to another; but the debt is not due. He calls for payment, not having a right to do so, and I happen to know, that his reason for wishing the money then, is to make an improper use of it. I am bound to refuse; because not being bound to pay then, I am volunteering to grant a favor, knowing that it will be abused.

On the same principle I can conscientiously pay taxes, knowing, that among other objects, the public money will be applied to pay judges and jurors for trying and condemning criminals to capital punishment; to pay the salary of the president of a college, who teaches that public prayer is unchristian, and the clergy a set of impostors; or to pay the expenses of war. This seems to me the only safe and wise principle, and it furnishes a suitable criterion for civil obedience.

[However, if the] magistrate, instead of a general tax law divides the taxes, and lays on the advocates of Peace the war tax. They cannot conscientiously pay it; because they are thus made the sole and direct instrument of carrying on the war, and without their compliance, it must be at a stand.…

…Obedience is due to the civil magistrate, not as a duty to society, but as a duty to God. God only can then lawfully fix the land-marks of that duty.

This was also Edward Swaine’s argument against tax resistance by nonconformist Christians against government support for establishment churches. And he was unafraid to take his argument to its logical ends:

If Cæsar say “Give me money,” we must give it; for God has nowhere said “Do not give Cæsar money,” or “Do not give Cæsar money without satisfaction that he will properly apply it.” If Cæsar say “Do not preach,” Paul must refuse obedience, for Christ has said to him “preach!” If Cæsar say to us, “Go to the North Pole” — or “wear a cocked hat” — we must do so; for God has not claimed our obedience to the contrary. He has not said, “Do not go to the North Pole” or “go only where you please.” He has not said, “Do not wear a cocked hat,” or “wear only what you like.” Those things, then, concerning which God has claimed nothing of us, we must render unto Cæsar.

Swaine draws the line in this way:

God says to us in effect… If [Caesar] should say to you… “I resolve to establish the worship of Baal for the good of the Empire,” and to levy a tax for that purpose, the resources of the State are his, and you are bound to render the tax. But, if he should say I hold it to be for the good of the land, that every one acknowledge Baal to be God, and therefore require the payment of the tax to be accompanied by a recognition by the payers of the godhead of Baal, you are bound, while you pay the tax, to refuse the recognition, though impaling or burning be the penalty. Or, if the tax be collected under an enactment that every one who pays shall be considered as offering to Baal, you are bound to refuse the payment, for to pay in such case would be equivalent to worship, and a rendering to Cæsar of that which is God’s. But I do not justify your refusal of taxes, because they may be levied for a purpose that my law condemns. He who violates my law must answer, and that is not you who pay the tax, but he who levies it if a bad one. It is he who misapplies the National Funds, not you who had no rightful command over them to apply or misapply.

You have no responsibility, and violate none of God’s laws, if your tax dollars are spent in sinful ways, according to Swaine, because “the tax-gatherer comes… not for a contribution, or subscription, or aid, but for property no longer the subject’s to give or to withhold, and no longer under his rightful control…”

Taxes for bad objects are to be paid, not because we can be excused for helping evil by any voluntary act, that we are morally free to forbear, nor because the payment of such taxes will not help evil, for it will help evil, just as much as the payment of a debt to one who is going to misapply the money will help the evil, — but because the tax is not the subject’s any more than the debt is the debtor’s to help with or to withhold. The payment therefore is his duty, for he is not morally free to decline it, although it will help evil.

Is paying a tax like paying a debt?

This comparison of taxes to debts, as used by Grimké and Swaine above, was an important metaphor in the ongoing debate about tax resistance. If paying taxes to the government is good in and of itself, because God has so decreed it, then taxpaying can’t simply be judged according to its consequences.

A tax payment, in this way of thinking, is not a donation or a subscription or a contribution that is made voluntarily, but is a duty akin to repaying a debt. You can’t ethically refuse to repay a loan because you think the person you owe money to will spend it unwisely.

Here’s an example of how this metaphor was used by one tax resister: Joshua Maule was a Quaker advocate of war tax resistance. When a general tax was increased by a certain percentage in order to pay for war expenses (with the government explicitly saying this was the reason), Maule refused to pay this additional fraction of his taxes, and he insisted that this was the only position consistent with traditional Quaker teaching regarding war.

Maule’s critics asked him why he continued to pay other taxes (like excise fees) or the remaining portion of his general tax — since surely some of these taxes would also go to pay for war. Nathan Hall compared Maule’s stand to someone trying to avoid drinking intoxicating beverages by, for instance, only drinking 75% of a bottle of 50-proof (25% alcohol) liquor:

We both have a testimony against the use of ardent spirits, but are, being very thirsty, placed in a situation where we can get no water except some that has a small portion of whiskey in it. Being under the necessity of taking something, thee may, by inquiry and calculation, find what proportion of the objectionable article is contained in it, and leave just that much in thy bowl; while my understanding will be that in partaking I partake of both good and bad, and in refusing refuse both. So that with me the question is and has been, not what portion I should pay so much as whether any at all.

Maule responded by trying to draw a sharp line between ordinary civil taxes, which like a debt he must pay regardless of how some of it may be used, and explicit war taxes, which fall under a different rule:

The arguments used in reference to what disposition the officers of the law might make of the money collected appeared to me to be valueless.… I am not accountable for the acts of other men: if I owe a just debt, I must pay it; if the person receiving the money uses it for a bad purpose, the accountability is with him; but if he demand money of me avowedly to be used in any way to the plundering of my neighbor, destroying his property, or taking his life, then if I furnish money thus demanded I become an accomplice in the evil work and accountable for the sin. I consider our civil taxes a just debt that should be promptly paid, but I am satisfied that no human authority has either a moral or a religious right to demand of me money or means of any kind to aid in destroying the lives and property of my fellow-men.

Samuel Allinson put forward the most forceful attack on the tax-as-debt analogy in 1780. First off, he denied outright that God has commanded us to give Caesar anything that Caesar plans to put to a sinful purpose: “if tribute is demanded for a use that is antichristian, it seems right for every Christian to deny it, for Cæsar can have no title to that which opposes the Lord’s command.” Having knocked out the divine pillar upholding taxpaying as a moral duty, he then proceeds to attack the idea that taxation represents some sort of secularly-contracted debt, or part of an implied “social contract.” Allinson argues that no Christian would agree to the terms of a contract that might require him to do the devil’s work:

Every valid contract is voluntarily entered into, and as it is the duty of every one previously to see that his engagement is innocent, so when his promise is purchased by a consideration given it would be dishonest and deceitful not to perform it, the other party having, as it were, deposited so much effects in his hands, which he is to render back according to agreement and when received the receiver has a right to apply it as he pleases without any account to the payer, but in the case of taxes he who gives has a right to call to such an account and therefore seems himself liable for and privy to the application. Every man has or has not given his assent to the government he lives under, in the first, he has formally declared his allegiance thereto, in the latter, that allegiance is implied in consideration of his receiving the protection and benefit of it in the safety of his person and the security of his property, in both, it is no more than to be “true and faithful” which can never mean a compliance with every requisition, for we owe a superior allegiance to the King of Kings, and whenever the requisitions of man run counter thereto we “ought to obey God rather than men” … We have never entered into any contract, express or implied, for the payment of taxes for war, nor the performance of anything contrary to our religious duties…

Conclusion?

So have we made any progress here? We’ve at least been able to review the question from several angles and to get some historical perspective on how it has been wrestled with. I think I’ve demonstrated that both of the extreme positions — that paying taxes makes you a fully-guilty accomplice in whatever the government then does, or that paying taxes because it is involuntary is a decision without ethical import — have serious flaws.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the Christian and the legal viewpoints, but as an atheist and an anarchist, to me those viewpoints are often only tangentially advisory at best and mere curiosities at worst. For me the question is an ethical one that has to be resolved with my reason and my conscience.

And as best as I can make out: I am under no original ethical obligation to pay a tax. Taxpaying is not in and of itself good, and I did not in reality enter into something akin to an agreement or contract that I would be unethically violating by failing to pay. Given that, I have to evaluate my decision to pay or not to pay a tax by looking at what consequences I expect will result — in other words, by imagining two worlds, one in which I paid the tax and one in which I haven’t — and choosing from them which one I’d prefer to be in. By doing this, I also imagine two of me, one who paid the tax and one who didn’t, and I choose which one I want to become.

In doing this, as with so many other decisions, some of my considerations are ethicalish (which of these worlds is more just? which of the possible me am I more proud of?) and some are more ordinarily self-interested (in which world am I more satisfied or better-off or esteemed?). This is, as far as I can tell, how it is and how it should be.

And where this has led me so far is where I’m at. Resisting some taxes completely (the federal income tax), others not-so completely (federal excise taxes), others hardly at all (the state sales tax), others dysfunctionally (the self-employment tax, which I don’t pay voluntarily, but which I accept will probably be seized). Along the way, I recalculate my situation and recalibrate my decisions based on my best judgment and my evolving understanding. And these wanderings through the thoughts of people who have grappled with these conundrums before me don’t hurt.

At FSK’s Guide to Reality, FSK gives his own take on the taxpaying-as-complicity debate I covered last Saturday.

Ben Metcalf’s Harper’s article, “Why I pay my taxes,” is finally on-line.

The smug, ironic distance of the standard Harper’sian voice may seem a poor match for such ridiculously earnest Picket Line concerns as taxpayer complicity, but Metcalf makes a good go of it.

It’s probably made many liberal taxpayers feel a twinge of guilt this April. If you know any, send ’em the link.

Taxpatriate Jeff Knaebel has another article up on LewRockwell.com: “Toward a Society of Love and Reason” — excerpts:

The Buddha taught that sila (morality) in respect of non-killing is on three levels:

• Abstain yourself from killing
• Do not support others engaged in killing
• Do not approve of others engaged in killing

It is clear to me that paying taxes to any government on this earth in present times amounts to direct finance of murder. It violates directly and implicitly the Buddha’s precepts. Paying taxes makes of one a material accomplice to murder.

How can I escape my derivative responsibility as an accomplice in finance of war when the whole economy is geared to war? Simply to participate voluntarily as an “upwardly mobile” member of a mindlessly destructive culture is, at the least, acquiescence to mass murder.

I live on savings and try to contribute to society as a one-way flow. I am aware of how fortunate I have been to enable this manner of living. I was a moderately successful rat in the race who took his chance to jump off the treadmill. I am not a highly evolved moral being. Along with moderate success has come immense failure, primarily caused by my own flaws of character.

I am a learner. I take solace in the perception that all of life is an experiment, and that there can be no failed experiment — only collection of more data.

So lately I’ve been being very urban homesteader — baking bread, brewing beer and sake, making yogurt, weeding the garden, canning soups. I’ve been looking for a paying gig, too, which I think partially explains my sudden explosion of home usefulness: it gives me something productive to do while I wait for résumés and bids to be ignored.

What I haven’t been doing much is writing anything substantial for The Picket Line. Sorry ’bout that.

Meanwhile all sorts of interesting things have backed up in my bookmarks, waiting for me to add some insight or context before passing them on for you to enjoy. I think instead I’ll just let them spill out here and trust you to fill in the blanks:

• Francois Tremblay wonders if taxpayers become complicit in what their tax dollars support. He weighs the arguments for both sides (no, because their participation is legally required; and yes, because their participation is nonetheless voluntary) and then engages in some spirited give-and-take with his readers.
• Steven Schallert writes about his war tax resistance at his interestingly-titled blog shutters slide to unveil fingerprints of angels.
• War tax resisters Phil and Louise Baldwin Rieman died in a car accident shortly after Christmas last year. There have been several remembrances of the couple on-line, such as this one from the Church of the Brethren.
• Murray Rothbard writes about ending tyranny without violence (through withdrawal of consent) and the nearly 500-year-old insights of Étienne de La Boétie.
• Carl Watner takes a fresh look at the Whiskey Rebellion and what it means about the origin and nature of the U.S. government.
• Gene Healy and Benjamin Friedman of the Cato Institute note that the U.S. military is preparing a new occupation, and when they meet the enemy the enemy will be us.
• The Taxpayer Advocate said in its annual report that American taxpayers pay — above and beyond what they actually are charged in taxes — nearly two hundred billion dollars just trying to do the paperwork involved in taxpaying.
• Our local paper did the math and put a number on a conclusion that should have been pretty obvious: it’s much cheaper to take public transit than to drive. According to their figures, it costs Bay Area drivers about $1,000 per month to get where they’re going by car instead of by bus and rail. Hell, we pay that much for rent.
• There seems to be a lot of buzz about a revival of local, alternative currencies during this recession.
• A writer for Rebelión notes that Europe’s public is sick of spending so much on the military and asks, “is tax resistance not therefore justified, an investment in the struggle for what is worth the trouble of defending instead of the military costs that impede this to a great extent?” (en español)
• Finally, U.S. nuclear weapons spending topped $52 billion last year (and that’s only counting what we’re allowed to know about). Compare that to the budget of your favorite government agency, business, or non-profit.

Remember David Little? Canadian fellow, stopped paying his taxes because he didn’t want to be complicit in funding abortions?

He’s been fighting his case in court, asserting that he has a right not to contribute to government spending for things that violate his religious beliefs. He hasn’t been having much luck. Most recently, the Court of Appeal of New Brunswick shot down his appeal, saying, basically, that democracy is all about a democratically-elected, representative government deciding how much of your money it wants to take and what it wants to spend it on, and individual conscience doesn’t enter in to it, and that’s a good thing.

The ruling has some weirdly-tortured political philosophy in it, such as this bit from the opening paragraph:

The fact that a person files a tax return and pays taxes does not connote an expression of support for any government policy or expenditure. These obligatory acts are the annual price Canadians pay to ensure there is a continuing debate over the appropriateness of government policies and expenditures made in accordance with the existing law.

See, if Canadians didn’t pay their taxes, they wouldn’t be able to have a continuing debate over the appropriateness of government policies and expenditures. You wouldn’t want that, would you?

The ruling is surprisingly full of poor arguments of this caliber, which is odd, because the conclusion they come to is a sort of commonplace no-brainer towards which (once you accept certain statist premises — ones that come with the territory in state courts) there are straightforward and sound and well-trodden arguments.

The meat of the issue is that same one that John Brown argued (see The Picket Line for the 21^st & 22^nd) — whether paying taxes to the government implicates you morally in the government’s actions or its spending decisions. In this case, the court pretty much denies that there’s anything worth arguing about — it doesn’t, so taxpaying doesn’t have any freedom-of-conscience implications, so there.

Quoting a precedent: “The simple, if subjectively unpleasant, obligation to pay taxes to a government some or all of whose views and programs one opposes does not imply support of such views and programs or force the taxpayer to act contrary to his or her personal beliefs and convictions; on the contrary, it is an essential part of living in a democracy such as Canada.”

Little hopes to make a last appeal to the Supreme Court, but says he won’t pay his taxes or fines in any case, and is prepared to go to jail for non-payment.

So maybe yesterday, you followed that link over to Alexander Shields’s “The Sufferings of many, for Refuſing to pay the wicked Exactions of the Ceſs, Locality, Fynes &c. Vindicated” to give it a look. And then, if my guess is right, you pretty quickly found something better to do.

It’s difficult to read, with a complex and sometimes bizarre sentence structure, inconsistent and archaic spelling, references to long-forgotten arguments, and lots and lots of Bible stuff.

So I thought I’d try to take some time and distill some of the more interesting spirit out of the mash.

First, a brief note about the context. The place: Scotland. The time: 1687. The monarchies of the British isles have returned to power after the brief post-civil war Commonwealth period, and among the counterrevolutionary pendulum swings are the return of powerful, hierarchical episcopal churches. Charles Ⅱ converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, and his successor to Scotland’s throne in 1685, James Ⅶ, was an out-and-out Catholic who believed strongly in the divine right of kings and would lecture you on the subject if you gave him half a chance. The Covenants that had defended protestantism in Scotland had been unilaterally renounced and declared treasonous by the government, which, under the pretext of increasing religious freedom, had at the same time rescinded laws against Catholicism. Protestant ministers who refused to submit to the official church hierarchy were reduced to holding their services illegally, under threat of death for all involved, in outdoor “conventicles.” The government combined harsh measures like imprisonment, torture, and “field executions” with attempts to divide the protestants with small compromises and concessions. The repression led to increased militancy among the protestant radicals, which included tax resistance, and which also served to divide the movement. By 1687, the combination of brutality and divide-and-conquer seemed to have worked, as the rebellion had died down, but what do you know, King James ran into a similar sort of religious trouble in England and was overthrown by a protestant and lost the throne of Scotland in the bargain. In 1690, the Presbyterian church was restored and (ironically considering the disestablishmentarian rhetoric of some of the protestant rebels, including one Alexander Shields, who was not pleased by this) made into the official Church of Scotland, which it remains to this day.

Alexander Shields was a nonconformist minister who, in 1685, when he was about 24, was imprisoned for refusing to take an oath of allegiance. He eventually submitted to a compromise declaration of non-hostility to King James as a way of getting out of jail, and then came to regret his weakness in doing so. For expressing this regret in a letter that was intercepted by the authorities, he was reimprisoned. This time he escaped, and joined up with the radical presbyterian wing. Soon after, he penned his book, A Hind let looſe, as a defense of this radical wing and a call to renounce all obedience to the episcopal and royal power structure, and had it published under the pseudonym “a Lover of true Liberty” in Holland. A section of this book is devoted to encouraging tax resistance and refuting the various counter-arguments and excuses people gave against tax resistance.

The phrase “a hind let loose” is a fragment from Genesis 49:21. The remainder of that verse reads “he giveth goodly words.” Boy doeseth he.

He begins by crediting a “Mr. McWard & Mr. Broun” — by whom I believe he means Robert McWard and John Brown — for arguments about the “Cess” of which he plans to “give a short Transumpt & Compend of.” That’s a good thing, because McWard’s & Brown’s arguments have too much “length & prolixitie,” he says. Too long and prolix for Shields; too long and prolix for me, I think. In any case, I haven’t found these sources anywhere, and for all I know they may no longer exist.

Shields intends to expand these original arguments against the form of tax known as the “Cess” to apply also to the various other ways in which subjects are imposed upon to contribute to the finances of the crown: fines for not going along with the establishment church, jailer-fees that you had to pay up for the privilege of being imprisoned, militia-money and something called “locality.” Some of these taxes were fund-raising measures specifically for conducting anti-presbyterian repression, and were therefore particularly hated. But by this point of his book, Shields hopes he has established that the government as a whole is anti-christian and deserving of outright opposition on that ground, regardless of particular policies or the purpose of particular taxes.

These anti-christian aims are all ones, he says, that the government could not accomplish “without the subsidiary Contribution of the peoples help,” and the language of the legislation with which it enacted the Cess proves it. But Shields finds that among his presbyterian peers, many recommended paying the tax, and many others who knew better than to pay it decided to keep their resistance quiet, and thereby encouraged other people to pay who assumed that if there were anything wrong with paying more folks would speak up about it.

That being the case, he commits to setting forth a rigorous argument for tax resistance, first conceding some points (with caveats), then asking some pointed questions, and then setting forth his arguments in favor of tax resistance.

His concessions are a set of acknowledgments of conditions under which Christians and citizens ought to pay taxes:

1. Like it says in Romans 13, Christians should pay tribute and custom to those to whom they are due. This includes salaries to ministers, fines for law-breaking, and jailer-fees, which should be paid like any legitimate debts. But it certainly does not include “Tyrants Exactions, enacted & exacted for promoving their wicked designs against Religion & Liberty; Hirelings Salaries, for encouraging them in their intrusions upon the Church of God; Arbitrary Impositions of pecuniary punishments for clear Duties; And extorted hirings, of the subordinate instruments of Persecuters oppressions.”
2. You should pay what is assessed “by Law or Contract” even if the recipient of the money later uses the money for “pernicious ends.” But if the tax is being raised for specific and express “wicked ends,” that’s another thing entirely from taxes designed for the public good but then misused. For this reason, it’s not a good argument to say that we always used to pay our taxes before, even though we knew that much of the money was misused. Things are different now that abuse is the very purpose the money is being raised for.
3. Even an originally illegal tax can become legitimized by a “dedition or voluntary engagement legally submitted unto by the true Representatives” after the fact. But until that happens, it’s not lawful to pay the tax. He compares the condition of the presbyterians to those of the Israelites under conquerers, in contrast to the condition of subjects of a representative government. But here he feels the need to answer critics who would say that the early Christians paid their taxes cheerfully to the Tyrant in Rome based on their understanding of Jesus’s teachings, the answer to which he gives in four parts:
   1. When Jesus gave the “Render unto Caesar” koan, “He left the Title unstated, and the Claim unresolved, whether it belonged to Cesar or not, and taught them in the general to give nothing to Cesar with prejudice to what was Gods; which condemns all the Payments we speak of, which are all for carrying on the War against God.”
   2. At that time, Caesar was not a tyrant or usurper, because “they” had already accepted the caesarian governments as legitimate.
   3. When Jesus paid the tribute money, he did so “lest He should offend,” but today “the offense & scandal lyeth upon the other hand, of paying the Exaction.”
   4. It’s blasphemous to think that Christ would have paid or permitted to be paid a tax that was “professedly imposed for levying a War against Him, or banishing Him and His Disciples out of the Land; Or to fill the mouths of the greedy Pharisees, devouring widowes houses, for their pretense of long Prayers; Or that He would have payed or suffered to pay their Extortions, if any had been exacted of Him, or His Disciples, for His Preaching, or working Miracles; Or if help or hire had been demanded, for encouraging those that rose to stone Him for His good deeds.”
4. It’s okay to pay some money to government extortioners if that’s the cost of preserving more of your property, “when it is extorted only by force & threatenings, and not exacted by Law; when it is a yeelding only to a lesser suffering, and not a consenting to a Sin to shift suffering.” He resists the idea that we can analogize taxation and highway robbery in this way. Although he agrees with the assumption behind the analogy, “that instead of righteous Rulers, we are under the power, and fallen into the hand of Robbers,” he says that for the analogy to hold true, the highway robber would have to not just demand money from you but demand it for the express purpose of using the money to murder your family and worse. “Whether then shall I, by giving the Robber that part which he seeks, enable him to do all these mischiefs? Or by refusing, expose myself to the hazard of being robbed or slain? Let the Conscience of any man answer this…”
5. It’s okay “passively by forcible constraint to submit to” “wicked Sentences, as impose these burdens” so long as you’re not doing so as a form of obedience. He uses the analogy of a condemned prisoner choosing to walk to the gallows rather than be dragged there kicking and screaming. But then he notes that every presbyterian who attended an illegal conventicle is under sentence of death, and nobody is suggesting they go turn themselves in: shall they “fall under the reproach, that being sentenced to die, they scrupled forsooth, yea refused to go on their oun legs to the Gibbet”? If it comes down to a walk-to-the-gallows or be-dragged-kicking-and-screaming situation, “its wholly the Suffering of a Captive” in either case and doesn’t have much moral import. Shields grants that it’s fine for a person to “suffer patiently the spoiling of his goods” if that’s the penalty for tax resistance.
6. It’s okay if you are on the horns of a dilemma where you have no choice but to choose between two evils to choose the lesser one. But be careful, and don’t try to use this as an excuse to avoid suffering by participating in evil. If you were to use this logic to pay your taxes, saying that’s better than the consequences, you would be shunning the lesser evil of suffering, “but the evil done to shun this, is real and active Concurrence, in manner, measure, & method, enjoyned by Law, in strengthening the hands of those who have displayed a banner against all the Lovers of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Be wary, for “the flesh is not only ready to inculcate that Doctrine, spare thy self, but is… witty of invention to plead for what will affourd ease.” Indeed, it’s safer to err on the side of suffering.

“But shunning prolixity,” says Shields, he moves on to a set of suppositions and questions:

1. Remember that episode when Jesus and his disciples were out on a boat and they all freaked out because it got stormy, and he was like, “chill,” and calmed the waters, and they were like “whoa”? Well, imagine if Herod or Pilate had been there and said “let’s sink that boat!” And they raised a tax to pay off the soldiers who were engineering the boat-sinking, and to pay off the Pharisees who were telling everyone it was the right thing to do, and to pay the jailers who captured any survivors or tax refusers, and issued fines to people who wouldn’t help… “In this Case would, or durst any of the Lovers of Jesus comply with any of these demands?” Well, gosh darn it, Jesus is in a leaky boat right here in Scotland, and the government is doing its best to sink that boat, so what are you going to do about it?
2. Would Israel have put up with paying a tax to Saul for the express purpose of paying off Doeg or the Ziphims to hunt down David and the Lord’s priests? What about you, as a dissenter? What if the government came to you and demanded money or supplies so that it could go out and murder some presbyterian minister and his flock? What would you do? Choose sin rather than affliction? Do evil that some good may come of it?
3. Would the godly have paid taxes to support pagan human sacrifice? The current regime of Scotland is doing nothing worse.
4. What if Nebuchadnezzar commanded that all Jews submit a handful of kindling to stoke the fire to burn Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednago — would the faithful have done it? What if a faithful ambassador of Christ was condemned and the law commanded everyone in the nation to send a thread with which to make a noose to hang him and a farthing to pay the executioner: “Can any man, without horrour, think of complying so far as to contribute what is commanded? Or would not a Gracious man, frighted into an abhorrence at the attrociousness of the wickedness, or fired into a flame of zeal for God, say without demur, as not daunted, with fear of what flesh could do unto him, I will rather venture my All to keep them alive, or be hanged with them, than by doing what is demanded be brought forth & classed in the cursed & cruel Company of those who shall be dragged before the Tribunal of Christ, with their fingers dyed & dropping with the blood of those who are peculiarly dear to Him?”

The gist of these evocative examples is that in cases like these, you need to look at three things:

1. The preciousness of what is to be destroyed by what the government is funding
2. The extent to which it is our consent and support that makes it possible to accomplish these evil designs
3. The obligations that we are under not only to withhold this support, but to preserve and maintain ourselves in opposition to Satan and his helpers, to the death if necessary, in order to keep some remnant of good alive for posterity

With that out of the way, we can finally get to Shields’s arguments in favor of tax resistance:

1. If you were to pay your taxes, you would be disrespecting the contendings and sufferings of those who have refused to pay them, both recently and at similar times throughout Christian history. He cites a number of authorities and examples on this point. He also cites Calvin on the question of whether a subsequent property owner can have a just claim to property that had been previously seized and transferred by the government unjustly, determining that not only can no such claim be legitimate but that the new property owner participates in the injustice to the extent that his pretense of ownership “shall carry the narrative” that the forfeiture was legitimate.
2. “[T]o pay is all the consent & Concurrence required of us to entail slaverie on the posterity.”

   If those Exactions be wicked, then Complyance with them must be iniquity: For it justifies the Court that enacts & exacts them, a pacqued Juncto of a prevalent faction, made up of perjured Traitors, in a Course of enmity against God, and the Country, who to prosecute the War against the Almighty, and root out all His people out of the Land, condescend upon these Cesses, Fynes, &c. as a fit & adapted Medium thereunto. Wherefore, of necessity all that would not oune that Conclusion, as their oun deed, in these Representatives, and oune them as their Representatives in that deed, must bear witness against the same, by a Refusal, to oune the debt, or pay the same.

3. The express reasons why the government is raising these taxes is to conduct its war against the true Christianity and its practitioners. If you comply with the means, you comply with the ends. What of the argument that some of the taxes may be necessary for other, more beneficial, expenses, like guarding the nation against foreign invasion? Bah. The government is as bad as if we had already been conquered by a foreign invasion, so that excuse won’t do.
4. The actual nature of tax payments is that they are deliberate compliances with evil. The argument that they are merely helpless submissions to force fails — in effect, they are acknowledgments that the existing power is a legitimate one. Obedience to such unjust laws can no more be justified than the laws themselves. (Here he tosses out a number of old testament examples.)
5. When in fact the government does extort money “only as badges of bondage” without any pretense of seeking acknowledgment as having legal right to obedience and legitimacy, then such a case is “more suitable for lamentation than Censure.” But my answer to people who say that in the present case “that they are constrained to it, and they do it against their will” is this:
   1. Don’t try to have it both ways: if you acknowledge the taxing government as your government, by voluntarily paying up, don’t then claim that you aren’t responsible because you were forced.
   2. The only voluntariness the law requires is obedience, and the only involuntariness it recognizes is disobedience. By the law’s own standard, tax payment is voluntary.
   3. The decision of whether or not to pay involves deliberation and election, two sufficient components of voluntary action. Try this analogy on for size: the law in Deuteronomy regarding rape took pains to distinguish a real rape from the case of a woman who was falsely claiming rape so as not to get her ass stoned to death for adultery. So, to prove rape, the woman “must not only be supposed to strugle & resist the attempt made upon her chastitie & honour by the villain; but she must cry for assistence in that resistence, without which she is held in Law willingly to consent to the committing of that wickedness.” Furthermore, she should afterwards “complain & cry, and crave Justice against” her attacker “and be wanting in nothing, that may bring him to condign punishment.” Shields says the analogy holds. If you really believe that you have been forced against your will to give up your property purely because of the threat of violence, then you should act like someone who has been violated and who is hungry for justice. If you just go about your business, it looks a lot like you were consenting all along.
6. Not only is taxpaying effectively consent, but worse, it is also “a Concurrence to assist them, and a strengthening their hands in” wickedness. Taxpayers who contribute to this government are like the Israelites who gathered their earrings together to melt down to make a golden calf. “For as they cannot accomplish their cursed ends without these Exactions, so the payment of them, is all the present, personal, & publick Concurrence in wageing this war with Heaven, that is required of the Nation.”
7. Not only is taxpaying consent, not only is it concurrence, but it is “a hire & reward for their wicked service.” The “hire” distinction was lost on me, but seems to have been an important hook on which to hang a new set of Old Testament episodes and injunctions. The consent, concurrence, hire progression is making taxpaying seem ever more like an offensive sin of commission, and less like a simple failure to recognize and accomplish some difficult act of righteousness.
8. Not only do we, as I have demonstrated, have a duty not to commit evil by paying these taxes, but we also have an active duty to do good by resisting these taxes. We have an obligation to rescue our brethren, to relieve the oppressed, to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. Resisting these taxes is part of fulfilling this duty.
9. The Covenant that previously governed the nation had a clause that invited the Curse of God down upon us in case of a breach of the Covenant. That breach having happened, anyone who concurs with the government that is currently operating in violation of the Covenant is putting themselves in terrible danger. If you’re giving your material support to the usurpers, rather than showing yourself to be willing to sacrifice life and property to defend the Covenant and the Interest of Christ it represents, then you’re on the losing team, loser. If on the day you agreed to the Covenant you had been asked whether you would have been willing to pay a Cess or other tax to powers determined to destroy it, what would you have said?
10. In order not to be guilty of assisting in this evil all around us, I must give a testimony — not just words, but “at least a plain & positive Refusing to yeeld obedience to that Law… for I must either obey and be guilty, or refuse and be innocent.” What about this testimony?
    1. Can anything less free me of the guilt?
    2. When God gets around to rooting out this wickedness, He’ll ask you if you’ve got your testimony handy before deciding which pile to put you in.
    3. There’s no time like the present, as “Christ is openly opposed, and every one is called either to concur or testifie”.
    4. Shouldn’t such testimony be open and public? “[F]or my Testimony must make it evident that the Law is not obeyed by me, else it is no Testimony.”
    5. Shouldn’t it be, in “plainness & boldness” proportionate to “the prodigiousness of that wickedness testified against?”
    6. It isn’t enough just to state your opposition once, but you must persist in it so as not to weaken the opposition by a later acquiescence.
    7. The righteous Judge will pass sentence according to such Testimony. You should give Testimony now as if you were standing before the Judge in the hour of judgment.
11. The only way to Testify against the current wicked order of things is to refuse to comply. This is a clear duty, and has many advantages to counteract the supposed disadvantages. It’s a “shameful subterfuge” to say that by resisting taxes, you’ll end up actually giving more money to the government in the end (since they’ll seize more to penalize the refusal). In such a case, you contribute only your suffering, not your sin, to the cause of wickedness, and in doing so you hurt their cause:
    1. As much as I can, I counteract their design. Besides the great value of being at peace with my conscience, I enlist myself on the side of good and assist in good’s eventual triumph.
    2. By my example, I encourage others to stand fast and resist.
    3. “I hereby transmit to Posterity a Pattern for imitation, and so propagate an opposition to this Course to succeeding generations.”
    4. I encourage God to come to us to plead his cause and take vengeance against our foes.
    5. If I comply, it wounds my faith and weakens my confidence and makes me weaker at other times when I have to wrestle with temptation or take a strong stand.
    6. If you act for God’s sake, or suffer for God’s sake, even if you die trying, you’ve struck a powerful blow.
12. By paying these taxes, you contribute to laying down obstacles that get in the way of other people who are trying to be righteous. Potential backsliders among us are looking to our example. Faithful resisters need to be comforted and strengthened and given confidence by people who believe they are doing the right thing. Those who come after us will also look to our examples, and we’d like to be remembered as a righteous generation worth being used as role models, rather than forcing them to reach into misty myths to find their heroes. Pity us if God decides we’d be most useful as an example of what not to do.

One of the recurring issues that comes up today in debates about conscientious tax resistance is whether (and if so, to what extent) paying taxes makes you liable for what the government does with the tax money. Does a taxpayer bear some responsibility, and deserve some blame, for paying taxes?

I’ve heard answers at either extreme: that taxpaying makes the taxpayer absolutely complicit in all of the government’s deeds, or that because the government forces you to pay taxes against your will you can’t be thought to be responsible for the consequences of paying them. For example, the blogger FSK wrote:

If you pay taxes, you are as responsible for war as the soldier who kills people. If you pay taxes, you are directly responsible for every bad thing government does. Paying taxes is immoral.

On the other hand, John T. Kennedy once argued to me:

Paying taxes doesn’t make you a collaborator any more than handing your wallet over to a mugger does.

(See also The Picket Line of 29 March 2008 for an in-depth look at many of the arguments that have been given concerning the question: does taxpaying make you complicit?)

Much of the debate concerns the extent to which taxpaying is a chosen, deliberate act of free will, or the extent to which it is a forced act done only under duress. On the one hand, taxpaying is certainly coerced — thus all of the various criminal and civil sanctions brought to bear against people who don’t pay up. On the other hand, these various sanctions are really just consequences of the choice you make, and all choices of any moral significance have consequences — the trick to being a good person is weighing these consequences well.

In the opening section of the third book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins to take on the task of distinguishing the voluntary and involuntary, the chosen and unchosen, and such categories. As I go through the sections of this book I’ll be trying to see how taxpaying fits in to the system he devises.

(Note: some translations break this opening section out into three distinct sections.)

Aristotle says that distinguishing between the voluntary & involuntary is essential for a discussion of ethics, because only voluntary acts are rightly subject to praise or blame, honor or punishment. (Involuntary acts are due pardon or pity at worst.)

Voluntary acts are those that are caused by something internal to a person — that person’s will or desire or choice. Involuntary acts are caused or impelled from outside. That’s fine for the black-and-white cases, but there’s a big grey area.

As Aristotle has argued before, we are motivated in our actions by desire for pleasure and fear of pain. Do those things amount to compulsions that make our actions involuntary? Aristotle says no. To admit such an argument would be to make the voluntary/involuntary distinction meaningless. The desire for pleasure and fear of pain are internal to us and so represent voluntary impulses. This is true also for more extreme emotions like passion and anger.

What if you do something wrong because you were ignorant about what you were doing or what the consequences would be? Aristotle says that actions done in ignorance form a third category: the “non-voluntary.” If the actor later is pained by the action and regrets it, it can then be promoted out of this purgatory into the involuntary category.

But isn’t everyone who acts wrongly acting in ignorance of how and why they ought to act rightly? Aristotle says that it is true that ignorance is what causes people to be unjust and wicked, but that this sort of ignorance does not change the voluntary/involuntary nature of the action: only ignorance of the particulars of the action, like what it is or what it is affecting. He gives the example of someone who is demonstrating the use of a weapon, thinking it to be disarmed, who fires it and inadvertently causes damage.

Illustration showing the varieties of ignorance that affect people’s voluntary actions, from St. George Stock’s paraphrase (1897)

What if you’re forced to do something vicious by fear of adverse consequences for not doing it — a lesser-of-two-evils sort of choice? Aristotle says that such acts are voluntary in-and-of themselves, “although in the abstract they may be said perhaps to be involuntary, as nobody would choose any such action in itself.”^* He notes that you can be praised for putting up with degrading or painful circumstances for honorable ends, so why shouldn’t you be blamed for avoiding pain for dishonorable ends?

(But what if you voluntarily put yourself into a situation in which you know it is likely that you will have to make a lesser-of-two-evils sort of choice, I wonder?)

You may be pardoned for voluntarily doing an act “under pressure which overstrains human nature and which no one could withstand,” but there are some acts that you should prefer death to committing. In general you need to do a cost/benefit analysis.

So where does taxpaying fit in? So far it looks to be in this voluntary in-and-of itself but possibly involuntary in-the-abstract category. Aristotle hasn’t told us much about this category yet, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions about what this means.

Illustration showing Aristotle’s division of actions from R.W. Browne’s translation (1889)

Illustration showing Aristotle’s division of actions from St. George Stock’s paraphrase (1897)

Illustration showing Aristotle’s division of actions from John S. Brewer’s version (1836)

You see the beauty of my proposal is
it needn’t wait on general revolution.
I bid you to the one-man revolution —
The only revolution that is coming.

—Robert Frost
from Build Soil

Today, instead of dredging up something from the archives about historical tax resistance campaigns and movements, I want to spend some time looking at individual tax resistance in service of what Ammon Hennacy called the “one-man^* revolution.”

Whether Hennacy got the name from Frost’s poem, or Frost from him, or whether each came up with it independently, I don’t know. The idea goes back much further than either, and in particular is especially pronounced in Thoreau’s thinking.

This idea is that, 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 a majority, or a critical mass, or a disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Just get your own house in order and commit yourself to your own personal revolution — that’s the most crucial and practical thing you can do.

“One-man revolution” is the answer to the question posed by radicals and reformers who feel overwhelmed by the task ahead. “What can one person do?” they ask (half-hoping, I suspect, that the answer will be “nothing, so don’t sweat it”). They think the revolution that will finally put things right is scheduled for later — when the masses see the light… when a crisis comes… when we find a charismatic leader… when we unite the factions under one banner… when… when… when…

The one-man revolutionary says: no, the revolution starts here and now. Your first task as a revolutionary is to overturn the corrupt, confused, puppet governor of your own life and to put a more responsible sovereign in its place.

As to what the policies of this new sovereign ought to be, well, that’s up to you. I’m not going to cover the details of how Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s one-man revolutions played out and what specific decisions they made along the way. Today instead I’m going to look at the reasons they gave for why the one-man revolution is practical and effective, in answer to the “What can just one person do?” skeptics.

These reasons can be roughly divided into five categories:

1. With the one-man revolution, success is in reach. It may not be easy, but you can win this revolution with your own effort. Furthermore, whether or not you succeed, the struggle itself is the right thing to do.
2. You don’t need to wait for a majority. You don’t need to water down your message to try to win mass appeal or group consensus. You can start immediately from a firm platform of integrity and honesty. This also makes you more self-reliant so that you can endure challenges better, which makes you more effective and far-reaching than those revolutionaries who always have to check to see if the rest of the pack is still with them.
3. Political revolutions that are not also accompanied by individual revolutions don’t make enduring radical change — they just change the faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving the corrupt structure intact.
4. The world sometimes is changed radically and for the better by the efforts and example of a single, one-in-a-million character. But the first step is not to set out to change the world, but to develop that character.
5. By fighting the one-man revolution, you are not as alone as you may think you are: you “leaven the loaf” and cause all society to rise, you attract other one-man revolutionaries to your side, and you sow the seeds that inspire others.

You can win the one-man revolution

Ammon Hennacy’s theory of the one-man revolution crystallized, appropriately enough, while he was being held in solitary confinement. He’d been sentenced for promoting draft evasion during World War Ⅰ and then thrown in “the hole” for leading a hunger strike of prisoners to protest awful food. Because he refused to name names, he was kept there for several months.

Locked up alone in a cell 24/7, unable to communicate with his comrades in the prison or outside, given the silent treatment by the guard, and overhearing the day-in day-out torture of the inmate in the adjoining cell — this was not the most promising situation for a revolutionary.

The only book they allowed him was the Bible (and they even took this away and replaced it with a smaller-print version for no other reason but to inflict another petty torment in the dim light of his cell). In the course of reading and reflecting on what he read — particularly the Sermon on the Mount — he decided that the revolution could be fought and won even where he stood.

To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. …the only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.

(A few days back I saw a bumper sticker that read “Jesus was a community organizer.” But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, you won’t see any organizing going on there at all — Jesus is urging people individually to get their lives in order so that their deeds will be like a light shining before others to inspire them. Do you see any “we must,” “we ought to,” “we should work together to,” or “once there are enough of us” in that sermon? Jesus isn’t addressing an organization but an assembly.)

You can start now, with full integrity

Lloyd Danzeisen expressed one of the advantages of the one-man revolution in a letter to Hennacy: “You are lucky and of course very wise to be a ‘one man revolution,’ for you do not have to discuss your action over and over again (with committees) but can swing into action.”

The advantage of organizing and working together is superior numbers, and, in theory anyway, greater force. But there are many disadvantages. It takes a lot of time and negotiation to get a bunch of people to take action together, and usually this also involves finding some lowest common denominator of principle or risk that they can all agree on — which can mean watering down the core of what you’re fighting for until it seems less like a principle than a petty grievance.

What such a movement gains in quantity it may lose in quality, and the force it gains from numbers it may lose from the diffuse, blunted, half-hearted effort of the individuals that make it up, or from the fact that much of their energy is expended in the organizing itself rather than the ostensible goals of the organization.

The advantage of drawing a large crowd of half-hearted followers is rarely worth the effort. It is not too hard to sway a crowd of wishy-washy people by appealing to the half-truths they already believe and being careful not to attack any of the nonsense they adhere to. But what does this get you? A crowd of wishy-washy people who are just as vulnerable to falling for the next demagogue who comes along with patronizing speeches. Instead, Hennacy recommends, we should “appeal to those about ready to make the next step and… know that these are very few indeed.… We can live and die and never change political trends but if we take a notion, we can change our own lives in many basic respects and thus do that much to change society.”

Thoreau wrote of how when he was invited to speak he refused to water down his message to make it most palatable to his listeners. He wasn’t aiming for the sympathy of the crowd, but hoped to reach that one or two who were ready to be challenged: “I see the craven priest looking for a hole to escape at — alarmed because it was he that invited me thither — & an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony & shallow ground.”

Thoreau noted with approval that the abolitionist revolutionary John Brown had not gathered around him a large party of well-wishers and collaborators, but instead had been very selective about whom he let in on his plans:

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came? — till you and I came over to him?

The very fact that [Brown] had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. He would have no rowdy or swaggerer, no profane swearer, for, as he said, he always found these men to fail at last. He would have only men of principle, & they are few.

He quotes Brown as saying:

I would rather have the small-pox, yellow-fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle.… Give me men of good principles, — God-fearing men, — men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.

A one-man revolutionary is more effective and harder to defeat

A one-man revolutionary — a “man of good principles” — is individually more effective and harder to defeat than that same person would be as part of a movement. This may seem paradoxical to people who are used to thinking in terms of “strength in numbers” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This is for two related reasons:

First, because as a one-man revolutionary you are self-motivated, you do not get thrown into confusion if the lines of communication down the chain of command are disrupted, and you don’t lose momentum by looking about to check if your comrades are still with you or if they have retreated or surrendered.

And second, because this makes it difficult for your opponents to get a foothold in trying to persuade you with threats or with bribes to give up the fight.

For example, Hennacy tells of one of his captors trying to trick him:

Detective Wilson said that the young Socialists arrested with me for refusing to register had all given in and registered. (Later I found out that he had also told them that I had registered.) [But] I felt that if they gave in, someone had to stick, and I was that one.

The detective assumed that Hennacy valued his belonging more than his integrity, and so made a completely ineffective attack. Thoreau similarly noted that his captors had failed to understand his motives, assuming he valued his freedom from confinement more than his freedom of action:

It costs me less in ev­ery sense to in­cur the pen­alty of dis­o­be­di­ence to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone be­tween me and my towns­men, there was a still more dif­fi­cult one to climb or break through, be­fore they could get to be as free as I was.… In ev­ery threat and in ev­ery com­pli­ment there was a blun­der; for they thought that my chief de­sire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.

People often draw the wrong conclusion from the success of the “divide and conquer” tactic when used by governments against opposition movements. The lesson proved by this is not that unless we stay united we are weak, but that to the extent that our strength depends mainly on our unity we are vulnerable.

Without the one-man revolution, no other revolution is worth the trouble

The problem with the mass, popular, peasants-with-pitchforks sort of revolution is that it’s so unreliable. You put everything on the line, shed buckets of blood, endure betrayals and unfriendly alliances and hard compromises, and finally (if you’re lucky) cut off the king’s head and take charge… and then what? As often as not, you end up with something as bad as before.

Political revolutions, says Hennacy, “only changed masters.” — “We made a revolution against England and are not free yet. The Russians made a revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship. It is not too late to make a revolution that will mean something — one that will stick: your own one-man revolution.”

Tyranny is not something that only infests the top of the org chart. The tyrant doesn’t cause tyranny, but is its most obvious symptom. Tyranny lives as tenaciously in the tyrannized as in the tyrant. This is why Thoreau was careful to say (emphasis mine):

“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Not, “when the workers seize power” or “when we get money out of politics” or anything of that sort, but “when men are prepared for it.” We must prepare ourselves, one one-man revolution at a time, and when we have, we will get the government we deserve (self-government, if Thoreau is right and if we ever do deserve such a thing).

The revolution is not accomplished when the last faction still standing wipes the blood from its hands and sits down behind the presidential desk to issue its first decree, but “when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office” — that is, when tyranny is purged from the bottom of the org chart.

Define success and failure carefully

Be careful how you define “success.” You can do everything you set out to do, but if you haven’t set out to do anything worth doing, you still fail. Even in mundane things, you’d be wise to keep your eye on a bigger picture. Thoreau mused in his journal:

If a man has spent all his days about some business by which he has merely got rich, as it is called, i.e., has got much money, many houses & barns & woodlots, then his life has been a failure, I think. But if he has been trying to better his condition in a higher sense than this — has been trying to be somebody, to invent something — i.e., to invent and get a patent for himself — so that all may see his originality, though he should never get above board — & all great inventors, you know, commonly die poor — I shall think him comparatively successful.

Success and failure have superficial and deep components that may contradict each other. John Brown set out to launch a rebellion that would end American slavery; the government stood its ground and defended slavery against the rebellion and had Brown hanged. Who was successful? Who won? A victory for evil is just a triumphant form of failure.

And a year and a half after Brown’s execution when Union troops set off to crush the confederacy of slavers, they were singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave — his soul is marching on!”

At the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown was called insane by the pulpit, popular opinion, and the press (even — especially — the liberal, abolitionist press). Some gave as evidence for his insanity the most extraordinarily sane thing about him:

It is mentioned against him & as an evidence of his insanity, that he was “a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor, apparently inoffensive until the subject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.”

You’d think with the example of Jesus hovering over Western Civilization, people would be skeptical of traditional notions of success: being captured and tortured to death by your enemies and having your followers scorned and scattered throughout a hostile empire doesn’t seem much like a victory. But Thoreau thought the response to John Brown proved that even after centuries of Christianity, “[i]f Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane & crazed.”

You don’t have to believe that history will eventually smile on you and turn your seeming defeats and setbacks into obvious victories. You don’t have to believe the nice-sounding but unlikely sentiment that Hennacy attributed to Tolstoy: “no sincere effort made in the behalf of Truth is ever lost.” You just need to remember that the seemingly small victories in an uncompromising one-man revolution can be more worthwhile (when seen from the perspective of what is worthwhile, not just what is expedient) than huge triumphs rotting within from compromise and half-truths.

Slavery in particular was such an unambiguous evil that it was one of “those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply,” Thoreau said. He made this comparison: if the only way you can save yourself from drowning is to unjustly wrest a plank away from another drowning man, you must instead do what is just even if it kills you. If you are “victorious” in wresting away the plank, and thereby save your own life at the cost of another, you lose.^✴

But even in cases not as extreme as slavery, he says, compromise and expediency are overrated: “there is no such thing as ac­com­plish­ing a right­eous re­form by the use of ‘ex­pe­di­ency.’ There is no such thing as slid­ing up hill. In morals the only sliders are back­sliders.”

The one-man revolution is more about doing the right thing daily than achieving the right result eventually, so even if it seems that everything is going against you, you can be confident you’re on the right track. “[B]e as unconcerned for victory as careless of defeat,” Thoreau advises, “not seeking to lengthen our term of service, nor to cut it short by a reprieve, but earnestly applying ourselves to the campaign before us.”

“Hennacy, do you think you can change the world?” said Bert Fireman, a columnist on the Phoenix Gazette.

“No, but I am damn sure it can’t change me” was my reply.

If you want to change things you have to get 51% of the ballots or the bullets. If I want to change things I just have to keep on doing what I am doing — that is: every day the government says “pay taxes for war”; every day I do not pay taxes for war. So I win and they lose. The One Man Revolution — you can’t beat it.

Do not let your opponent set the norm. Generally a minority is jeered at because they are so small. It is quality and not quantity that is the measure. “One on the side of God is a majority” is the perfect answer which I have given dozens of times with success.

(In this last quote, Hennacy is paraphrasing Thoreau, who wrote that “those who call them­selves ab­o­li­tion­ists should at once ef­fec­tu­ally with­draw their sup­port, both in per­son and prop­erty, from the gov­ern­ment of Mas­sa­chu­setts, and not wait till they con­sti­tute a ma­jor­ity of one, be­fore they suf­fer the right to pre­vail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, with­out wait­ing for that other one. More­over, any man more right than his neigh­bors con­sti­tutes a ma­jor­ity of one al­ready.”)

One-in-a-million can move the world

Sometimes, a single one-man revolutionary really does change the world. Maybe the world was already ripe for changing, but it still needed a one-man revolutionary to break from the pack and make the change happen.

Hennacy says the self-transforming doers like Christ, the Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc, were far more radical than theorizers like Marx or Bakunin. Thoreau would agree (though his list — “Minerva — Ceres — Neptune — Prometheus — Socrates — Christ — Luther — Columbus — Arkwright” — was a little more ethereal):

I know of few radicals as yet who are radical enough, and have not got this name rather by meddling with the exposed roots of innocent institutions than with their own.

We don’t progress by passively absorbing the inevitable bounty of history grinding away unconsciously on the masses, as the Hegelians might put it. Rather, says Thoreau, “The great benefactors of their race have been single and singular and not masses of men. Whether in poetry or history it is the same.” We should not be content to admire these heroes, or to await their arrival, but should be inspired by their examples to be heroic ourselves.

The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly. How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave — but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest; and only the hardy souls venture upon it, for it deals in what we have no experience, and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world.

Ac­tion from prin­ci­ple, — the per­cep­tion and the per­for­mance of right, — changes things and re­la­tions; it is es­sen­tially rev­o­lu­tion­ary, and does not con­sist wholly with any thing which was. It not only di­vides states and churches, it di­vides fam­i­lies; aye, it di­vides the in­di­vid­ual, sep­a­rat­ing the di­a­bol­i­cal in him from the di­vine.

There is something proudly thrilling in the thought that this obedience to conscience and trust in God, which is so solemnly preached in extremities and arduous circumstances, is only to retreat to one’s self, and rely on our own strength. In trivial circumstances I find myself sufficient to myself, and in the most momentous I have no ally but myself, and must silently put by their harm by my own strength, as I did the former. As my own hand bent aside the willow in my path, so must my single arm put to flight the devil and his angels. God is not our ally when we shrink, and neuter when we are bold. If by trusting in God you lose any particle of your vigor, trust in Him no longer. … I cannot afford to relax discipline because God is on my side, for He is on the side of discipline.

We can’t all be Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc. (Steve Allen said that Ammon Hennacy fulfilled more of the role of a Lenny Bruce; Hennacy’s wife suggested Don Quixote.) It is only one-in-a-million who moves the world. But despite the odds we all should aspire to be this one in a million.

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore one who has love, courage, and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.

Even if we fall short of this goal ourselves, by choosing this goal we not only choose the only goal worth choosing, but we adjust our standards so that if we are ever lucky enough to meet this one in a million, we will be more likely to recognize her or him. Most people are incapable of recognizing or comprehending the hero in real life — they lionize the dead martyred heroes of past generations, while joining the lynch mobs to martyr the heroes of their own.

It only takes a little leavening to leaven the loaf

By aiming at this standard, you also raise the standards of those around you, and so even if you cannot detect a direct influence, you improve society. The way Thoreau put it — “It is not so im­por­tant that many should be as good as you, as that there be some ab­so­lute good­ness some­where; for that will leaven the whole lump.”^†

By being virtuous in an out-of-the-ordinary way you encourage people to call ordinary vices into question and you force the devil’s advocates to show themselves by coming to the devil’s defense. Thoreau was convinced that one person was enough to leaven the loaf:

[I]f one thou­sand, if one hun­dred, if ten men whom I could name, — if ten hon­est men only, — aye, if one hon­est man, in this State of Mas­sa­chu­setts, ceas­ing to hold slaves, were ac­tu­ally to with­draw from this co­part­ner­ship, and be locked up in the county jail there­for, it would be the ab­o­li­tion of slav­ery in Amer­ica.

Hennacy said that his “work was not that of an organizer but of a Sower to sow the seeds.”

We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!

When they are ready for it [my emphasis again — ♇], the rich, the bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician and the clergy may have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.

You have a plan to reform the world? As the saying goes: “show me, don’t tell me.” Thoreau:

The Reformer who comes recommending any institution or system to the adoption of men, must not rely solely on logic and argument, or on eloquence and oratory for his success, but see that he represents one pretty perfect institution in himself…

I ask of all Reformers, of all who are recommending Temperance, Justice, Charity, Peace, the Family, Community or Associative life, not to give us their theory and wisdom only, for these are no proof, but to carry around with them each a small specimen of his own manufactures, and to despair of ever recommending anything of which a small sample at least cannot be exhibited: — that the Temperance man let me know the savor of Temperance, if it be good, the Just man permit to enjoy the blessings of liberty while with him, the Community man allow me to taste the sweets of the Community life in his society.

Too many reformers think they can reform the rottenness of the system the people are sustaining without changing the rottenness of the people who sustain the system. “The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions. … It is not the worst reason why the reform should be a private and individual enterprise, that perchance the evil may be private also.”

So often we hear of a Big Plan that, were it enacted as designed, would solve the Big Problems. But the problem with the big plans is that they never seem to get enacted, or if they do, they never seem to work as designed, as the same problems show up in new guises. Meanwhile the planners waste their time and energy and don’t change what is changeable. Tolstoy put it this way:

If a man drinks, and I tell him that he can himself stop drinking and must do so, there is some hope that he will pay attention to me; but if I tell him that his drunkenness forms a complex and difficult problem, which we, the learned, will try to solve in our meetings, all the probabilities are that he, waiting for the solution of the problem, will continue to drink. The same is true of the false and intricate scientific, external means for the cessation of war, like the international tribunals, the court of arbitration, and other similar foolish things, when we with them keep in abeyance the simplest and most essential means for the cessation of war, which is only too obvious to anybody. For people who do not need war not to fight we need no international tribunals, no solution of questions, but only that the people who are subject to deception should awaken and free themselves from that spell under which they are. This means for the abolition of war consists in this, that the men who do not need war, who consider a participation in war to be a sin, should stop fighting.

An alcoholic who spoke with Hennacy had much the same sentiment: “the AA fixed me up. You are right in not wanting to change the world by violence; the change has to come with each person first.”

The present American peace movement, stubbornly paying for the imperial armies it says it opposes, reminds me of drunks meeting in a tavern at happy hour to organize a prohibition movement that will solve their alcohol problem.

Your one-man revolution isn’t as lonely as it may seem

Hennacy and Thoreau also had faith that if you begin the one-man revolution, this will attract like-minded souls to you and you to them, and that you will find yourself working in concert with comrades you never knew you had:

Thoreau: “Men talk much of cooperation nowadays, of working together to some worthy end; but what little cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a simple result of which the means are hidden, a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere. If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to.”

Hennacy: “In reading Tolstoy I had gained the idea that if a person had the One Man Revolution in his heart and lived it, he would be led by God toward those others who felt likewise.… This was to be proven in a most dramatic way, and was to usher me into the second great influence of my life: that of the Catholic Worker movement.”

The One-Man Revolution

So what do you have to do to be the exemplar and sow the seeds?

1. Accept responsibility, and act responsibly.
2. Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones.

Accept responsibility, and act responsibly

Most political action amounts to “who can we find to take responsibility for this problem” — the One Man Revolutionary asks “what can I do to take responsibility for this problem?”

Not that everything is your responsibility, or that the world is looking to you personally to solve all of its problems. But you should at the very least examine your life to see what problems or solutions you are contributing to with it. Can one person make a difference? You are already making a difference — what kind of difference are you making?

It is not a man’s duty, as a mat­ter of course, to de­vote him­self to the erad­i­cat­ion of any, even the most enor­mous wrong; he may still prop­erly have other con­cerns to en­gage him, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it prac­ti­cally his sup­port. If I de­vote my­self to other pur­suits and con­tem­plat­ions, I must first see, at least, that I do not pur­sue them sit­ting upon an­other man’s shoul­ders. I must get off him first, that he may pur­sue his con­tem­plat­ions too.

A man has not ev­ery thing to do, but some­thing; and be­cause he can­not do ev­ery thing, it is not nec­es­sary that he should do some­thing wrong.

In Thoreau’s time, the evils of slavery and of wars of conquest were sustained by the active allegiance and support of the ordinary people around him, many of whom nonetheless congratulated themselves for their anti-war, anti-slavery opinions.

I quar­rel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-op­er­ate with, and do the bid­ding of those far away, and with­out whom the lat­ter would be harm­less.

I have heard some of my towns­men say, “I should like to have them or­der me out to help put down an in­sur­rec­tion of the slaves, or to march to Mex­ico, — see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, di­rectly by their al­le­giance, and so in­di­rectly, at least, by their money, fur­nished a sub­sti­tute. The sol­dier is ap­plauded who re­fuses to serve in an un­just war by those who do not re­fuse to sus­tain the un­just gov­ern­ment which makes the war…

Those who, while they dis­ap­prove of the char­ac­ter and meas­ures of a gov­ern­ment, yield to it their al­le­giance and sup­port, are un­doubt­edly its most con­sci­en­tious sup­port­ers, and so fre­quently the most se­ri­ous ob­sta­cles to re­form. Some are pe­ti­tion­ing the State to dis­solve the Union, to dis­re­gard the req­ui­si­tions of the Pres­i­dent. Why do they not dis­solve it them­selves, — the union be­tween them­selves and the State, — and re­fuse to pay their quota into its trea­sury?

If a thou­sand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a vi­o­lent and bloody meas­ure, as it would be to pay them, and en­able the State to com­mit vi­o­lence and shed in­no­cent blood. This is, in fact, the def­i­ni­tion of a peace­able rev­o­lu­tion, if any such is pos­si­ble.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that because the one-man revolution is in your heart that it can just stay there, locked up inside, without leaking out into the world around you.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course. Do not let your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. I have no doubt it will prove a failure.

The one-man revolution doesn’t necessarily require living in opposition to society and the status quo, but it does require holding fast to justice and virtue. When society and the status quo are opposed to justice and virtue, as they so often are, this puts them in opposition to you as well.

Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones

Your friends and even your enemies will come to your aid when you try to hold yourself to a high standard. All you have to do is to make yourself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. People love to point out hypocritical moralists, in part because some hypocritical moralists are hilarious, but also in part because it helps people excuse their own failures to hold themselves to high standards. If you build yourself a glass house and throw stones from it, everyone will volunteer to keep you on the straight-and-narrow.

Hennacy:

I have… put myself in a glass house. If so I must needs take whatever stones come my way. I have the right by my life of integrity to criticize, but I must also take whatever criticism comes my way in all good humor.

[A] spoiled and arrogant priest wanted to know if I was “holier than thou.” I told him I hoped by Christ I was, for if I wasn’t I would be in a hell of a fix. I used this blunt method to deflate his spurious piety.

At times those who do not want to have their inconsistencies pointed out say in a super-sweet voice to me “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I reply, “O.K., judge me, then.”

When your standards for yourself rise, so do your standards for other people (otherwise you really are being arrogant). Thoreau, criticized for demanding too much from people, said he could not “con­vince my­self that I have any right to be sat­is­fied with men as they are, and to treat them ac­cord­ingly, and not ac­cord­ing, in some re­spects, to my req­ui­si­tions and ex­pec­ta­tions of what they and I ought to be.”

While both Thoreau and Hennacy strike me as stern with others, and maybe not always fun to be around (as Hennacy would say: “I love my enemies but am hell on my friends”), they were anything but joyless. Thoreau’s vigorous, enthusiastic love of life and the world are legendary, and Hennacy’s character too was eager, life-affirming, and generous (even in its criticisms).

Utah Phillips came home from the Korean war a drunken brawler, checked in to Hennacy’s Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City, and eight years later checked out again, sober, a pacifist, and an anarchist. He remembered Hennacy this way:

He was tough without being hard — tough without that brittle hardness that some tough men have that would shatter if you struck it too hard. “Love in Action,” Dorothy Day called him — Dostoyevsky’s words: “Love in action is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”^‡

Neither Thoreau nor Hennacy had any tolerance for bliss-bunnyishness, but both were cheerful; both knew how to be dutiful without being dour. Thoreau:

To march sturdily through life, patiently and resolutely looking grim defiance at one’s foes, that is one way; but we cannot help being more attracted by that kind of heroism which relaxes its brows in the presence of danger, and does not need to maintain itself strictly, but, by a kind of sympathy with the universe, generously adorns the scene and the occasion, and loves valor so well that itself would be the defeated party only to behold it; which is as serene and as well pleased with the issue as the heavens which look down upon the field of battle. It is but a lower height of heroism when the hero wears a sour face.

A great cheerfulness indeed have all great wits and heroes possessed, almost a profane levity to such as understood them not, but their religion had the broader basis of health and permanence. For the hero, too, has his religion, though it is the very opposite to that of the ascetic. It demands not a narrower cell but a wider world.

In conclusion

I’ve tried here to put forward the strongest affirmative case for the practical effectiveness of the one-man revolution, at least as it can be found in Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s writings.

They make a strong and persuasive argument, I think, but not an airtight one. I wish more evidence was preserved of them in dialog with incisive critics of the one-man revolution, to hear how they would respond to the best arguments against it.

But what keeps the argument for a one-man revolution from persuading people is not, I think, the strength of the counter-arguments, but just the fact that to accept the argument is not enough — it demands much more than a “Like,” and much more than most people think they have to give. To be persuaded is to be overwhelmed, to take the first step off the path and into uncharted territory, and only a few of us have the courage to take that step.

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• Caleb Shenk, a junior accounting major, was a contestant at the 2023 C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. He won the second-place award for his speech on “Protesting Taxation as a Peace-Seeking Accountant.”
• The “Don’t Pay” movement targeting utility bill hikes has spread to Lebanon.
• Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul raised a stink a few days ago when he suggested that Russian taxpayers bear some of the blame for the Ukraine invasion: “This is Russia’s war, not just Putin’s. Putin decided to invade Ukraine. But other Russians, not Putin, are killing people in Ukraine. Other Russians continue to pay taxes to finance those killings. Some brave Russians are protesting the war. Most are not.”
• Thousands of workers from dozens of labor unions in Sri Lanka have gone on strike to protest IMF-demanded austerity measures and tax hikes.
• Catalan separatists are again encouraging people to redirect their taxes from Madrid to the Republican Solidarity Action Fund.
• About 150,000 employees of the U.S. federal government collectively owe $1.5 billion dollars in overdue taxes.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, giving us practice perhaps for the coming struggle against the artificially-intelligent drone hordes. The latest mechanical victims included a camera muffled by packing tape in Italy, cameras smashed and blinded in Germany, dozens burned, toppled, blinded, or torched in France, others smeared, battered, painted, and blocked with haybales in Germany, and more chopped down, burned, and blinded in France.