Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → American conservative arguments for tax resistance → Vivien Kellems

As I mentioned a while back, I’m putting together a “tax resistance reader” with historical examples of writing by and about tax resistance in its various forms.

I wanted to include at least one example from the American “Constitutionalist” tax protester movement. Although it is a different sort of egg than the conscientious or tactical tax resistance examples that are the main focus of the reader, it is a surprisingly large and influential movement, and one that occasionally mixes with the contemporary American war tax resistance movement.

The Constitutionalist tax protesters say that the federal government is exceeding its Constitutional authority in the way it taxes Americans, particularly in the case of the income tax — that there is no law, or no Constitutional law, or no valid law, or something of that sort, that requires us to pay a tax on our incomes. They typically hope that the federal court system will see things their way (though the courts rarely if ever do) but, at the same time, are so convinced by their understanding of the Constitutional limits on government that court cases to the contrary usually neither convince nor deter them.

It’s a charming faith in a sort of Platonic Constitution as it ought-to-be (or, often, a fantasy nostalgia for the Constitution of an imaginary past). At its best, it asserts a citizen’s prerogative to the superior share of responsibility for running the republic and restraining its government that is a frequent theme in democratic political theory. But at its worst, it’s a bunch of bizarre mumbo-jumbo and cargo cult legal blather.

Most of the contemporary tax protester literature is devoted to an intricate analysis of a legal framework that exists nowhere on Earth, but only in an imaginary world. It’s a bit like watching people play role-playing games in which they become space captains or World War Ⅱ generals or sword-wielding elves, only in this game they become lawyers.

Baroque and fascinating as these arguments can sometimes be, they’re also pretty dumb — and quickly anachronistic, as new “can’t miss” Constitutional or “common law” arguments are advanced by a new generation of tax protesters, to replace the ones that failed for the last set. Each new generation of arguments requires a deeper dive into the arcana of obscure court opinions, old lawbooks, and bizarre logical constructions.

I hoped to find an example of the genre that was more straightforward and sparing on the mumbo-jumbo. For this, I went back to Vivien Kellems, a fascinating woman and one whose tax resistance in defense of her version of the Platonic Constitution serves as an exemplar of the American Constitutionalist tax protester phenomenon.

The trick was to find some of her writing and get permission to include it in my reader.

Kellems wrote about her tax resistance in a book called Toil, Taxes and Trouble, that was published by E.P. Dutton in 1952. E.P. Dutton was later absorbed by the Penguin Group. Their permissions department says that the rights to the book reverted to the author, who was represented by Curtis Brown Ltd. However, a representative of Curtis Brown told me they don’t represent Kellems’s work any longer, and didn’t have any leads for me.

My understanding is that a book that was published in 1952 went into the public domain if its copyright registration wasn’t renewed by the end of 1980. So my next step was to try to find out if the registration was renewed, and if so, by whom. I checked the on-line database at the U.S. Copyright Catalog (which covers copyrights registered after 1978), and I even checked through the full, pre-1978 database (which is huge, hard to track down, and only recently available to the public). There’s no sign of Kellems’s book in either database. So, I’m going to go on the assumption that Toil, Taxes and Trouble is now free-for-all.

And, in that spirit, and from that book, here’s a transcript of the speech Kellems gave to the Los Angeles Rotary Club on 13 February, 1948, to announce that she was going to stop withholding taxes from the paychecks of her employees:

“And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city.”
It has frequently been said that history repeats itself, and today, we are witnessing a repetition of the act of Caesar Augustus two thousand years ago. It all began in 1913, when we issued a decree “that all the world should be taxed,” every man in his own city. For in that year we adopted the Sixteenth Amendment to our Constitution:
“The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on income from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
And when we adopted this income tax amendment, we departed from our constitutional method of taxation.
For one hundred and twenty-five years, the Federal Government had levied taxes and they were always apportioned among the several States. Why do you suppose the Constitution is so specific and so explicit that Federal taxes shall be uniform and apportioned among the States? For one reason only. Our forefathers were determined to build a republic, with equal opportunity and equal responsibility for each and every one of us. They knew that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and they did not wish to have one group of citizens, or one part of the country penalized for the unfair advantage of another.
How wise and farsighted they were! For one hundred and twenty-five years this was our traditional, constitutional system of taxation, and under it we built the richest, most powerful nation in the world. We developed and maintained for the majority of our people, a standard of living, undreamed of in any other country, the hope and envy of all the world.
And then what happened? We chucked our proved system of taxation out the window, and we passed the income tax. Gone was our uniformity, gone was our apportionment among the States. And with uniformity and apportionment went a great deal more — our fundamental American rights. At first, we started with a tiny little one per cent on all incomes. That being more or less painless, we raised it to 2 per cent. And then 5 per cent, and then 10 per cent, and then 20 per cent, and then 50 per cent, and up and up and up to 90 per cent and in 1943, due to that clever so-called 75 per cent forgiveness trick, some citizens in this country were taxed more than 100 per cent of their incomes. Is it a tax or is it confiscation?
But that isn’t all. Being so intrigued with the income tax, we decided that if one tax is good, two are better and we proceeded to pass the capital gains tax which slapped business right in the face and sent it reeling into the corner. And to salt it down, we added the idiotic capital stock tax. And still not satisfied, we made sure that every dividend should pay two taxes — one by the corporation and another by the stockholder, if and when he got it. And right in the middle of this tax orgy, we elected an Administration that made a wonderful discovery: The world was its little oyster to open.
Up to this point we thought we had done pretty well, but we soon realized we were just pikers. Taxes? We didn’t know the meaning of the word, but we soon found out that the New Dealers did. Taxes? A new one every day or two! They rained upon us as the gentle dew from Heaven. “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect,” quoth the delighted Harry Hopkins. Soak the rich in Illinois, or New York, or Connecticut and buy some votes in Oregon or Nevada or wherever they are needed. The formula worked like magic for political purposes but it threw our country into the deepest and most tragic depression of our history. The depression of the 1930’s was a tax depression. Business simply could not function. It took a world-wide war, billions of dollars, and the precious lives of thousands of our boys to pull us out of it.
But with the adoption of the income tax, we lost something more precious than uniformity and apportionment among the States. Let us go back to our Fourth and Fifth Amendments: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated…” and “…no person shall be compelled to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
These two Amendments insured to the citizens of the United States the right of privacy. It was ours in every sense, until the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, but with the income tax, we lost this precious right. If I say, “No,” you cannot come into my house without a search warrant, and before you can secure such a warrant, you must advance good and sufficient cause for searching my house. But the Income Tax Inspector can come into my home or yours. In the name of the Income Tax, the Federal Government can search and seize every paper you own, it can force you into court, to be a witness against yourself, and if you are not able to pay the tax, it can sell you out, lock, stock and barrel. The Income Tax is the strongest weapon ever placed in the hands of an unscrupulous government, and as long as that Amendment is a part of our Constitution, our freedom is in jeopardy. Our right to privacy, so carefully insured to us by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, has vanished.
But taxes are like strong drink. They grow upon you. If income taxes are good for some of us, they must be good for all of us. If one citizen is to pay an income tax then every person who has an income should also pay his proportionate share. With which conclusion I agree. But I disagree with the premise — I don’t think an income tax is good for anyone, the taxpayer or the Government.
But this time we really did a job. Under the hypnosis of war hysteria, with a pusillanimous Congress rubber-stamping every whim of the White House, we passed the withholding tax. We appointed ourselves so many policemen and with this club in our hands, we set out to collect a tax from every hapless individual who received wages from us. We became our “brother’s keeper.”
From time immemorial the tax collector has been feared and hated. The baron of old used to farm out his tax collections, paying his agent a percentage of what he was able to wrest from his impoverished subjects. It is not accidental that this job was placed upon the employer. A crafty Administration which thrived upon class hatred “planned it that way.” Here was another wedge to drive between the employer and the employee, another opportunity to cause misunderstanding and dissension. The employee did not blame his government, he blamed his employer, and even today thousands of workers in this country still think it is a dirty trick of the wicked capitalists.
But we weren’t as clever as the barons’ tax collectors. We didn’t pay ourselves for collecting taxes, we didn’t even reimburse ourselves for our expense in collecting taxes, we made ourselves responsible for other people’s taxes and we penalized ourselves for not collecting them. Let us read the law: “Every person required to deduct and withhold the tax… from the wages of an employee is liable for the payment of such tax whether or not it is collected from the employee. If, for example, the employer deducts less than the correct amount of tax or if he fails to deduct any part of the tax, he is nevertheless liable for the correct amount of the tax. However, if the employer… fails to deduct and withhold the tax and thereafter the income tax… is paid, the tax shall not be collected from the employer.” In other words, the Government won’t collect it twice — isn’t that big-hearted? But there is more. “Such payment does not, however,… relieve the employer from liability for penalties or for failure to deduct and withhold within the time prescribed by law.” So, if your employee does not pay his tax, you have to pay it, and if he does pay it but you do not deduct and withhold it, you can be fined and sent to prison. This in free America!
The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right here.
The employer or professional man, not on a salary, is allowed a bit of time in which to prepare his accounting and pay his tax. But from the salaried worker or wage earner that pay envelope is rudely snatched from the paymaster’s hand and those taxes taken in advance out of today’s butter or tomorrow’s hospital bill. This withholding law has made a greedy, avaricious monster out of the Federal Tax Grabber and an unwilling Simon Legree out of the wretched employer forced to do his dirty work for him.
Many otherwise patriotic citizens have lent themselves to this system because they mistakenly believed that it would create greater tax consciousness and a sentiment for economy in our Federal expenditures. Even if this were true, the system is still wrong. Shall we compromise our fundamental American principles for expediency? The majority of workers today figure their wages by the money in that pay envelope. And so they should. That 20 per cent is disregarded completely — it has been shifted to the shoulders of the employers and is nothing more or less than a 20 per cent payroll tax which is added to the price of every manufactured article. Labor doesn’t need a raise. All labor needs is to get what labor earns. Lop off that 20 per cent payroll tax, labor will have its raise, and the inflationary spiral will take a sharp dip down. It’s as simple as that.
And how about the millions of dollars spent by employers each year in collecting that tax? If it costs my little company as much as it does to deduct, withhold and pay that tax, what must it cost a big company such as General Motors? Why should we bear this additional expense? The Government gets the tax, doesn’t it? Well then, how about the Government paying for collecting it? I have searched the Constitution through and can find no power or right granted to the Federal Government for this mass picking of the pockets of the American people.
The very men who shout the loudest against the demands of the Union for the checkoff have connived and conspired with the New Dealers for this vast Government Checkoff.
Just how far are we going? Are we going to deduct contributions for the church, dues for the lodge, money for the grocery bill, the electric light and coal bill? Shall we buy clothes for the children and pay tuition for their schooling? Once having started, where do we stop? If this is Russia, then let’s say so. Let’s just hand the worker an envelope full of coupons at the end of each week and call it a day!
Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship. Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.
It is about four o’clock in Westport. By this time our payroll has been distributed. The income tax of each individual has been distributed. The income tax of each individual has been deducted and withheld, but it is the last time the Kellems Company will perform this service for the Government. I have more confidence in my employees than has their Government. I believe that every person in my employ will pay his taxes as long as we have an income tax law, but if he does not, that is a matter between himself and his Government, exactly as his religion is a matter between himself and his God. I have no right to inject myself into either relationship.
If High Tax Harry wants me to get that money for him, then he must appoint me an agent for the Internal Revenue Department, he must pay me a salary for my work, and he must reimburse me for my expenses incurred in collecting that tax. And I want a badge, too. I am not a tax collector and if an American citizen can be fined and thrown into prison for not collecting taxes from his workers, then let’s know about it now. Let’s see what the court has to say about this law — it’s not the first one passed in violation of the Constitution.
The decision to take this step has not been made hastily nor has it been an easy one. There are many sincere people who will censure me for breaking the law. Knowing this and having been through one New Deal smear and persecution, I still break this law, deliberately. Before I reach Westport the income tax inspector will be ensconced in my office, completely surrounded by my private papers, my company books and my canceled checks. He will greet me at the door, righteous indignation all over his face. Well, having gone through it before, I can go through it again. Because you see I made a discovery. Like all bullies and bloodsucking parasites, those mangy little bureaucrats down in Washington are at heart yellow cowards. So no matter what they do I’m standing on my rights until the court hands down its verdict.
As in the life of each individual there occasionally comes a moment of grave decision, so in the life of a free nation comes a significant moment, fraught with fearful consequences. We have reached such a moment in our development. Free people preserve their freedom and rid themselves of tyranny only be resistance and by breaking the law. We have a country because our forefathers defied a tyrant and broke the law. They broke tax laws. Rather than pay a tax they threw the tea into the harbor. They refused to pay a stamp tax. They poured their whisky down the drain rather than pay a tax on it. An American is aroused indeed, when he will sacrifice his liquor! Every man who signed the Declaration of Independence was a lawbreaker and a rebel. He broke the law, but he founded a nation. Thousands of patriotic American men and women spirited Negro slaves across the Canadian border. They broke the law but they freed a race. Thoreau, one of our most revered and honored philosophers, refused to pay a tax and went to prison. He broke the law but he saved his honor, and while in prison, he wrote that immortal document “Civil Disobedience.” It was the reading of “Civil Disobedience” which determined the whole course of Gandhi’s life. Brave American women suffered humiliation and imprisonment when they dared to defy the Government. They broke the law but they won the vote and freedom for their sex.
One night in the spring of 1947, a group of courageous women, about one hundred of them, gathered in my shop in Westport and at ten o’clock went to work. We were free American citizens prohibited by law from working after ten o’clock at night and before six in the morning. We broke the law but we gave back to the women of Connecticut their constitutional right to work when they please.
Did you ever break the prohibition law? Ever make any bathtub gin? Ever get a ticket for speeding? What is the difference between breaking the speed law and breaking the income tax law? A lot. For one you get slapped on the wrist with a small fine; for the other you get slapped in the jug with a big fine. The penalties should be reversed. Speeding may mean loss of life but cheating on the income tax means only loss of money. However, the New Deal has always valued American money more than American lives although it has spent both with impunity.
Unjust and tyrannical laws always breed contempt and evasion. Just as millions of Americans made, and sold, and drank liquor under Prohibition, so today millions of Americans are lying, and cheating, and evading the income tax. It is no more possible to enforce the income tax law than it was to enforce the prohibition law. We couldn’t plug those liquor leaks and we can’t plug these tax leaks. We are losing billions of dollars in unpaid taxes and the basis of business is rapidly shifting from credit to cash. Everything from apartment houses to fur coats is being sold for cash. We have become a nation of tax collectors, tax evaders and craven cowards. So, he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.
Our forefathers bequeathed to us a heritage of freedom. Implicit in that bequest was the obligation and the responsibility to pass that freedom on to our posterity, unimpaired. What greater indictment can be made of our generation than that we have permitted that freedom to slip between our fingers; we have allowed despots and tyrants to tax it away from us. We cannot pass it on, in the American tradition, to our children who have every right to receive that freedom, so carefully guarded for us by our ancestors. We have failed in that sacred trust.
The whole country is confused and discouraged, no longer is there incentive and ambition to work, to achieve success, and to set aside savings for the future. Bombarded by ceaseless propaganda, robbed of his just earnings, the average American is like the worm ready to turn. All over this land there is one burning topic of conversation — taxes. A ground swell of seething resentment is growing into a tidal wave that may well engulf the tax planners, the tax grabbers and all their kind. Americans will bear a lot and are slow to anger but as this treasonable plot to sell us out unfolds before their eyes, they realize that this is not the ordinary corruption, mismanagement and bad government we have known in other periods of our history. This is something far more sinister. The destruction of the capitalistic system by increasingly heavy income taxes is the purest Marxian doctrine, and Lenin followed his great teacher, when in 1924, he declared that the United States would spend itself into destruction. We are becoming aware that these ruinous taxes are not accidental, they are not even a result of the war; they have been deliberately saddled upon our backs as a part of a plot of the Communists to take us over. Bankruptcy and national suicide stare us in the face.
How much longer are we going to take it? Is there no more good, old-fashioned American courage, or have we become a nation of spineless jellyfish? Are we worthy of the sacrifices of our forefathers or are we the silly suckers the rest of the world thinks us? There is no time to lose. We must strike now. We are the Government. We, the people, are still the strongest thing in our country and we can still get what we want. We just have to want it hard enough. We have fought and won a global war to free the whole world and have succeeded only in bringing chaos and misery to that world and in making tax slaves of ourselves.
So let’s repeal the income tax. You think it can’t be done? If we left it to you men, it couldn’t. But I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. We women are going to repeal it. We got you out of that prohibition mess, didn’t we? Well, we’ll dig you out of this one. But I want to remind you that we didn’t vote for either one — they were both exclusively your ideas. So we’ll get you out once more but for goodness’ sake, the next time you get such a brain wave, will you please tell us so we can stop you in time!
You see we women have more to lose in this situation than you men, we own most of the assets of the country. Approximately 70 or 80 per cent of the wealth of the United States is in our little, lily-white hands, and if you dear, sweet men don’t start taking care of yourselves, we’ll soon own it all. You work yourselves to the bone and along about forty or fifty, you pop off with heart disease. And not content with that, ever so often you have a war and stand up and shoot each other. Just keep this up and it won’t be long until we own and run the whole country. And I’ll give you three guesses as to how many income taxes we’ll have.
Because we women are just about fed up with all this nonsense, so-called socialized medicine, federal aid to education and all the rest of his paternalistic claptrap, designed to make us incompetent dependents upon the Government. All we want is for the Government to give back to the American people the money which is rightfully theirs, the money for which they work and which they earn, and we’ll pay our own doctors’ bills, we’ll educate our own children, and we’ll once more become self-respecting, self-reliant citizens. And, incidentally, we’ll stop spending half our time filling out ten thousand silly income tax returns, questionnaires and forms which will give us more time in which to make more money — for ourselves. Of course, this will automatically get rid of thousands of form makers, form readers, form filers and tax collectors but we’re not going to shed any tears about them. They can go out into private life and get productive jobs like the rest of us. With them off our backs we’ll save thousands of dollars and give ourselves another tax reduction.
We women are simple people. We can’t understand why the Government shouldn’t first determine its income and then live within it. Why does it pass the budget first and then run out and see where it’s going to get the money? Right now the Senate won’t act on the tax bill until it sees what the budget is going to be. We believe that instead of passing Mr. Truman’s supercolossal budget the Senate should first give us a whopping, big tax cut, right across the board, and then tell Mr. Truman how much money he can spend. That’s what we do. We first find out how much money we’re going to have and then we decide what we’ll spend and if that income doesn’t mean fur coats and diamond rings, well then we just don’t have fur coats and diamond rings. And we think it’s time the Federal Government cut out fur coats and diamond rings for a spell, and concentrated upon meat and potatoes.
And so may I be very impolite and close this little talk with a few words, not to you, but to another audience, a vast, unseen audience, many not within sound of my voice. I’m speaking to women, millions of American women; to every woman whose husband comes home at the end of the week with 20 per cent of his wages taken out of his pay envelope, to every woman worried and harassed over the mounting grocery bill, to every mother wondering how to buy a little boy a new pair of shoes, to every mother frantic with fear over a sick child, unable to pay a competent doctor. Women, women of America, let us band together! Let us rise up and say we will take no more of it. Let us write, let us wire, let us telephone our Congressmen, let us march on Washington, if necessary, but let us demand that this monstrous, wholesale robbery of the American people come to an end!

Determining copyright expiration is a strange art, and the convoluted law that governs it is every bit as baroque as modern Constitutionalist tax protester legal theory. So, I may be jumping the gun here. If you, dear reader, hold the rights to Vivien Kellems’s writings, please do let me know, so I can ask for permission to include it in my reader, and forgiveness for including it here.

A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation. In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.

Here are some of the examples I found:

Tax resister “insurance”
For instance, the Breton Association in 19^th century France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”
Another example was the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in 1930s Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the IRS. The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up [the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any confinement.”
Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities. Whiteway Colony was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the Bijou and Agape communities live below a taxable income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Supporting resisters as an employer
Some members of the Restored Israel of Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several months.”
Disrupting auctions of seized property
Earlier this year I recounted a dramatic and successful example of the American group “Peacemakers” blocking the sale of Ernest & Marion Bromley’s seized home.
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown in’ by the auctioneer.”
Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail
Jessica Ramer and a Claire Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether or not to declare the income.

Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but still give the nice server what they have earned.
Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging IRS seizures:

The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington, D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation. He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop, to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth, alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition, and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed, non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on alcoholic beverages).
Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses
One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:

Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan. The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda, reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
- Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,
  The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherers and sinners,” “tax-gatherers and Gentiles,” “tax-gatherers and harlots,” “tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
- A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before the American revolution. John Adams wrote:
  At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.
- Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:
  [W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:
  Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Violently resist tax collectors, disrupt trials/auctions, intimidate collaborators
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this, governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently, percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers who complied in paying the excise tax.
Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of taxed British imports by declaring that

…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public, shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer: and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence, with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer; and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country, and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics
In mid-19^th century Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:

The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings, you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which tax collector.
Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax resisters. In early 1968, for instance, 448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
This year’s 2008 War Tax Boycott, Don’t Buy Bush’s War, and Pledge for Peace campaigns also have a public-signing component.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister alternative funds function partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs as he was picketing the IRS office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
Keep in contact with resisters and express support
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the IRS as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across the country.
Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making
Here there are too many examples to list.
Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that “The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry to its knees.”
Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed? They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe. You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
Support the families of imprisoned resisters
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”
Study the law, give legal support
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”
Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable television on United States involvement in Central America, and a people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community, however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”

Can you think of any I’ve missed?

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

If You Want Mylai, Buy It

Young men are a dime a dozen. What the Army wants is a dime to buy a dozen young men with.
Either give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but stop asking, “What can an old man do?”
April 15 is the date. April 15 is the date you turn over a quarter of your income to Behemoth, and half to three-quarters of what you turn over goes to the Army to buy a dozen young men to populate (and depopulate) Perforation Paddy. “I sent them a good boy,” said Private Meadlo’s mother after Mylai, “and they made him a murderer.”
If you want it, buy it. If you don’t, don’t. But stop asking, “What can an old man do?”
If, like me, you had a good year and made more than $625 in 1970, the Internal Revenue Act requires you to file an income tax return. If you refuse (rather than evade) the requirement to file, you are still a felon, but you should notify Behemoth and all its minions lest you be hanged for the wrong reason. (The Act simply punishes “failure to file” and “failure to pay”.) I shouldn’t refuse to file, myself, but better men than I have taken the position that filing is more than a formality; the best of them, A.J. Muste, always filed an appropriately marked Bible instead of a return.
So, too, as the antics proceed, you will be asked (unless you have a readily attachable pay-check) where you stash your money so that Behemoth’s little boys in blue can go and get it. Here again I should comply, myself, lest Behemoth get the impression that I am playing a cat-and-mouse (or mouse-and-cat) game. But this decision, too, like whether or not to file a return, is probably a matter of temperament.
The purpose of taxation is to enable people collectively to buy what they want. Sometimes when some of them want a little something special and some of them don’t — for instance, throughways financed by tolls — those who want them pay for them and those who don’t want them don’t. But Mylai is financed by the general fund of the Treasury, on the assumption that everybody wants Mylai. Behemoth has no way of knowing that the assumption is false unless those who don’t want it refuse to buy it. A vote for Nixon (or Humphrey) or Johnson (or Goldwater) is a vote for Mylai. (“It was murder. We were shooting into houses and at people — running or standing, doing nothing.” — Sergeant Charles Hutts.)
The nation-state is not merely fallible; it is, as every Judeo-Christian (or Christeo-Judean) schoolboy knows, unholy because it divides the family of man into we and they. Only men are, or may be, holy in a world of nation-states, and they dare not perform an unholy act to preserve such an institution. Still the conscientious tax refuser is a conscientious citizen of the nation-state. He would gladly pay his taxes for the things all the people in it (including him) want. In Norway (in this respect the only even halfway civilized country in the world) the conscientious citizen may have his tax payment segregated for the support of the United Nations if he does not want to buy Mylai.
Bucking always for salvation, the conscientious citizen is nevertheless up against some serious objections to his refusal to send a dozen young men to the edge of the ditch in Mylai. The objections appear to be six in number:
Objection 1: The legal penalty of five years in stir and/or a ten-thousand-dollar fine. The U.S. Government has not yet pressed for the penalty in any case of tax refusal that I know of — partly, I suppose, because Behemoth does not know what to do about conscience, partly because the use of force, violence, and other lawful means of penalizing conscientious people always increases their number. (Better pretend they’re not there — up to a point.)
But the number is increasing anyway, and it is not unlikely that it is approaching that point. When it is confident that it has got its Haynsworth-Carswell Court, Behemoth may feel constrained some one of these days to press for the penalty. The tax refusal movement, for twenty years amorphous, is now coordinated by War Tax Resistance, whose address, I am reliably informed, is 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10017, and whose telephone number (212‒477‒2970) was discovered in the Manhattan telephone directory by a task force of forty FBI agents led personally by J. Edgar Hoover. Desperado Bradford Lyttle of WTR reports 181 active refusal centers across the country and estimates 15,000 refusers in 1970.
Answer to Objection 1: There are worse things than losing five years and/or ten thousand dollars, and Mylai is one of them.
Objection 2: The loss of job or reputation. Ten years ago (even five) many tax refusers lost jobs (or failed to get them) as a consequence of the invariable FBI “inquiry.” That’s less likely (but only less likely) now. Loss of reputation, on the other hand, has never appeared to be consequential; I have never known anybody to the left of Orange County, California, who thought that a tax refuser was anything worse than crazy, and even in Orange County they hate taxes.
Answer to Objection 2: There are worse things than losing a job (though that is easier for a light-fingered clown like me to say than it is for an honest workingman).
We proceed now from the nuts-and-bolts to the nitty-gritty, as follows:
Objection 3: Tax refusal is ineffective because “they” get the money anyway (by force, violence, or other lawful means).
Answer to Objection 3: True, true; but, then, so is everything else ineffective (including two victorious world wars to save the world for democracy). To man, all things are impossible. If whatever you do is ineffective, you might as well buck for salvation and do what is right.
Objection 4: Tax refusal is illogical: If you refuse to pay half your income tax, half of what you do pay will be used for Mylai, as will more than the other half (since Behemoth, when it seizes the other half by force, violence, and other lawful means will also seize twelve per cent per annum interest on it).
Answer to Objection 4: This is true only if logic is a brance of effectiveness — and even then it is only half true. Behemoth will lose money on the deal because it will have to spend more to collect it than it gets. In one instance I know of, where the refuser took his case “on up,” it must have cost $25,000 in salaries and travel expenses of Treasury and FBI dicks, district attorneys, assistant attorneys-general, judges, and court attachés to collect and hold on to $32.27 (and the refuser took his own expenses in the case as a tax deduction). It is true, none the less, that in the end Behemoth will get all the money it wants for Mylai, by raising this tax rate if necessary.
But there is another, and more significant, logic: the logic of symbolism (not to be confused with symbolic logic). The only action a man can take against the nation-state is symbolic. He can not prevent its depredations but only repudiate them persistently in the hope of (a) salvation and (b) the sympathetic infection of his fellow-citizens. It is not logical symbolically (for instance) to bomb the ROTC building, because people sympathize with the victim of a bombing, and, besides, Behemoth has all the ROTC buildings it wants and is always eager to build new ones and add the building costs to its Gross National Product billboard. (The Army doesn’t need ROTC buildings or ROTC except as a symbol of militarism; no European army would dare ask a university to disgrace itself by letting its students be marched around the premises.) What is logical symbolically is for students to sit nonviolently in front of the ROTC building and be hauled violently away. Tax refusal is logical symbolically.
Objection 5: Tax refusal is a disavowal of representative government.
Answer to Objection 5: It is, if, and only if, by representative government is meant majoritarianism and not representation at all. If you are an American citizen and you do not want Mylai and won’t buy it, you are not represented. The Congressmen (including the Senators) who deplore Mylai all buy it, without exception. The last one who wouldn’t was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who voted all alone against the second go-around of the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy. The conscientious citizen who does not want Mylai and will not buy it is driven to self-government by the failure of representative government to represent him.
Objection 6: Tax refusal is anarchy, and anarchy is the worst thing that can befall society.
Answer to Objection 6: Anarchy is not the worst thing that can befall a society; it is the second worst. The worst is tyranny, and the worst tyranny is self-evidently that which requires the innocent to kill the innocent. (“I love women. I love children, too. I love people.” — Lt. William L. Calley.) He who does not want and will not buy tyranny must, like George Washington, take his chances on anarchy.
So hopelessly unholy is the nation-state that it drives the conscientious citizen to anarchy and then accuses him of driving it to anarchy when he tries to disengage himself from its tyranny. In the interesting case of the $32.27 cited above, Attorney Francis Heisler was arguing for the refuser before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and one of the judges said to him: “Counsel, is your client aware that if this Court holds in his behalf the Court itself will be laying the axe to the root of all established government?” “I think he is, your honor,” Attorney Heisler replied.
The objections considered, we proceed to the obstacles. There is only one that appears to be insuperable: withholding, the worst crime ever committed against liberty by a good man. When Beardsley Ruml thought up “pay-as-you-go,” everybody cheered except the company bosses who had to do the detestable New Deal’s detestable bookkeeping for it. (Anybody remember when the Connecticut manufacturer, Vivian Kellems, led the Old Guard attack on Social Security by refusing to make the employe deductions?) Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. They can sue to recover — some have — but nobody has made it to the Supreme Court yet. Others reduce or eliminate the withholding by claiming excess dependents (the whole population of Vietnam, for instance) in calculating their estimated tax. Again, I suppose, a matter of temperament, and mine doesn’t happen to run that cat-and-mouse way — though their cause is just, and we have indeed made the whole population of Vietnam our dependents.
A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated. (Personally leading a task force of eighty FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover discovered the association by looking in the Philadelphia telephone directory, so there is no point in my denying it.) But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.
A few years ago a new form of refusal got rolling, available to people trapped by withholding. This was non-payment of the telephone tax (which goes into the general Treasury), on the ground that Chairman Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee had argued its necessity for continuance of the war against Mylai. I’m uneasy about the telephone tax refusal myself; again, I suppose, a matter of temperament. There seem to me to be two visible arguments, and one invisible, against it.
First, I can not bring myself either to do or not to do anything on the bases that what a Congressman says is true. And second, it seems to me that if you are going to fight City Hall you should go for the jugular. The income tax is the jugular. The telephone tax is one of those petty excises, no more significant fiscally, and no more to be singled out, Congressman Mills to the contrary notwithstanding, than the whiskey, movie, or airplane tax.
But the invisible, base-of-the-iceberg, stem-of-the-martini-cherry argument for paying the phone tax is, I’m afraid, one of craven convenience. If Behemoth were to put me in jail for five years for income tax refusal, I’d refuse to pay my telephone tax instantly. But living where and how I do, running a little back-bedroom sweatshop out in the country, I can’t make it very well (still worse, very sick) without a telephone. Discussing telephone tax refusal with some of my anarchist friends, I have discovered that some of them were for it because they didn’t feel quite up to going to the mat on the income tax, and still others because they understood that the telephone company, like Vivian Kellems, was no more enthusiastic about collecting the Mylai tax than they were about paying it and would not jerk the phone out for non-payment of the tax.
This last seemed to me to be a misreading of history. Unlike Vivian Kellems and the American Friends Service Committee — Right and Left united across the years by the mounting terror of the Middle — the telephone company has no principle except money; and Behemoth’s agent, the Federal Communications Commission, is where the money is. In the Communist countries like Spain and Greece and, come to think of it, every other country in the world, the post office operates the telephone and telegraph systems, whose profits subsidize the carrying of the mails; in the only truly free country in the free world the money-losing branch of the communications system is communized and the money-making branches are Government-protected private monopolies.
But telephone tax refusal caught on until, according to the calculation of War Tax Resistance, there are now more than 100,000 practitioners of it. For a couple of years nobody did anything about them. But reports have begun to filter in of Government agents swarming over refusers and, more ominously, of the jerking of telephones by the company on behalf of its protector, the Government. As the reports spread it may be anticipated that there will be a falling-away of telephone tax anarchists, as, I suppose, there will be of income tax anarchists when Behemoth decides that they are getting to be too much of a nuisance and starts throwing them into the pokey.
Until that time the only obstacle (not objection) to income tax refusal, other than withholding, is the harassment it entails. The smart way to live alongside Behemoth is not to attract his attention, and whoever attracts his attention is in for it. Twenty years ago he was paying his harassers $40 a day. It must be $80 now, or $100; there is nothing niggardly about Behemoth.
He sends two kinds of harassers around. The first is a ritualistic cut-out character whom it’s a positive pleasure to be harassed by. He is the warm handclasp type, around thirty-five and running to pudge from running around in his down-payment Impala. He wants to have a little talk with you.
“Homyonum’s the name, Mr. Murgatroid, from the Internal Revenue Service.”
(Warm handclasp.)
“Sit down, Homyonum, sit down, and tell me what I can do for you.”
“To be perfectly frank, Mr. Murgatroid, I think that I may be able to do something for you.”
“Well, now, Homyonum, that is nice — I never expected the Internal Revenue Service to do something for me. Do sit down and have a nice glass tea.”
(He will, and he does.)
“Mr. Murgatroid, we of the Treasury Department are actually your agents. We are here to help you.”
“How sweet of you, Homyonum. One lump or two?” (Two.)
“Mr. Murgatroid, I want you to know that I respect your position, but I think you are ill-advised to refuse to pay your income tax.”
“Homyonum, my boy, your advice is ill. Milk? Lemon?” (Milk.)
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Murgatroid?”
“Not at all, and do let me tell you why your advice is ill. If my position is, as you say, respectable, then yours is not, since the two positions are contradictory. Do you follow me?”
“I —.”
“What I am trying to tell you, Homyonum, since you respect my position, is that you are trying to tell me that I ought not to pay my income tax and neither ought you. You do want to be respectable, don’t you?”
A little more of this standoff, a warm handclasp, and Homyonum is gone wherever such people go nights and is seen no more. He makes his report, the report spends two or three months going through channels, and then Behemoth hands one of his judges a distraint warrant to sign and sends one of his blue-boys around to attach your unattached property (money in the bank, wages coming in, shoes off your feet) in the amount in which you are delinquent in buying Mylai.
The other kind of harasser is another glass tea entirely. He is tall, sallow, dour, ulcerated: a certified public accountant who doesn’t know anything about your income tax refusal (he says), but has been sent to audit your return. “I suppose,” he says, “that your name came up on a spot check. Of course you have all your records and a receipt for each expenditure — if I may just look at them.” At the end of two weeks, at $40, $80, or $100 a day, reducing the Gross National Product by that much, he has discovered that you owe Behemoth $1.14 (or Behemoth owes you $1.14; that’s not the point of it at all) and you and your back-bedroom are a shambles.
He turns up the next year, on the dot, to do it all over again, and then you know he is lying about the spot check (and even he beginst to suspect he is). Meanwhile, he has converted you into a fox. You spend half your life (at $40, $20, or $10 a day) keeping records of your expenditures. You spend the other half of your life like the mouse you were not going to play in the cat-and-mouse game, scurrying for loopholes down which you can hurry. You end up beating your wife, cursing your children, and, of course, kicking the cat. And that, not the $1.14, is the point of it. If Behemoth can make your life unbearable, you will buy Mylai.
It is the very devil to be harassed, but what did you expect — a valentine from Mrs. Mitchell? It’s like (or even as) Give-’Em-Hell-Harry used to say: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You harass them, and they harass you back, and they’ve got the big battalions on their side. (You know Whom you’ve got on yours.)
And you harass them back and they harass you back. Who said ineffective? Behemoth has the whole country, the whole world, computerized to take care of everything — everything but one man who says, No, sir, instead of Yes, sir. It takes one (count ’em, one) man to obstruct the machine by introducing the human element into it. The grind-organ monkey is suddenly a monkey-wrench. I put it to you: What more can an old man do? The machine has not been built yet, and won’t be, that does not come down with the gripes while it digests a human being.
Mind you, I am not advocating income tax refusal; not I. For all I know the advocacy itself constitutes a felony, especially if it creates a clear and present danger that the Army won’t be able to buy a dozen young men with machine guns at the edge of the ditch in Mylai. Operating on a very low and cautious level, I say unto you only, Give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but don’t ask, “What can an old man do?” If you want Mylai, buy it; if you don’t want it, don’t. That’s the free enterprise system, and do you believe in the free enterprise system or are you some kind of a Communist?
Operating on the highest level of all, under a law that even the Supreme Court (Girouard, etc.) admits is higher than the Internal Revenue Act, Jesus Christ was asked by the Pharisees whose the tribute money was, and you know what he said and you know that he said it perceiving their wickedness. (Matt. 22:18.) If you have to choose between Christ and the Pharisee who, like the Pharisee of old, occupies the highest seat in the Temple, you are in a tight spot. I’d play it safe myself: Better to do time than eternity.

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

I don’t read Italian, so my take on this is based on Google Translate and on treating Italian as if it were some sort of pidgin Spanish. That said, it seems like a fellow named Giorgio Fidenato, a farmer from Pordenone, has decided to stop withholding taxes from the paychecks of his employees. He reasons that it’s up to the employees themselves to arrange their accounts with the government, and that if the treasury wants him to do their work for them, he expects to be paid for his trouble.

This is almost the exact same action and line of argument that American entrepreneuse Vivien Kellems used in 1948 when she stopped withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.

Fidenato is the co-founder and coordinator of the Movimento Libertario, an Italian libertarian movement.

While I’m on tour in Italy, I should mention the Carnival of Viareggio, which, according to the usual sources, became the burlesque it is today when, in 1873, “a number of local citizens, as a sign of protest… decided to put on masks in order to show their refusal of high taxes they were forced to pay.”

When Vivien Kellems resisted the federal income tax withholding system, she was subjected to an unusually intense smear campaign, which included the government intercepting her private mail and making it public, as shown in the following Associated Press account from the 31 March 1944:

Anti-tax U.S. War Plant Owner Called Sweetheart of Nazi Agent

Washington, March 31. — (AP) — Miss Vivien Kellems, Westport, Conn., war contractor who advised businessmen not to pay income taxes, was described in Congress today by Representative John Coffee (Dem., Wash.) as the sweetheart of a Nazi agent in Argentina.
Coffee read to the House of Representatives love letters he said she exchanged with a German count in Buenos Aires. He told his colleagues Miss Kellems possessed war equipment blueprints “of inestimable value to the enemy,” and demanded that the justice department “put an end to this incredible conspiracy.”
Without disclosing how he obtained it, Coffee said one letter from Miss Kellems to Count Frederick Karl von Zedliz in Buenos Aires was signed “all my love sweetheart, Vivien.”
“I say that Vivien Kellems is a menace to the American war effort,” Coffee said. “This woman, who is in constant touch with our hated Nazi enemies — this woman, the love of a Hitler fifth column spy in Argentina, admits by her own statements, that right now in Connecticut, she is engaged in work for the armed forces of a highly restricted and confidential nature.”
Miss Kellems, whose Connecticut plant makes signal corps equipment, announced in January she had skipped her December 15 income tax payment and would use the money to set up a post-war reserve for her firm. She made speeches urging other businessmen to do the same thing, bringing from Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau the remark:
“To advise citizens to refuse to pay taxes — particularly in time of war — smacks of disloyalty.”
In turn, Miss Kellems charged that the government had squandered billions on “boondoggling.”
Later she announced that she had made one payment on her taxes because she found she had some ready cash. She denied advocating anything illegal, saying the law permitted postponement of taxes when a person could not pay. To pay in full at once she insisted, would spell bankruptcy.
She also charged she was being “violently smeared” and denied a statement, which she attributed then to a radio commentator, that she was engaged to marry Count von Zedlitz.
Coffee said Von Zedlitz was on the British black list as an enemy agent, and said Miss Kellems’ speech advising business men not to pay income taxes was made after she received a communication from Von Zedlitz.
He told the House Miss Kellems wrote Von Zedlitz that an astrologist had told her she would “play a part, not only in national affairs, but also in international affairs” and concluded the letter by saying “how could that be if I am not married to you?” He said that indicated her intention of marrying “this agent of the German Reich.”
“This same Miss Vivien Kellems, who advises American business men not to pay their income tax and support the war effort, admits that she consulted with the Nazi agent in Buenos Aires on her proposed seditious speaking tour,” the representative said. “In that same month Von Zedlitz wrote to Miss Kellems … Wishing her ‘joy’ in the ‘monstrous speaking program.’
“Miss Kellems poses as a patriot; yet she has consistently played the Nazi game,” Coffee said. “Vivien Kellems is today giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Vivien Kellems is today a tool of the Goebbels propaganda machine.”
Coffee told the House Miss Kellems “is the lady who ran against our own Clare Boothe Luce in 1942.”
He said it was his contention that any American citizen who deliberately advises American business men not to pay taxes which the law imposes “is guilty of such reprehensible conduct as justifies her prosecution at the hands of the Department of Justice.”

The letters were also leaked to the press.

As far as I know, there was no real evidence that Von Zedlitz was in fact a Nazi agent or even a Nazi sympathizer. But this did sideline Kellems’s political career (she had run against Luce in the Republican primary, and had been planning another run), though she came back as an anti-Bush Republican senatorial candidate in the 1950s.

There were some half-hearted investigations into how the Office of Censorship had leaked her letters to a Democratic congressman (best guess: via Roosevelt’s State Department), but by then the damage was done. (Though there were some fascinating revelations about how the censorship department was being used for industrial espionage, ironically, to help a German film manufacturer compete against the American company Eastman Kodak.)

John Coffee lost his seat in the election of 1946, and never made a comeback.

Kellems kept up her anti-income-tax fight, saying: “Your vicious Nazi smear technique of the New Deal has been successful in silencing other American citizens who have dared to differ with the views of the present administration. But since I have nothing to conceal I am not afraid and all your fulminating and personal abuse will not swerve me from my purpose, which is to effect the repeal of the income tax and to persuade congress to pass some sensible tax laws.”

About a year before she died, in 1974, People magazine profiled Kellems as “A Determined Lady Who Won’t Pay Income Taxes”:

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. — Benjamin Franklin
One lady who is resisting this certainty is Vivien Kellems. At 77 years old, she is tiny and slender with carefully coiffed, silver-gray hair and a face which shows the fine wrinkles of thousands of smiles. And she is rich.
Vivien Kellems could be the classic example of a benign little old lady, were she so inclined. She isn’t. And that has complicated life for a lot of people — most of whom work for the Internal Revenue Service.
Come April 15 every year, many American citizens like to think of Vivien. For at an age when most of her contemporaries would be content to curl up with their memories of Rudolph Valentino, Ms. Kellems — businesswoman, feminist and rebel with a lot of causes — is still an enthusiastic volunteer in a very long war against the income tax. She has refused to pay any since 1968, sending in signed but otherwise blank federal returns.
Sitting amid her antique glass collection while she nibbles hors d’oeuvres served by her maid of 20 years, Ms. Kellems hardly looks like a revolutionary. But when she talks about the income tax, it’s with an activist’s outrage.
“My fight is in the best American tradition,” she says. “I want to be a test case. I get these letters from old ladies saying, ‘I couldn’t do it, but I just want you to know how I feel.’ They’ve given me the courage to go on.” And they also send contributions to the cause.
And so she fights on, part of the year from the Brentwood, Calif. mansion of her brother Jesse and the rest of the time from her pastoral 100-acre estate in quiet East Haddam, Conn.
Her current crusade is aimed at the federal income tax laws’ discrimination against unmarried people, whose tax rate can be as much as 20 percent higher than that for married people. Sheldon Cohen, former commissioner of the IRS under President Johnson and now a tax consultant, says, “I think she’s right about single people. She’s a Don Quixote in this area. Some of the windmills deserve to be tilted at. But there isn’t any complete justice. Ultimately, she’s not going to win.”
Vivien Kellems would dispute this. Now one of the best known and respected tax lobbyists in Washington, she has persuaded New York’s Representative Edward Koch to introduce a bill that would create one tax rate for everyone. And she is working to get the bill out of the House Ways and Means Committee, where it has been kept languishing for three years by Chairman Wilbur Mills, long the Horatio at the tax reform bridge. “If we can blast the bill out of committee, it’ll sail through Congress,” she says. “Wilbur Mills promised it will be out of committee this session. Mr. Mills and I are close friends, but he’s let me down four times. You don’t get a law passed in Washington because it’s just and fair but because it’s politically expedient.”
While she lobbies in Washington with one hand, Ms. Kellems is keeping the IRS at arm’s length with the other. Since she first refused to fill in her tax form, she has been barraged with claims, penalties and interest levied against her — $122,000 worth. But so far she has paid only $813.30 for a medical deduction on her 1965 return which was disallowed by wrist-slapping IRS auditors in 1969. (The IRS is planning to take her back to court in June.)
“The IRS demanded my records and subpoenaed my accountants to get them,” Ms. Kellems says. “I said that I was pleading the Fourth and Fifth amendments, that my income and my records were my property and could not be seized without a court warrant, and that I didn’t have to answer when it might tend to incriminate me. Then I got a letter from the IRS saying I had properly pleaded the Fifth and they wished to withdraw the suit. I haven’t filed now for five years. They assess interest against me, and I assess interest against them.” She reckons that by 1968 — when she stopped paying — the government owed her $72,000 in taxes collected in previous years when she was paying the single person’s rate.
Ms. Kellems in fact tried to sue the IRS for $2,939.13, which she said was the penalty she paid on her 1965 taxes for being single. Although she knew she had little chance of winning, she fought her case all the way to the Supreme Court. Last spring, that ultimate tribunal refused to consider it.
More recently, Ms. Kellems has been counterattacking the tax system on another front. The objective was a capital gains and dividends tax program instituted in 1969 and 1971 in her home state of Connecticut. Half the objective has been won already: after a drive in which she played a major role, the dividends tax was repealed in 1973. And, concedes a state tax official with a sigh, she also played a major role in getting the capital gains tax cut in half.
Vivien Kellems was born June 7, 1896, in Des Moines to parents who were both ministers of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The family moved to Eugene, Oreg. when she was 2. Vivien grew up there as the only girl in a family of six children and was always close to her brothers.
She graduated from the University of Oregon — where she was the only coed on the debating team — and stayed on to complete a master’s degree in economics. Her elder brother Jesse (he is alive but seriously ill) insisted that Ms. Kellems continue on to her doctorate at Columbia University. But when Jesse, also a clergyman, ran out of money before Vivien completed her thesis, she went to work, booking appearances for the U.S. Marine Band. (Ms. Kellems is currently completing her doctorate in economics and win soon submit her thesis on “how individuals can act to change the law” to the University of Edinburgh, where Jesse received his Ph.D. 50 years ago.)
Then another brother, Edgar, whom Jesse had put through MIT, invented a device — the cable grip — for installing, handling and supporting electrical cables. Ms. Kellems had $1,000 saved, so she staked Edgar, and together they founded the Kellems Company in 1927, with Vivien as president. “I started with one man and vast ignorance,” she recalls. By the time the Kellems sold the company to Harvey Hubbell Inc. in 1962, it was a flourishing enterprise with 135 employees. Since the company was not public, the amount received was not disclosed.
“I loved the cable grip business,” Ms. Kellems says. “Men always try to hide the fact from women that business is so much fun. I had no intention of selling, but it became harder and harder — and the tax situation for a small business was incredible. Then Hubbell came along, and they agreed to keep the factory where it is in Stonington and to keep on all our employees.”
Mrs. Rose Gee, formerly an assistant to Ms. Kellems at the Stonington operation, says, “If you started to work for her, you would never have thought of leaving — she was that kind of person. Everybody loved her.”
Well, not quite everybody. For Ms. Kellems had already begun her long struggle with the IRS. Round one involved the withholding tax.
“When they passed the withholding tax, it was as a war measure, but they never took it off,” she says, still a little indignant about the whole thing. “I mulled that over. Then I was giving a speech at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles one night in 1948, and I heard myself saying that I would not collect any more withholding taxes from my employees. I said I wasn’t going to be an agent for the government. If they wanted me to be their agent, they’d have to pay me, and I wanted a badge.”
She didn’t get a badge, but she got a lot of flak from the IRS. Even though her employees were themselves paying their withholding taxes, the IRS hit Kellems with a $7,600 penalty. After a lengthy court battle, this argument was settled. The Kellems Company started withholding. “I had to,” she says, “or they would have bankrupted me.” During the 1950s, she took her antitaxation campaign to the public. “When I needed a platform,” she recalls, “I would run for office. I ran for governor, for senator, for Congress, and lost every time.” She had more success with another cause in Connecticut in 1964, when she sat in a voting booth for nine hours to protest the difficulty of ticket-splitting on the voting machines used in the state. After toppling over from fatigue, she was finally removed from the polling place. Subsequently, Connecticut’s voting machines were modified to allow easier vote-splitting.
Through most of her endeavors, Ms. Kellems has remained a loner, turning down chances to affiliate with such groups as CO$T (The Committee of Single Taxpayers) because, she says, “I’m not a joiner, I’m just not that kind of person; basically I’m a Victorian.”
A handsome woman who twice made the nation’s best-dressed list in the early ’40s, Ms. Kellems is not without a trace of feminine vanity. Pouting after losing the Republican nomination for Congress to Clare Boothe Luce in 1942, she said, “Everybody talks of Clare Boothe’s sex appeal. Nobody mentions mine.”
She was married at 23 to a World War Ⅰ Navy veteran but left him after two weeks and got a divorce a year later. Her only other publicly serious romance involved an engagement during World War Ⅱ to a German businessman long resident in Argentina — Count Frederic von Zedlitz. Because he was on a British-American wartime blacklist of German nationals abroad, journalists Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell accused her of fascist sympathies.
Ms. Kellems insisted that her fiancé was anti-Nazi. But she was shattered by the allegations, and the engagement dissolved. In 1952 she wistfully told a reporter, “If I had settled down to a normal life, if I had married and raised children, I’d probably never have gone barnstorming around the country on all these crusades.”
Today she is resigned to a single life, saying, “Of course I’ve had my share of romantic entanglements. At my age, who hasn’t? But I could never marry now, not with the fight for equality for singles going on.”
Always an ardent feminist, Ms. Kellems has been campaigning in support of the Equal Rights Amendment for women. (She attacked discriminatory work curfew laws in Connecticut as early as the 1940s.) But taxes are her main concern. “This tax fight is stimulating, and it’s fun,” she says. “It takes the place of business; this is a matching of wits, too.
“I’ve met absolutely lovely people in the IRS, though. They do terrible things, but my relationship with them is just fabulous. I get invited to IRS parties and they say to me, ‘Keep it up, Miss Kellems.’ I have many, many friends.” The sentiment appears to be reciprocal.
Banking tycoon J. Pierpont Morgan once said, “If the government cannot collect its taxes, a man is a fool to pay them.” If he had been a little less of a sexist, he and Vivien Kellems would probably have gotten along just fine.

Kellems used to tell her supporters to “enclose a used, dry tea-bag or coffee grounds to spill out on the desk” when writing letters of protest to Congress, as an allusion to the Boston Tea Party — a tactic that has come back in recent years. These days, though, it’s more likely to result in a HazMat team and an office building lock-down than a simple trip to the wastepaper basket (which, come to think of it, probably makes it a better tactic than ever).

Late in life, Vivien Kellems was still finding fresh reasons to resist her taxes. She failed to get income tax withholding or the income tax itself ruled unconstitutional, so at 72, she tried to fight it as discriminatory: From the 15 April 1969 St. Petersburg Times:

She’s On A Last Crusade

A 72-year-old spinster vowed yesterday she wasn’t going to pay any more income taxes until the government refunds the $73,000 extra she says she has paid over the last 20 years, just because she is unmarried.
Miss Vivien Kellems of East Haddam, Conn., who has tangled with the Treasury before, made her pledge in a letter to Treasury Secretary David M. Kennedy which protested the higher tax rates that have applied to single persons since 1948.
“I’m an old woman,” Miss Kellems said. “This is my last crusade. I’m not going to pay unless they settle with me. … I’ll go to court if necessary.”
Miss Kellems said she would have refused to pay sooner, but that she did not realize, until last winter, the tax rate for single persons is higher than for married persons.
In her letter to Kennedy, dated April 12, Miss Kellems said: “Today I have mailed Form 1040 to the International Revenue Service, Andover, Mass. … I have signed this form but I have not paid the tax.
“Nor am I going to pay any more income taxes until you have returned to me the sum of $73,409.03, the amount of income taxes, plus 6 per cent interest, illegally taken from me over the past 20 years because I have no husband.”
“If you can tax me because I am single, you can tax me because my eyes are gray, my hair is white, or I am 72 years old. I have no more control over these conditions than I have over my marital status. How many eligible, single men aged 72 or thereabouts do you know?” she asked Kennedy.

In the early 1950s there was a revolt against the “nanny tax” — the requirement that people who hire domestic help in the United States pay social security and medicare taxes on their salary.

Here’s one look at the conflict, from the 27 May 1953 Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

Texas Housewives Call Tax Collection “Slavery”

New Orleans, May 26 (AP) — Those Marshall, Texas, housewives told three judges today the government has forced American housewives into slavery by compelling them to be “unpaid tax collectors.”
The rebellious housewives also told the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that the government in their opinion “has no power in the operation of a household.”
The housewives who have gained national attention in their battle against a 1950 amendment to the Federal Insurance Act appeared in court with their attorney.
Domestic employes must pay one per cent of their salary for social security under the amended act and the employer contributes a like amount.
The employer must withhold this money from the servant’s wages and the Marshall housewives claimed this is unconstitutional because the government is forcing them to work without compensation.
A lower court ruled against them and then they appealed to the Court of Appeals here.
Eleven housewives refused to pay the tax. But to consolidate the attack on the act, only one housewife, Mrs. Carolyn Abney, sued the government.
She asked that $12.57 the government took from her bank account to pay social security for domestic servants be returned.
Through their attorney, Dean Moorhead of Austin, Texas, the housewives claimed they were being forced into slavery because:
“The withholding provision violates the 13^th Amendment … by imposing involuntary servitude upon domestic employers, and that provision deprives domestic employers of their liberty and property in violation of the Fifth Amendment.”
Records And Reports
Moorhead said housewives are required by law to keep records, make reports, and furnish receipts to the government.
“The amendment,” he said, “forces these housewives to be unpaid tax collectors for the government.”
Carlton Fox, government attorney, said arguments presented by the housewives were “inconceivable.”
“Sure these Texas women are good women,” he said, in urging them to “search their conscience” and see if they could turn out a servant too old to work “to face the haunting fears of poverty and old age.”
The court did not indicate when it would rule on the appeal.

That the article begins “Those Marshal, Texas, housewives…” indicates that the protesters must have been pretty well-known at the time. It’s hard to imagine a bunch of people who can afford to hire domestic help and who then complain about the “slavery” of having to do the paperwork of withholding like any other employer, getting much public sympathy for their stand. On the other hand, their concerns probably did resonate somewhat with the ruling class. I wonder also about the extent to which this protest carried with it echoes from the English suffragist protests against paying insurance taxes on their domestic help (protests that were based on a “no taxation without representation” argument, rather than on an objection to the tax itself).

Here’s more, from The Victoria Advocate, 6 August 1951 (excerpts):

Tax Fighters Beat Agents Into Banks

Marshall, Aug. 6 — (AP) — The federal government today moved against the bank accounts of tax-rebelling Marshall wives and found several had withdrawn their money.
Two Internal Revenue Bureau agents reached Marshall National Bank with federal seizure warrants, and orders that accounts of the wives and their husbands be made available for inspection.

Carolyn Abney, spokesman for the rebellious wives, said:
“The women are now acting individually and they are all now consulting their individual attorneys. They petitioned their government in an orderly manner and asked for a hearing. An answer to an American citizen’s petition to his government has been a seizure.”

Kenneth Abney, Marshall attorney and husband of Carolyn Abney, said the women will ask the Internal Revenue Bureau that money taken from their accounts be refunded. If they don’t get the money back in this manner, Abney said, they will ask Rep. Wright Patman to introduce a bill permitting them to sue the government.

In a follow-up article, Abney claimed that none of the women had closed their accounts or withdrawn money from the accounts to make them uncollectible, but that the agents or the bank must have been using faulty information to locate them.

Another wire article from 1953 listed the names of some of the other protesters: “Eleana Bradford, Mary Hicks, Winnifred Furrh, Mrs. Joy Quinn, Mrs. Dorothy Martin, Mrs. Celeste Clemons, Mrs. Etheldra Spangler, Mrs. Jennie Abney, Mrs. R.B. Lothrop, Mrs. Rubye Pelz and Mrs. Carolyn Abney.”

The women lost their first case in 1952. The judge, who himself resented paying taxes for his domestic servants, was sympathetic but unmoved by the group’s legal arguments. At the time, the women were represented by Martin Dies, “former congressman and chairman of the first House Un-American Activities Committee.” At the time they were using more anti-red rhetoric. Abney said: “It is a violation of the sanctity of the American home. The law violates a basic American freedom. Already business has been socialized and the American home is the last stronghold against socialism. This may sound dramatic, but we are fighting to preserve the freedoms our forefathers gave to us.”

Vivien Kellems, who had her share of tangles with the tax collector over the years, sent a telegram of support.

In 1954, the group lost its Supreme Court appeal. At first, the women remained defiant and continued to refuse to pay, claiming that the Supreme Court had not really answered the Constitutional question but had only verified the interpretation of the tax statute. They eventually caved in and began to pay the required quarterly taxes.

Abney became the first woman to be elected to the Marshall, Texas city commission in 1970.

When Vivien Kellems decided to launch a civil disobedience campaign against federal income tax withholding, she chose a very deliberate strategy. Her soundbite message was: I shouldn’t have to do my employees’ taxes for them, nor should I be forced to be the unpaid tax collector for the government. Her tactic was to refuse to withhold taxes from her employees wages, but to also go out of her way to help her employees file their own withholding, as a way of showing that her stand wasn’t about refusing to pay taxes.

Here’s an article from the 15 June 1948 St. Petersburg Times about her campaign:

Miss Kellems’ Workers Pay Their Own Tax

Westport, Conn. — (UPI) — Because their boss is feuding with the Internal Revenue Department, some 40 employees at Vivien Kellems’ Cable Grip Manufacturing Co. will pay their own withholding taxes today.
Miss Kellems who openly defied the Federal revenue regulations by refusing to withhold taxes from wages, said that her “loyal” employees would take time out this morning to even their score with Uncle Sam for the second tax quarter. Her workers, she said, will march to the Post Office, purchase money orders for their withholding taxes and mail them to the collector in Hartford.
Thomas F. Griffin, acting Internal Revenue collector for Connecticut, said the payments will be accepted and credited to the accounts of the individuals.
“I’m not going to act as a collection agency for the tax department,” she said bitterly recalling the government’s lien against her bank account last month which cost her $1,685.
When Miss Kellems refused to pay first quarter withholding taxes for her employes, the government slapped a lien against her bank account. She cried “outrage” and threatened to sue the bank, but never-the-less the government got its money.
Miss Kellems said she changed her mind about suing the Westport Bank and Trust Co. and indicated that she would soon announce a new course of action against the government.

Remember good ol’ J. Bracken Lee? Governor of Utah in the 1950s? Decided to stop paying his federal income tax because he thought the Feds were unconstitutionally spending good American taxpayer dollars on foreign projects of various sorts?

From the 14 October 1955 Sarasota Journal:

Letters Pour In Backing Governor’s Tax Stand

By Frank Wetzel

Salt Lake City (AP) — The post card from Monroe, La. to Gov. J. Bracken Lee reads:
“Two, four, six, hut—
“We want a tax cut—
“Seven, eight, nine, ten—
“We want to know when—
“We don’t want no hem or haw—
“We’re for the governor of Utah.”
The Louisiana doggerel was among more than 500 letters and cards piled across the desk today of Harold W. Simpson, Lee’s administrative assistant. Lee is a Republican.
Simpson said all but four letters praised Lee’s statement he will not pay all his income tax next year, hoping to prod the government into a suit in which he can challenge the constitutionality of using income tax funds for foreign aid.
“These letters would surprise a lot of politicians,” said Simpson. “Judging from them, I believe a nationwide referendum would go against continuing foreign aid.”
Utah Democrats have blasted Lee’s proposal. They asked the governor to either retract or resign. Lee refused to do either. State Republicans have said “No comment.”
Challenged Two
Lee’s assistant said 90 per cent of the letters came from outside Utah. Of the four opposing Lee’s stand, Simpson challenged two. He said they appeared to come from the same typewriter, although different names were typed a[t] the bottom. Both were postmarked Los Angeles.
One congratulatory message came from Vivien Kellems, a Stonington, Conn., manufacturer who in 1948 stopped withholding income taxes from employes of her cable grip firm. She contended the government couldn’t make her serve as an unpaid tax collector. The government seized $7,819 in penalties from her firm’s bank accounts, but Miss Kellems and her brother David sued and got most of that amount back.
Other letters offered to help. Several included small amounts of money to help finance Lee’s battle.
Lee declared last week he would withhold his income tax on a portion of his salary. “I shall put my tax in the bank here in Salt Lake City,” he said. “Not a dollar of it will they get until legality of this case is tested in the United States Supreme Court.”
Samples from other letters:
Boulder, Colo. — “Good for you — both for having the courage to stand up to this tax-despotic government of ours and its paid press, and for BEING RIGHT.”
Santa Ana, Calif. — “When a man of your stature comes out as you have on such a vital issue it rekindles the hopes of the American people that all is not lost and that there is still a chance.”
Houston — “I doubt if you can muster much support — the people are just too ignorant of what is going on to be impressed, but I urge you to carry on.”

And more news of indefatigable income tax foe Vivian Kellems, from the 19 October 1971 Lakeland Ledger:

Tax Reform Sought

A 75-year-old Connecticut woman who claims the government owes her $83,000 in tax refunds is opening the first round of a court battle she hopes will lead to a better tax break for single people.
“This is the beginning of a crucial test,” said Vivian Kellems of East Haddam, Conn., in a telephone interview.
Miss Kellems, who made good in the electrical industry, said her appearance in a federal tax court, scheduled today, marks the first test of constitutional issues surrounding single taxpayers.
Miss Kellems has refused to pay income taxes for three years, claiming instead that the government owes her more than $83,000.
Exemptions granted married taxpayers for their dependents are unconstitutional unless somehow offset by a tax break for single men and women, she said.
Failure to show similar exemptions to single tax payers, she said, violate[s] the 5^th, 14^th and 16^th amendments.
Federal Tax Court Judge Graydon Withey will hear a suit filed by Miss Kellems in which she is appealing an IRS ruling on an entry in her 1965 tax return. The IRS turned down her attempt to claim $813.30 in “special food” as a medical expense.
Miss Kellems stands by what she says is a valid deduction, but beyond that says the government owes her a refund, plus interest, for money it has collected simply because she’s single.
“I’m quite sure I’ll lose in the tax court,” she said, but considers that just the first step in an appeal process she expects to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Before beginning her battle with the IRS, Miss Kellems sold the small manufacturing plant that made her independently wealthy.
The years since then “have been the happiest of my life,” she said.
Miss Kellems travels frequently, appearing wherever she can on television or radio talk shows to promote her cause.
Recently, she found an ally in the Rep. Wilbur Mills D-Ark., who has promised to hold hearings on IRS relations for unmarried persons.
Mills is the single most powerful figure in Congress on tax matters.
Miss Kellems stresses that she holds no animosity toward the officials who enforce the tax laws.
When IRS Commissioner Johnnie M. Walker took office earlier this year she sent him a note outlining their differences but congratulating him on his appointment.
“He sent back a nice thank you note,” she said.
Walker’s boss, Secretary of the Treasury John B. Conally, appears to be a “worthy opponent too,” she said.

We’re overdue for some more Vivien Kellems, I think. Here’s an example of her work, from the 17 January 1949 Evening Independent:

Vivien Kellems Returns to Battle

Withholds Portion of Own Tax from Government Hands

Westport, Conn., — (AP) — Miss Vivien Kellems, cable grip manufacturer, today renewed her battle with the government over the withholding tax law by herself withholding $1,685.40 from her 1948 income tax payment.
The Westport industrialist contended in a letter to Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder said [sic] “today I have paid my 1948 income tax but I have deducted the sum of $1,685.40 which you illegally took from me.
“If you wish that money you can sue me or you can again send your gestapo agent and grab it from the bank.”
The $1,685.40 was the amount seized last May from her account in the Westport Bank and Trust company when she refused to pay the first installment of the withholding tax for her employes. The government claimed $837.70 in taxes and a like amount in penalties.
Miss Kellems contended that she had no right to withhold money from her employes. Through the remainder of the year she furnished them with statements of the amounts due which they paid personally to the income tax division.
The treasury department asserted that all employers were compelled to collect withholding taxes. In the initial failure the treasury department refused Miss Kellems’s invitation to arrest her and collected the money from her bank account without the court action she sought.
If the government wants her to collect the tax, she has said in several statements since then, it must make her a tax collector, pay her for her trouble and give her a badge.

More Vivien Kellems, this time from the 19 January 1944 Evening Independent:

Action Is Asked Against Delinquent War Industrialist

Washington, Jna. 19 — Representative [John Main] Coffee (W.[sic]-Wash.) called today for immediate action by the department of justice against Miss Vivien Kellems, Westport, Conn., war industrialist, who announced she had refused to pay her Dec. 15 income tax and urged other business people to follow her example.
“I am asking the department of justice,” Coffee said in a statement, “to file summary action against Vivien Kellems for her statements calculated to do injury to the nation’s war program and discourage the purchase of War bonds right at the inception of the Fourth War Loan drive. Her statement constitutes a violation of the law.”
Miss Kellems, speaking before a luncheon meeting in Kansas City yesterday, called upon “all business, both big and small, to follow my example and put aside postwar reserves out of their taxes.”
She asserted that present tax rates violate the constitution and amount to “unreasonable seizure.”

And here is the treasury secretary’s response, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Tax Evasion “Disloyal,” Morgenthau Charges

Treasury Secretary Sidesteps Direct Reference to Woman’s Anti-Levy Speech

Washington, Jan. 19. — (AP) — Secretary Morgenthau, taking note of a woman industrialist’s call for business to follow her example in putting aside post-war reserves out of tax money, said tonight that “to advise citizens to refuse to pay taxes — particularly in time of war — smacks of disloyalty.”
“Such an attempt,” the treasury head added, “is especially unworthy of persons profiting from war contracts.”
Morgenthau made no direct reference to Miss Vivien Kellems of Westport, Conn., or her address to a civic group in Kansas City yesterday in which she said she had not paid her December 15 income tax installment and urged that others in business follow her example. She asserted present tax rates are unconstitutional and confiscatory.
Earlier, the internal revenue bureau served notice that it is going to collect the December 15 income taxes from Miss Kellems, while Representative Coffee, Democrat, Washington, advocated justice department proceedings against her.

Anti-Tax Advocate Promises Answer

St. Louis, Jan. 19. — (AP) — Bewildered by the furor caused by her speech advocating a post-war reserve “out of taxes” delivered yesterday in Kansas City, Miss Vivien Kellems, tonight asserted that Secretary Morgenthau’s charges were “too serious” to answer at once but declared she would answer them, “and in full.”
“Why, he’s practically accusing me of treason.”
She said she was advocating the use of money normally paid into income taxes for a post-war reserve, but she said the reserves should be “put into war bonds.”

Hard to know what Kellems’s game was. She never saw a tax she didn’t want to rebel against, but on the other hand she made her fortune on government contracts and, as that last example showed, could even advocate more voluntary funding of big government programs.

From the 23 January 1951 issue of The [New London, Connecticut] Day:

Miss Kellems Says Others Feel Tax Ruling Unlawful

New Haven (AP) — Vivien Kellems told a federal jury of seven women and five men here today that there were “others who felt as I did,” that the withholding provision of the income tax law, is unconstitutional.
Judge Carroll C. Hincks permitted her statement despite the fact that he already has ruled the law to be constitutional.
Reads California Speech
For that matter, Judge Hincks permitted the Stonington manufacturer, over the objections of the government’s attorney, Fred J. Neuland, to read in full a speech she made at Los Angeles in February, 1948, vigorously attacking the withholding tax law.
Neuland, special assistant to Atty. Gen. J. Howard McGrath, is defending the government in Miss Kellems’ attempt to force the return of $7,819 seized by Collector John J. Fitzpatrick from her bank accounts in 1948 as withholding taxes and penalties due.
Miss Kellems told Judge Hincks and the jury today that George C. Waldo, editor and chief of the Bridgeport Post, “felt the same way as I did for the same reasons, and even went further.”
She recalled having asked his views at a dinner before she made her Los Angeles speech, and pictured him striding up and down his library while he expressed his views and, she added, he dictated a part of the speech she eventually made.
Stresses Absence of Wilfullness
Miss Kellems stressed during the early stages of her testimony the “absence of willfulness” in her refusal to collect withholding taxes from the two score employes of her Stonington cable grip factory.
There were a bare dozen spectators in Federal Judge Carroll C. Hincks’ courtroom during the brief period in which the jury was selected, most of them women.
It was expected that after a short space during which the government would introduce documentary evidence in the form of records tending to show her failure to pay withholding taxes during the disputed period, Miss Kellems would go on the witness stand and occupy it most of the day.
Miss Kellems suit followed her failure to persuade the government into suing or indicting her. Operator of a small plant at Stonington she charged in speeches delivered all over the country that the withholding provision of the income tax law is unconstitutional.
Her employes pay their income taxes individually.
Government attorneys have said that she will not be able to raise the question of constitutionality during the trial, however. Judge Hincks disposed of the question last fall when he ruled the law constitutional in dismissing a government motion for a summary judgment dismissing her suit.
It was obvious Miss Kellems acted intentionally and deliberately in refusing to pay withholding taxes, Judge Hincks said, but the case must be tried to determine whether she also acted “willfully.” He defined a willful action as one taken with a motive or purpose.
Miss Kellems has named as defendants the government itself and John J. Fitzpatrick, internal revenue collector of the Connecticut district. Her case against Fitzpatrick will be heard by a jury at her request. Judge Hincks will decide the case against the government.
Miss Kellems filed her suit, she said, as a last resort after the president and Treasury Secretary Snyder turned a deaf ear to her requests for indictment. In letters to them, she said she had been defying the law in the conviction it was unconstitutional and because she wanted to fight out the issue to the supreme court.

Weirdly, the jury found that Kellems had not acted willfully, but the judge found that she had (the two suits were decided separately because in one case Kellems was suing the government itself, not the internal revenue commissioner personally, and the government did not allow juries to decide such cases).

The jury awarded Kellems the $6,133 that John Fitzpatrick had seized for penalties, but the judge awarded the rest of the contested amount to the government. At first, Kellems declared that she would appeal, reasoning that it made little sense for the judge to come to a different decision than the jury on the same set of facts, but she later decided the expense of an appeal wasn’t worth it.

And, from The Times-News of Hendersonville, North Carolina, 15 March 1952:

Revenue Agents Headed For Miss. Town To Collect From Lady Editor

By Robert F. Loftus

Washington, Mar. 15. (U.P.) The Treasury had news today for that lady editor in Summit, Miss., who says she won’t pay her social security taxes.
Revenue agents are headed her way.
Mrs. Mary D. Cain, editor of the weekly Summit Sun, wrote an open letter to Secretary of Treasury John W. Snyder the other day denouncing social security as illegal and immoral. She said she could take care of her own old-age — when it arrives.
Mrs. Cain said she wouldn’t pay the taxes for herself or deduct them from her employes’ wages. And what was Snyder going to do about it?
“Shades of Vivian Kellems,” Snyder muttered, or something like that.
What he meant was that this wasn’t the first time in his memory that a woman has tried to start a taxpayers’ rebellion.
Mrs. Kellems, a Connecticut manufacturer, gave Synder quite a headache about a year ago by refusing to collect withholding takes [sic] from her employes. She said she wasn’t working for the Treasury and Snyder could do his own tax collecting.
Snyder had to take her to court, but he got his taxes. And Mrs. Kellems collects them for him now. She wasn’t fined or sent to jail because she wasn’t trying to evade payment.
Treasury spokesmen said Mrs. Cain may not be so lucky if she insists on challenging the tax law.
They said revenue agents will be in to see her as soon as they look over her income tax return, which is due in the Jackson, Miss., collector’s office by midnight Monday, if she hasn’t already filed.
Mrs. Cain, being her own boss, is supposed to pay her own social security taxes via the self-employment tax, which she has to pay along with her regular income tax.
Like other employers, she also is required to deduct social security taxes from her employes’ wages each payday and to send the money to the Internal Revenue Bureau at the end of each quarter. Her next such payment is due March 31, and the bureau said it will keep an eye out for it.
The bureau said “several” persons besides Mrs. Cain have refused to pay the social security taxes. It would not identify them, but they’re in the same boat with the fiery lady from Summit, who wound up her open letter like this:
“I’ve had enough of the New Deal. I’m sick of the whole Truman administration. Pop your whip, Mr. Snyder, I am ready.”
Treasury spokesmen said Snyder probably wouldn’t think of using a whip on a lady. But they noted that the law carries pretty stiff penalties for taxpayers of either sex who refuse to pay their social security taxes.
Willful failure to file a return and pay the taxes is a misdemeanor, punishable by fines up to $10,000 or one year in jail, or both. And a willful attempt to evade or defeat the tax laws could cost the offender a maximum of five years in jail, plus a $10,000 fine.

The Lewiston Evening Journal for 20 June 1952 carried Westbrook Pegler’s column boosting the U.S. Senate candidacy of upstart Vivien Kellems against the New England Republican establishment. (Kellems ran as an “Independent Republican” but got fewer than 5% of the votes of the winning Republican candidate.) Kellems was a tireless tax resister whose exploits have been recounted here before. The Pegler column includes some interesting notes on other conservative tax resistance actions of the time:

Vivien Kellems has been flapping around in planes year after year, making speeches against the income and withholding taxes and inciting women to patriotic rebellion. Nobody knows the history of the income tax better. The real rebellion of the time is led by women. The Marshall girls, of Marshall, Tex., refused to pay the baby-sitters’ tax. Vivien flew down to give them counsel and now Mrs. Winifred Furrh, of Marshall, reports that only 20,000 households out of 50,000 in the Dallas Internal Revenue district have even filed returns under this section.
From Bethel, Vermont comes a carbon copy of a Social Security return, proudly sent by Lucille Miller, a rebel against the Communist invasion up there. Across the face runs the loud defi: “Go to Hell, you cheap parasites!” The amount was $5.07.
In Summit, Miss., Mrs. Mary D. Cain, the editor of the weekly Sun, refused to pay Social Security, closed her bank account, announced that her husband wasn’t responsible for her debts and dared John Snyder, the secretary of the Treasury, to do something.

Lucille Miller also did time for encouraging military draft evasion in 1955. The judge in the case declared her insane and ordered her locked up, and she was captured under a storm of tear gas after a brief siege of her house and not released until she won a federal court order. She was later found guilty of “18 counts of counseling young men to evade the Selective Service Act” and given a two-year suspended sentence. The U.S. Court of Appeals turned down her appeal.

She published a zine, The Green Mountain Rifleman, which is usually described as “anti-communist” in the press of the day, but I’ve also seen it referred to as anti-semitic. Having not seen any copies myself, it’s hard for me to say.

Winifred Furrh was one of the “Texas housewives” whose case I covered last year.

Texas Housewives In Tax Revolt — Federal warrants for refusing to pay social security taxes on wages of domestic help are studied in Marshall, Texas, by housewives (seated, l to r.) Mrs. Virginia Whelan and Mrs. Winifred Furrh; and standing, Mrs. Carolyn Abney (left) and Mrs. Etheldrea Spangler. Mrs. Abney spoke for the group, which includes 14 others, when she announced a “wait and see” policy in the dispute, involving only $54. The warrants authorize seizure of property. (International Soundphoto.)

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Wendy McElroy, at The Freeman, gives an overview of the persistent tax resistance of Vivien Kellems.
From an article about a crackdown on tax evasion in Italy:
…Popular comic and political activist Bepe Grillo on Monday week [sic] described the tax collection office Equitalia as the “terror of every Italian” and said he could understand why an anarchist group had that very day sent it a parcel bomb.…
La Repubblica newspaper quoted finance department data which suggest levels of tax evasion have leapt fivefold in the last three decades, with the treasury losing $275 billion in the last year alone.

The now-defunct libertarian magazine Inquiry carried an article about American tax resistance, “Constitutionalist” tax protest, and tax evasion in its 2 April 1979 edition:

War resisters, libertarians, and rock stars have joined millions of other Americans in fighting the tax man.

Tax Revolt!

by Frank Browning

Once a week, a small but growing group of men and women in Billings, Montana, meet in each other’s houses. They are not there to hold Tupperware parties, organize church bingo games, or play bridge. Instead, they are discussing strategies for the organization of a revolt against the government of the United States.
These ranchers and storekeepers are not unkempt anarchists or the central committee of some international terrorist underground. On the contrary, they are the descendants of a grand American tradition: They are tax rebels who believe that government taxation has become little more than blatant confiscation of citizens’ property to feed the insatiable appetites of Washington politicians and bureaucrats.
Martin Beckman is a leader of the Montana tax resistance movement. His Billings-based group — Americans for Constitutional Government — counsels taxpayers who are fed up with handing over one-fifth of their earnings to the federal government each year. The IRS form 1040, Beckman has proclaimed, is an illegal “confession sheet” that the feds use to defraud ordinary, hardworking citizens. “No American has to sign a confession sheet,” he maintains. “The government has used form 1040 to extort billions of dollars from American citizens.” In Big Timber, a small town not far from Billings, Beckman met with a newly formed group of tax rebels last spring. “The government is taking advantage of our lack of knowledge of our Constitution,” he told these new recruits to the movement, explaining further that IRS tax forms are a violation of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination. “You only have those rights you demand. You use those rights or you lose them. Our founding fathers were all tax rebels.”
Although the IRS and the federal courts have refused to consider the Fifth Amendment “self-incrimination” argument as justification for refusing to file tax returns, and although Beckman himself has been the butt of IRS investigations, his Montana group is thriving. Other independent tax protest groups are flourishing in other sections of Montana and in Connecticut, California, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia — in almost every section of the nation.
The ranks of these tax rebels are increasing so fast that the commissars of the Internal Revenue Service have begun to show signs of panic. For the 1975 tax year, the IRS had to order almost a million Americans to file income tax reports. And as the IRS deploys its agents and its computers in a new get-tough campaign, the tax resisters are themselves growing tougher. Like the people of Billings, they are organizing informal study groups, community meetings, taxpayers’ unions, instructional workshops, and fraternal associations, and are even lobbying in Washington.
Ten years ago, tax resisters were thought of as radicals or peaceniks who, like singer Joan Baez, were unpatriotically refusing to contribute to the Vietnam War efforts. Today the activist fringe has been swept aside by the anger of ordinary people who feel stymied by the rising cost of living and the falling value of the dollar. A Louis Harris survey conducted in March 1977 found that Americans are more fed up than ever with the federal tax system. Sixty-six percent of those polled declared their tax burden had reached “the breaking point,” 87 percent believed that “the big tax burden falls on the little man,” and 84 percent agreed that “the tax system is set up to let the rich get the real breaks.” Little wonder that the tax rebellion is growing larger and stronger.
Jim Davidson, executive director of the National Taxpayers Union, a libertarian tax reform group, estimates that some 10 million Americans have refused to pay federal income taxes — 10 times the number the IRS says it has caught. Several years ago, the editors of U.S. News & World Report, quoting tax experts, estimated that the government loses around $30 billion in unpaid taxes annually. New studies made at Bernard Baruch College in New York City suggest that an immense “underground economy” exists in the United States, an economy that functions totally on cash and in 1977 produced some $195 billion, 10 percent of the entire gross national product. None of that income was taxed. Whether they are outspoken tax resisters or the clever tax evaders of the “underground economy”; whether they have set up tax-deductible family corporations or have bought up secret number “honor bonds”; tax rebels are fueling the biggest national insurrection since the armed farmers of Massachusetts launched Shay’s Rebellion 192 years ago to protest the unfair tax system of the new American government.
The use of all these devices reflects what many economists see as a return to the anonymity of a cash economy by millions of middle-class Americans who are struggling to fight inflation by moonlighting at extra jobs where no taxes are collected. “Our theory,” said a representative of Chase Econometric Associates, a subsidiary of the Chase Manhattan Bank, “and I must emphasize that it is still a theory, is that Americans are returning to self-employment as a means of support and not reporting the income to the government.” If he is right, it means that Americans are following in the footsteps of the French, the English, and the Italians for whom tax cheating is more the norm than the exception. According to Business Week: “Signs are increasing that as tax rates soar, and as inflation pushes people into higher tax brackets while it erodes purchasing power, Americans are starting to copy citizens of other countries in their efforts to evade the tax collector.”
Mike Tecton is typical of the tax rebels. A lanky architect from Oklahoma, he has been a tax resister for 19 years — although he prefers to call himself a “Constitutionalist.” He and his wife Jane live in a plain, unpretentious house in McLean, Virginia, a 15-minute drive from IRS headquarters in downtown Washington. In 1974 he made his tax protest public by founding the Thomas Jefferson Equal Tax Society, an organization dedicated to eliminating the graduated federal income tax through court action, on the ground that it is discriminatory. The IRS immediately began to close in, and last year Tecton found himself behind bars.
“For over a decade Mike didn’t file or pay income tax,” his wife explained. “For 11 years there was no response from the IRS. Then Mike spoke in 1974 at a tax seminar in Chicago and flew to California to speak at another. That’s when the IRS came after him.” In the summer of 1974 Tacton placed a small advertisement for his newly founded Thomas Jefferson Society in the Washington Star. His ad read: “I, MIKE TECTON, FREE BORN CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES, CHALLENGE THE IRS AGENTS OR ANY OTHER MEMBER OF CONGRESS TO A TV DEBATE ON THE ISSUE ‘CAN EQUALLY FREE CITIZENS BE FORCED BY CONGRESS TO SUBMIT TO UNEQUAL TAX CLASSES, INFERIOR TAX CLASSES, TAX PAYING CLASSES, OR ANY OTHER TAX CLASSES?’ I SAY NO!”
Four days after he ran his newspaper ad, IRS agents tracked Tecton down in Chicago where he was working on an architectural project. On October 22, 1974, he was convicted of failing to file an IRS 1040 tax form, and was sentenced to three years’ probation and fined $300. In 1976 probation was revoked on charges that he failed to file tax returns in 1975, which he disputes, and he was sentenced to six months in prison. He began serving time on January, 3, 1978.
Mike and Jane Tecton believe that the IRS is more interested in gagging opponents of the system than in collecting back taxes. At one point, agents came to their McLean home and announced that the Tectons owed $22,000 in back taxes. “Prove it!” Mike shot back. The agents left. So far the IRS has not pressed its claim. Nor have the Tectons been silenced.
While Mike was in the Allenwood federal prison camp, Jane kept in touch with members of the Thomas Jefferson Society and with other tax resister groups across the country. She published the first edition of USA, the society’s monthly newspaper, which she claims had a press run of 10,000. In the last three years the society has published 17 books and pamphlets with such titles as 101 Reasons Why the Income Tax is Unconstitutional, and I Charge Congress with These Crimes.
The Thomas Jefferson Society operates on the principle that the government is committing a crime by withholding the taxes of working people from their paychecks. He calls it “enforced slavery” by organized theft of citizens’ property. Across the Potomac River from McLean, in Washington, D.C., is another group of tax resisters who have formed a nonprofit cooperative print shop and who refuse to send their taxes to the IRS. Ed Guinan is a priest and the coordinator of the shop, called Collective Impressions. A year and a half ago Guinan and his colleagues decided to continue paying social security taxes but to send their withholding taxes to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
“Every quarter, when taxes are due, we send a check to the Arms Control Agency,” Guinan says. “They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.” Collective Impressions owes only $500 per quarter to the IRS, but Guinan and his coworkers believe they are making an effective protest against U.S. military spending policies.
Ed Guinan and Mike and Jane Tecton see their refusal to pay taxes as a tough-minded fight against the U.S. government — a government that they believe is not honestly or legally representing its citizens. Collective Impressions in effect pays its taxes — but not to the U.S. government. “It’s wrong to try to damage or defraud someone,” Jane Tecton argues. “An honest belief based on something is different. Our game isn’t money. Money, big cars, they don’t mean anything to us. We don’t bother with people who aren’t sincere.”
For every staunch, unyielding tax resister, of course, there are untold numbers of “tax avoiders.” A tax avoider is someone who opposes paying taxes to the federal government, and who has chosen a wily strategy rather than a simple declaration of resistance. The biggest tax avoiders are large corporations and their executives. For example:

Pepsico Corporation and Owens-Illinois, Inc. take care of their top brass by leasing an exclusive salmon stream for them in Iceland.

A New York executive claimed business lunch deductions for 338 days in one year — skipping Thanksgiving Day but deducting lunches for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. His meals usually ran above $20 each for an annual total deduction of almost $10,000.

An executive at Time magazine took his five-course lunch at New York’s exclusive Chambord every day; for dinner he usually drank a milkshake or ate a boiled egg. The restaurant sent his bill directly to Time, which deducted it as a corporate expense.

Nick Panagi, a writer, sometime university lecturer, and occasional carpenter, is the consummate tax avoider. He is now in his late fifties, his close-cropped beard graying slightly at the fringe. He lives in a simple, modern oceanfront apartment on one of the elegantly funky beaches west of Los Angeles. Born in Rumania of Greek-Sicilian parents, he grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen district of New York City where he shed his accent in a record six months to avoid being beaten up at school. Since he came to southern California, he has been a legal consultant, a lecturer, and a professor at one of the city’s largest universities. “Nick Panagi” is of course a pseudonym.
“Do I operate on some set of great political principles?” he asked. “I have only one principle and it’s very simple: I don’t like the government. The taxes are usually used for things that help the rich and never help the poor.”
Panagi takes his argument about taxes a step further than the tax rebels at the Thomas Jefferson Society or the Taxpayers Union. “Their kind of ‘principled’ stand to refuse to pay taxes never achieves anything. It didn’t stop the Vietnam War; it won’t end pollution and it can’t correct the corrupt welfare system. Until there are massive, powerful organizations controlled by the working people in this country and dedicated to fighting the system, the only hope is to create more and more rebels.
“I never pay taxes,” Panagi proclaims with pride. This is the 17^th year in which he claims indeed not to have given a cent to the U.S. government. For many of those years he worked as a writer or a consultant and no taxes were deducted from his paychecks. But even in those salaried years when tax was withheld, the IRS refunded it all to him. The principle Panagi uses to avoid taxes grew out of his experiences as a young man when he commuted every week between Boston and New York.
“In those days, before there were fast freeways, I’d always speed like a hellion Monday mornings and Friday nights. Of course, I’d get stopped at least twice a month; the cop would walk up to the car with some line like, ‘Hey, buddy, what’s the hurry?’ I’d answer, nervous and embarrassed, ‘Oh, yeah, I guess I was going 85’ — when I knew I had only been driving 75 or 80. I always admitted going faster than I was actually driving, and immediately the cop would be off his guard, ask me if something was wrong and be ready to believe any story I told him. That’s the key to avoiding taxes in this system: The more you flaunt it, the more respectable you appear. The richer you are, the more you deserve. If you made $5000 last year and had legitimate expenses of $4500, the IRS won’t believe you. But if you earned $150,000 and post illegitimate expenses of $138,000, they will. So always make your income appear as high as possible.”
Last year, as in the last several years, Panagi has earned about $18,000. Following his method, he has never reported an income below $30,000. How? Any check he receives, he records as income. An out-of-town friend asks him to cash a $50 check for the weekend. A girlfriend lends him $500 or $1000 for “a trip to Las Vegas.” He pays her back immediately but records her check as income. Eight friends go out to dinner. He takes the tab and pays the check. The seventh collects cash from the other six and writes him a check, which he records as income. The restaurant tab he marks as research and entertainment for a story and deducts the whole amount as expenses. A friend signs over his paycheck and Panagi writes the friend a personal check for a few dollars more in return. The original payroll check deposited in Panagi’s account is reported as income. By the end of the year, he has accumulated at least $12,000 in “outside income.”
And then what?
“As a free-lancer or consultant, everywhere I go, practically everything I eat, most of my clothes, my auto expenses, the books and periodicals I buy — they’re all deductible expenses. And since I earned $12,000 outside my salary, that income is itself proof that I operate a personal consulting business — even if I don’t write a single article or deliver a single lecture. As a matter of fact I really do all those things each year — and I lose money operating that personal business.”
Panagi has other write-off tricks. Frequently he picks up the tab for eight or ten people in a fancy restaurant — and nobody pays him back. Since a wife is not deductible as a secretary, he is not married. “Two years ago I went to Puerto Rico and I took a woman with me. The ‘salary’ I gave her as my secretary and all her expenses there could be deducted. Every trip I make, I usually take a companion, and she’s always deductible.”
Panagi admits that he has been audited, and frequently. The IRS auditors always seem puzzled that he can spend as much or more than he earns. “I tell them I borrow money — and I do. I live on credit, credit cards, and bank loans. Some of my friends say, ‘But look how much interest you pay.’ That’s true too. Last year, 1977 for example, I paid almost $2000 in interest on credit cards and loans. But if I didn’t live as extravagantly as I do, I wouldn’t get back as big an income tax refund — almost $6000. So even with the high interest payments, I made a net profit last year of $4000.”
Panagi’s formula reduces to two maxims: Operate some kind of independent consulting business (even though you earn a regular salary) in order to file a self-employment tax return, and live as high as possible.
The Panagi formula, of course, requires certain privileges many people lack. Bank credit may take years to establish. Not everyone can get credit cards, and maintaining a family of five may also raise the stakes of the Panagi system dangerously close to disaster. A more modest device for the beleaguered family is the “family corporation.”
Family corporations are simply small, home-town versions of U.S. Steel, Chase Manhattan, and Pan American Airways — none of which paid any federal income tax in 1976. The only taxes family corporations owe are on profits and capital gains. The officers of the corporation may be members of the family and any others whom the incorporators wish to name. The key to the success of the family corporation is a careful assessment of the marketable skills each family member may have.
“Anyone who has expert knowledge in some field of endeavor can become a consultant in that field,” says Stephen Angell, an adviser to the War Resisters League. “Sales, manufacturing, and management are all legitimate objects of a business enterprise, and each of these categories should be given broad interpretation. For example, manufacturing includes handmade articles, and management encompasses property management. Most family corporations of course have business property, usually houses, which may be partially leased for residential purposes. A proportionate share of all house expenses — insurance, repairs, heat, light, telephone, taxes, depreciation, and mortgage interest, becomes a deductible business expense.” He also points out that many family members’ hobbies can be adapted to business purposes. Family members who like pets may be paid a fee by the corporation each month to raise stock, which, when it reaches maturity, is offered on the market. The expenses are deductible, and it may take several years to develop a profitable enterprise.
“If you enjoy gardening, then farming and selling produce could become a part of your business,” he notes. “You could also garden for yourself on the side. If you are a stamp collector, become a dealer in stamps. A skier can rent skis.” Group life insurance, health insurance, and IRS-approved retirement plans can also be removed from personal budgets and made deductible business expenses.
A growing number of married couples in which both partners work have found it valuable to fly off to some Caribbean island for a Christmas divorce; because they are single on December 31 they can file their taxes independently at a much lower rate than would have applied to their combined incomes. If they are so fortunate as to remarry after January 1, so much for the rewards of marital bliss. Many couples have found that their tax savings more than offset the cost of their holiday divorces.
Anxious to cash in on the burgeoning rushed to offer what has been called “the little guy’s legal way to cheat on taxes.” For years wealthy globe-trotters have beaten the tax racket by stashing their wealth in numbered bank accounts abroad where their money is safe from IRS scrutiny. The favorite tax havens for the superrich have been Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Panama, and some Caribbean islands. Since the late 1960s, however, a number of small U.S. banks have begun offering so-called “Honor Bonds” to their customers.
Originated in Columbus, Ohio, these honor bonds are low-denomination certificates of deposit issued without names, payable to “bearer” and identified by code numbers. They are transferable from one owner to the next without any notice to the issuing bank-and, unlike most savings accounts, no interest record is forwarded to the IRS.
“Why go to Switzerland?” asked one Camden, New Jersey, bank in its ads for the special bonds. “The bank will not issue an IRS 1099 form,” promised a Columbus, Ohio, bank, adding, “Since NO name appears on the bond and no customer identification number is required, the Honor Bond you buy is completely anonymous. They can be used as gifts or to pay debts.” Another bank was even blunter: “Numbered Savings are issued by Serial Number only TO PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! They’re perfect gifts because no transfer notice is necessary — no names, no notice…” By early this year honor bonds were available from banks in 14 states in denominations of $25 up to $5000. According to Representative Benjamin Rosenthal, a New York Democrat who held hearings into the use of the bonds in March 1978, “Hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘No-Name’ bonds have been issued. The potential tax loss to the Treasury as a result of the issuance of these negotiable instruments,” he warned, “relates not only to income taxes, but to estate and gift taxes as well.”
Rosenthal is not alone in his fear of what honor bonds may do for the little man. The IRS is working itself into a veritable lather. A year ago it proposed changing tax filing regulations on the bonds to require banks to report the names of the bonds’ owners as well as the amount of interest paid on them. As Acting Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Donald Lubick told a congressional subcommittee, “This non-compliance diminishes public respect for the operation of the tax system and could jeopardize our system of voluntary compliance.” It is hard to imagine how public respect for the IRS could be any lower than it is already, but given the tax collectors’ penchant for belligerence against the ordinary American taxpayer, Lubick may be right. Within its proposed change of the rules governing honor bond reporting, the IRS does plan of course to allow wealthy investors (those who buy over $100,000 in bonds) to continue the advantages they have always had. Although the IRS will probably eliminate the tax evasion opportunities on the smaller honor bonds, they will still guarantee anonymity to the original owners of the bonds. All of which makes one wonder whose interests the IRS has at heart.
The sallow-faced folk from the IRS are increasingly alert to the tactics of tax-avoiders. Harry Margolis is a San Francisco area tax lawyer, a man whose clients have included both political radicals and the fabulously wealthy; he was brought to trial in 1977 on a charge of conspiracy. Margolis, near retirement, was facing the possible prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. When he was indicted, the Justice Department called the case “the biggest breakthrough we’ve had in the whole area of fraud and the widespread use of offshore tax havens.” The IRS witnesses testified that Margolis had channeled the money of his rich clients into phony companies in the Bahamas and the Netherlands Antilles, both offshore tax havens, thereby defrauding the United States of $1.4 million in taxes.
His acquittal notwithstanding, Margolis admits that he’s spiriting his clients’ money out from beneath the noses of the taxmen. His clients, often entertainers, are actually paid by foreign-registered corporations that are in turn paid by the film companies and nightclubs where the entertainers perform. No taxes are deducted by the clubs when the checks are sent to the foreign corporations. “The tax money you earn,” Margolis explains, “will go to an area where some tax is paid, but that is a low tax area.” Margolis agrees that the system is “criminal,” and that it amounts to nothing more than a bribe by taxpayers to give small, impoverished nations a few dollars in exchange for protection from the IRS. The “crime,” however, is encouraged by the federal tax code itself.
Among the riskiest tax avoidance schemes are those that involve the failure to report income — which is consistent with the general maxim that it is better to flaunt the law than to hide from it. Those who hide their loot are called tax evaders. They are usually punished most severely by the IRS. Notable evasion cases in 1977 included:

Val Marino, a former construction and engineering director of Avis, Inc., the car rental company that always tries harder, for failing to report $40,000 in kickbacks received from H.L. Lazar, Inc., a construction subcontracting company in New York. He was not indicted for the bribery itself.

Andrew Tsanas, manager of maintenance and operation at J.C. Penney headquarters in New York City, for failing to pay taxes on $1.4 million in kickbacks he received from H.L. Lazar, Inc. IRS claims he owed $880,000 in taxes on the kickback. U.S. District Judge Jacob Mishler labeled Tsanas “the biggest shakedown artist to come before me.”

Edmund O. Matzal, a New Jersey psychiatrist active nationally in Lester Maddox’s Presidential campaign on the American Independent party ticket, who refused to pay taxes because they represented “involuntary servitude” and because he opposed U.S. foreign aid to countries supporting North Vietnam.

Leo Kornblath, a New York architect who “laundered” $36,000 in corporate money by paying it to “Happy Hooker” Xaviera Hollander for so-called interior decorating services. Hollander, a Dutch citizen and reputed brothel owner who needed to show a legitimate income to remain in the United States, returned the full amount of these checks to Kornblath, and enabled him to escape paying $13,000 taxes.

Alleged organized crime figure Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, freed in a mistrial on charges of failing to report a large part of his income from 1971 to 1974. Salerno, the IRS contended, reported a $40,000 annual income during those years but spent “literally hundreds of thousands of dollars more.” Salerno claimed he made up the difference from accumulated cash savings.

Anthony T. Ulasewicz, the private investigator, sentenced to a year’s probation for failing to report $45,000 he earned as the conduit for $200,000 paid to the Watergate burglars. Ulasewicz won his light sentence because he filed an amended return in 1973 on which he did pay the proper taxes and penalties.

If any general conclusion can be derived from the records of tax indictments, convications, and sentences, it is that very, very few people need worry about getting slapped by the harsh hand of the government, especially if they exercise common sense in avoiding taxes and do not become public martyrs. One IRS official in the Midwest estimates conservatively that there are about 1.6 million tax cheats in the United States. Last year a total of only 247 people were convicted after trial of tax fraud and another 1229 pleaded guilty. In short, the odds of being hit with a criminal conviction are 6639 to 1. Indeed, since fraud is the principal crime on which tax evaders and resisters are convicted, the question of intent is often far more important to the IRS prosecutors than the failure to pay taxes alone. Fraud convictions require that a jury believe the taxpayer intended to evade taxes.
So long as the independent entrepreneur records all his income, the tax authorities seem to lend an understanding ear to some very unusual expenses encountered in the process of making a profit. Witness the U.S. Tax Court’s cool acceptance last year of a convicted dope dealer’s “legitimate” business deductions. Bill Holt, convicted in El Paso, Texas, of smuggling marijuana, was sentenced to five years and ordered to pay a $30,000 fine. Holt admitted to the IRS that he had made $780,000 from dope dealing in 1972, but, he claimed, he should be allowed tax deductions for the lost marijuana and trucks seized from him by the police. No, said the tax court. Contraband and the equipment used to smuggle it could not be allowed as deductions because that would imply the court condoned illegal activity. Instead, without comment, the court did allow him to deduct $320,000 for “sales commissions,” $280,000 for “cost of goods sold (marijuana),” and $40,000 marked “driver’s expenses.” After all, the last thing the government wants to do is discourage new business opportunities.

Well, that was interesting. But let’s try to bring it up to date…

The federal government is stricter now about allowing deductions for people whose business involves drugs prohibited by federal law — something that is making tax time difficult for medical marijuana dispensaries, for instance.
Edward O. Matzal was sentenced to probation and eight hours of community service for not paying his taxes for three years. He died in 2010.
Harry Margolis died of brain cancer not long after winning yet another criminal tax case against him in 1985.
In 1992, Congress cracked down on bearer bonds (called “honor bonds” in this article).
Stephen Angell died last year at 91. He was active with the Alternatives to Violence Project.
I’d really like to know what ever became of “Nick Panagi” — his technique is kind of a crazy topsy-turvy version of mine and I’d be curious as to how it worked out in the long run. But he remains cloaked by pseudonym.
Ed Guinan has been working to help poor and other disadvantaged groups in Washington, D.C. He founded the Community for Creative Non-Violence.
I’m not sure what became of Mike and Jane Tecton. I don’t see much reference to them after this time, except one article from the 1990s in which Mike Tecton is serving as an informal legal advisor to someone representing himself in court on a firearms law violation.
Martin Beckman is the co-author of the “show me the law” tax protester bible The Law That Never Was. The IRS seized and sold his home in 1979; the Beckmans challenged this in court, filing multiple appeals at least through 1989, but failed to convince the courts of their legal theories. He claimed to still not be filing income tax returns as late as 1988, when he was running a long-shot campaign for U.S. president.

Another now-defunct libertarian magazine, The Libertarian Review also covered the constitutionalist tax protester scene in their April 1981 issue.

One thing I noticed from that article was a coda of sorts to the Vivien Kellems story, bits and pieces of which I’ve noted here before. Kellems was an ornery libertarian sort back in the day, and her legal battles against the federal income tax make her a sort of founder or at least distinguished ancestor in the Constitutionalist sect.

Here’s how the story ends, apparently:

In the late 1960s, she finally became an overt tax rebel by refusing to surrender her records to the IRS when they questioned her deductions. In retaliation, the IRS merely disallowed all of the deductions claimed for the years in question and assessed her thousands of dollars in additional taxes, which she refused to pay. From the time of this confrontation until she died eight years later, in 1975, she filed no returns and she paid no taxes.
According to a book which encourages such anti-tax actions, The Continuing Tax Rebellion: What Millions of Americans are Doing to Restore Constitutional Government, by Martin A. Larson (Devin-Adair, 1979), she had become so sensitive a case that the IRS had decided she must not be prosecuted, and no action was taken against her. Mr. Larson goes on to state, “Shortly after her death, I received a letter from the firm of attorneys who handled her $1.8 million estate and who stated that only $265,000 had been paid the government in the complete settlement. Thus no income taxes were paid even after her death.”
In other words, Vivien Kellems, even though she never got the constitutional test case she was seeking, nevertheless made the IRS back down. Or did she? A story on tax rebels in Barron’s by James Grant, dated April 2, 1979, reported, “Last April, it was disclosed that the government had recovered some $816,949.97 from Miss Kellems’ estate.” So whatever was “settled” shortly after Kellems’s death was not really settled until the IRS had taken what it wanted.

In the modern world, many governments have introduced income tax withholding or “pay as you earn.” In such a scheme, it can be difficult for people to resist paying income tax, as the tax has already been paid on their behalf by their employers. In such cases, resisters need their employers to be willing to go out on a limb and resist alongside them.

Today I’ll give some examples of employers who helped their employees resist income tax withholding.

Quaker Meetings

Quaker Meetings (congregations and collections of congregations) have sometimes supported the war tax resistance of their employees by not withholding taxes from their paychecks.

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for instance, has the following policy [excerpts]:

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Yearly Meeting) has discerned and again affirms that conscientious objection to paying taxes supporting military purposes is an appropriate and traditional individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony. As a result, Yearly Meeting has a religious duty to refrain from taking action that violates an employee’s expression of conscience in such historic Friends testimonies. …

At the written request of an employee pursuant to this Policy, Yearly Meeting will withhold from an employee’s gross salary or wages, but refuse to forward to IRS, amounts up to but not in excess of the military portion of the federal income tax otherwise due on that employee’s pay. Yearly Meeting, in notifying IRS that it has not remitted a portion of withheld taxes, will disclose and advise IRS of its action, as described [below]…

Yearly Meeting will communicate at least annually with an appropriate office or official of the IRS to explain that, pursuant to this Policy and Yearly Meeting’s core religious principles, it has withheld the full amount of taxes, as indicated by form(s) W-4, from the salaries of certain employees opposed to the payment of taxes for military purposes. Yearly Meeting will further explain that, at the request of each such employee, it has not remitted the portion of the amount withheld which the employee has conscientiously refused to pay, that it has identified the amounts not remitted in its records, and that the amounts not remitted, plus interest, will be paid over to the Treasury of the United States on behalf of the employees at such time as there is assurance that the taxes will not be used for military purposes.

The Meeting was taken to court in 1988 for failing to remit $11,224 in taxes from resisting employees. More recently, the Meeting has been pursuing legal arguments in support of its employee Priscilla Adams, who has been resisting war taxes for years with the help of the Meeting. The Meeting was unable to convince a court to order the IRS to respect its conscientious scruples, and the agency ordered to Meeting to garnishee Adams’s salary. The Meeting has continued to refuse.

The London Yearly Meeting for a while withheld a portion of the pay-as-you-earn withholding of some of its employees, hoping to make this a test case that might legalize conscientious objection to military taxation. The courts rejected their arguments, and an appeal to the European Commission of Human Rights also failed, and so the Meeting stopped trying to resist military taxation and now gives war tax resistance only rhetorical support:

Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this. However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the PAYE [withholding] system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.

American Friends Service Committee

During the Vietnam War, the American Friends Service Committee refused to withhold taxes from those of its employees who were refusing to pay taxes. Milton Mayer said, of the Committee’s action:

Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. … A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated. … But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.

The AFSC continues to support tax-resisting employees, and has had mixed luck defending itself in court. According to the NWTRCC pamphlet on Organizational War Tax Resistance:

Employers or other entities which refuse to withhold from the assets of a war tax resister on religious grounds actually have a chance of justifying their actions in court thanks to a 1973 case involving the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the IRS. A federal district court ruled that the AFSC and its employees had the First Amendment right not to be required to participate in the withholding system, since the IRS has other methods of satisfying its objectives, such as levies. The decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, but solely on procedural grounds. This position is possibly strengthened by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress in 1993.

The IRS has more recently tried to send what are called “lock-in letters” to the AFSC, demanding that they withhold taxes from their resisting employees at the maximum rate permissible by law.

For a time (and this may still be the case), the AFSC policy was to obey such withholding laws and orders, but to hold back a percentage of the withheld taxes from the government, putting that percentage (a percentage they deemed equal to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military) into an escrow account.

According to a 2008 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report, many employers ignore these lock-in letters. This takes some gumption. The way the law works, if an employer doesn’t comply with the lock-in letter, the employer can become liable for the taxes that the employee isn’t paying.

Mennonite General Assembly

In 1989, the Mennonite Church General Assembly adopted a resolution to “support the Mennonite General Board in establishing a policy that federal income taxes not be withheld from the wages of any of its employees who make this request because of conscientious objection to the use of their taxes for military purposes.”

The General Board, however, balked on establishing such a policy after determining “there was not enough support… to ask church boards to engage in civil disobedience.”

Restored Israel of Yahweh

The small Jehovah’s Witnesses spin-off group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh practices war tax resistance. To help facilitate this, two of them, who ran a construction business, agreed not to withhold taxes from those of their employees who were also members of that denomination.

Those two, along with the company’s bookkeeper, were taken to court and convicted of tax evasion charges, making them, according to one of their lawyers, “the first pacifist tax resisters to be prosecuted and jailed — possibly ever — for felony conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and attempted tax evasion, the most serious criminal charges in the Internal Revenue Code.”

War Resisters League & War Resisters International

In 1956, Ralph DiGia, who was working for the War Resisters League, asked them to stop withholding federal taxes from his paycheck. The League agreed, and some other employees followed DiGia’s lead.

It had taken a lot of work to get the League to adopt a policy of tax refusal. At first, they had refused, with a member of the League’s executive committee saying “the life of the organization is at stake.” War tax resisters responded, saying: “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance now, when will they be ready?” Another group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, also refused to challenge the IRS, and some of its employees resigned over the issue.

War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, decided in late 2011 to hold back a percentage of its employees’s taxes (equivalent, in its view, to the military percentage of the British national budget). The organization takes the position that conscientious objection to military taxation is an unrecognized human right, but a human right all the same, and they intend to assert it.

Collective Impressions

American war tax resister Ed Guinan for a time ran a print shop called “Collective Impressions.” “Most of the workers in the collective were rooted in a Catholic tradition of pacifism,” said Guinan, and so, from 1977 to 1980 the company paid its employees’ withholding not to the Internal Revenue Service but directly to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

The Agency returned the money, saying it could not accept it under such circumstances, whereupon Collective Impressions put the money into an escrow account from which it hoped to eventually be able to pay the money in a way that wouldn’t violate the pacifist beliefs of its employees, and from where it was eventually seized by the government.

Straight Lines, Ltd.

Martin Philips, director of the Welsh jewelry business “Straight Lines” stopped paying the 13.6% pay-as-you-earn withholding to the government for his employees — sending the money instead to the Overseas Development Administration as a protest against government military spending.

The government took Straight Lines to court, and eventually seized money from the company to cover the unpaid taxes.

Vivien Kellems

Soon after income tax withholding was introduced in the United States, ornery industrialist Vivien Kellems decided she was not interested in being the tax collector for her employees’ at the Kellems Cable Grip Manufacturing Company:

The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right here.

Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship. Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.

To demonstrate that she wasn’t against her employees paying their taxes, but only opposed to having to do it for them, she organized her employees once per quarter and allowed them, on company time, to fill out their own tax returns and to go down to the post office as a group to purchase money orders and file their own taxes.

The government subjected Kellems to a public smear campaign (which included intercepting and publicizing her love letters), and to legal action. The government won the legal battle, fining Kellems $7,600, whereupon she resumed withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.

George Fidenato

George Fidenato is Vivien Kellems reincarnated in today’s Italy. since 2009 he has been refusing to withhold taxes from his six employees’ paychecks. “I do not want to be the tax collector. I’m not a slave of the state, and wouldn’t want to work for it even if you paid me!” As of this writing he is still pursuing legal appeals.

Indianapolis Baptist Temple

The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in 1983, when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in the early 1990s, the IRS started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals, finally getting turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, whereupon the government seized and auctioned off church property and Dixon himself was fined.

“Texas housewives”

In the early 1950s, a group of women the press invariably referred to as the “Texas housewives” refused to withhold and pay social security taxes on the wages of their household help. The women were opposed to government-run social security, and to being enlisted as government tax collectors. They claimed also to be supported in their stand by their employees.

Money was eventually seized from their bank accounts to cover the taxes. They also pursued court appeals to try to get the tax declared unconstitutional, but in 1954 they lost their case and began paying the taxes.

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom

The National Insurance Act of 1911 required all workers to pay a portion of their paycheck into a fund for government-run health and unemployment benefits.

Members of the women’s suffrage movement saw this as another tax enacted without their consent, another example of “taxation without representation,” and another opportunity to resist.

Some members of suffrage groups were employers, and some suffrage groups had paid employees. In October, 1912 the Women Writers’ Suffrage League met to ask whether they “should, as a society, resist the new insurance tax and refuse to insure their secretary, with her full consent to their so doing?”

Kate Harvey refused to pay 5 shillings, 10 pence of tax for her gardener — for which she was sentenced to two months in prison.

The Women’s Freedom League refused to pay the tax on their employees — “we refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women without the consent of women” — but the government seemed unwilling or unable to do more than threaten the group.

Last year at this time I excerpted some articles about the tax resistance of Utah governor J. Bracken Lee. I’ve since found a more complete version of one of the articles that includes the following details:

Lee elaborated on his tax-fighting plan in an interview after he announced it at a meeting of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. At the meeting, he put it this way:
“I shall put my tax in the bank here in Salt Lake City. Not a dollar of it will they (the federal government) get until legality of the case is tested in the United States Supreme Court.”
Lee said he is taking his tax action to “awaken the American people.”
“My main thinking,” he said, “is if I can get this before the public I can get some people to thinking about this thing. I’m interested in having the American people awakened to what’s occurring in this country.”
Lee’s announced plan recalled the cases of two women whose defiance of the federal income tax laws drew considerable attention not many years ago.
One involved Miss Vivien Kellems, a Stonington, Conn., industrialist and critic of government tax policy. The other concerned Mrs. Caroline Foulke Urie, a Quaker widow from Yellow Springs, Ohio, who objected to government expenditures for war. Mrs. Urie died last April at the age of 81.
Early in 1948, Miss Kellems stopped withholding income taxes from employes of her cable grip firm, contending the tax law was unconstitutional and claiming the government couldn’t require her to serve as an unpaid tax collector.
The government paid no heed to her requests to be indicted to provide a test case. Instead, it levied penalties totaling $7,819 and seized the money from the Kellems company’s bank accounts. However, Miss Kellems and her brother David sued to recapture the money. In January 1951, a Federal Court Jury in New Haven decided she had not acted “willfully” and returned a verdict entitling Miss Kellems to recover most of the money the government had seized.
Mrs. Urie’s case arose in the late 1940s when she decided to withhold part of her income tax because she believed it would be spent for war purposes. The amount so withheld she donated to organizations she felt were promoting peace.
The government never sought to prosecute.

When I was going through Ammon Hennacy’s writings as part of the research that led to my “one-man revolution” post back in June, I kept an eye out for mentions of J. Bracken Lee. Though they were not particularly ideologically compatible, the two were both tax resisters and Hennacy spent a good deal of time in Salt Lake City, Utah, as the organizer of a Catholic Worker house there. And sure enough there’s a mention or two:

I had received several notices from the health department to close down the Joe Hill House. An article in the paper said that I was not allowed to sleep more than 10 people on the floor. I asked the inspector what he would do if I had 11. He said he would padlock the door. I told him I would break the padlock and beat him like Brigham Young beat the army, and in mock anger I led him to the door and told him “to get the hell out of here.” I spoke to Commissioner Smart and he asked me to present my appeal to the City Commissioners. I did so and Smart said I was saving the city money by putting up tramps. And Mayor Brack Lee said that they would go easy on the regulations for I was doing good work; they didn’t want to put me in jail for disobeying their regulations, and he said facetiously that they would have to make an ordinance allowing me to do just what I was doing.

When I was selling CWs at 43 and Lexington a woman told me of a Sister Mary Catherine, a Carmelite nun, whose folks were polygamists and whose relatives are the Romneys, Apostles in the Church. I corresponded with her and she read my book and she reads the CW, and I visited her in Salt Lake City. A Jewish man by the name of Herbert Rona became a convert to the Mormons. An atheist gave him a CW and he wrote to us saying that he was a pacifist. He had me speak at his home and ex-Gov. Bracken Lee, LeGrande Richards (one of the 12 Apostles), Professor Bennion, and Judge Anderson, all Mormons, came to a meeting at Rona’s house where I explained my radical ideas.

In May 1963, upon motion of non-Mormon Mayor “Brack” Lee, the City Commissioners passed a resolution unanimously favoring the serving of Negroes in all restaurants and public places. This was taken because a Negro reported that he had been refused service in a restaurant, but this is a recommendation, not a law.

Individuals can demonstrate their support for tax resisters in various ways. Sometimes just dropping them a line can be a good pat-on-the-back. Here are some examples of ways in which people and groups have given their thumbs-ups to tax resisters:

When the IRS seized Amish farmer Valentine Byler’s horses to cover his unpaid social security taxes, Byler received dozens of letters of support from around the country, with sentiments like:
- “I congratulate you on having the intestinal fortitude to stand up for your beliefs.”
- “Your courageous stand for your religious principles is to be commended.”
- “I am sincerely sorry this has happened.”
When the “Texas housewives” banded together to refuse to withhold social security taxes from the wages of their domestic help, Vivien Kellems (another American conservative tax resister) sent a telegram of support.
When Utah governor J. Bracken Lee started resisting his federal income tax to protest what he felt to be unconstitutional federal spending, he got hundreds of letters and postcards of support from across the country (including, again, one from Vivien Kellems). Among the messages:
- “Good for you — both for having the courage to stand up to this tax-despotic government of ours and its paid press, and for being right.”
- “When a man of your stature comes out as you have on such a vital issue it rekindles the hopes of the American people that all is not lost and that there is still a chance.”
The [U.S.] National Woman Suffrage Association put forth resolutions at their conventions of 1874, 1875, and 1876 in praise of resisters Julia & Abby Smith, Abby Kelly Foster, and Sarah E. Wall.
When the government tried and failed to auction off goods seized from a tax resisting doctor in the Dutch West Indies in 1921, “[a] cheering crowd carried the physician about shoulder high.”
When the Wyoming Conference of the Methodist Church dismissed a minister for being a war tax resister, another minister, James Gail Garst, resigned from the Conference in protest.
At NWTRCC gatherings, one regular activity is for the attendees to sign cards of support to send to resisters who have suffered property seizures, liens, levies and other such government reprisals for their resistance.

It may sound like a long shot, but have you considered trying to make friends with the tax collector? It’s a strategy that’s so crazy it just might work!

Here are some examples of where tax resisters or their allies have tried it:

The Peacemakers were eventually successful in winning back war tax resisters Ernest and Marion Bromley’s home, which had been seized for back taxes. In a retrospective, they claimed:

The Peacemakers were resolute that their confrontation with the government would be on their terms. Believing that the legal system is an instrument of oppression and exists to protect the state and the property of the powerful, they refused to take their case into the courts. Instead they worked to make the truth known through personal meetings with IRS officials, through continuous leafletting, through appealing to their supporters country-wide to demand justice.… They put enormous energy into building relationships with IRS officials that would allow for honest dialogue. And always, they challenged and responded to the bureaucracy in a highly personal manner.
Initially it appeared that IRS’ reversal had been an act of faith in the Peacemakers; that it had been touched by the group’s philosophy of truth and their consistent methods. It wasn’t that complete a victory. The Commissioner had been sufficiently impressed by these people to where he called for a special investigation — which verified the Peacemakers’ statement.

Dorothy Day wrote of this:

Chuck Matthei had told me the story of his interviews with the head of the Internal Revenue Service, the almost daily dialogue that went on between them, and the frank and “manly” admission, made finally by the IRS chief, that a mistake had been made, that the Peacemakers had Truth on their side. I felt a great sense of joy and thanksgiving, a sense of hope too, that our officials in Washington D.C. could be approached in this way — with dignity and perseverance, with courtesy, with the recognition that we are all, each one of us, whether government official or radical (one who gets to the roots of things), children of God. We do believe that we are all brothers and sisters. We believe, too, that we can only show our love for God by our love for our brothers and sisters. So we share our joy with you, our readers, and hope we all have a sense of renewed strength and energy to continue our opposition to all violence, to all wars.

Ernest and Marion Bromley pose in front of their home.

Quaker Thomas Watson was seized by the American army during the revolution, and condemned “to be stripped and ironed, and on the next afternoon to be publicly hanged” for refusing to take the continental currency that Congress was using to finance the war, his family was given little hope for him. “You may go home,” one petitioner was told, “and rest assured your uncle will be hanged.”

But the wife of the prisoner had a warm friend in the landlady of the inn at Newtown; and when was woman’s kindness ever invoked for the relief of suffering, or woman’s tact required in vain? She was advised not to apply in person for the release of her husband. The landlady had learned Lord Sterling’s fondness for the creaturely comforts of life; and knew that wine had the effect to soften the severity of his temper. To take advantage of this disposition, she invited him to a sumptuous dinner. He did full justice to the delicacies of the table, and willingly partook of the generous old wine, which had been reserved for special occasions. As the wine warmed the General’s good-nature and disposed him to kindlier feelings, she cautiously introduced the case of the condemned; pitied his condition, cold, and in irons; regarded his treatment as needlessly severe; and at length requested that his fetters might be removed and his clothes restored to him. He could not resist this appeal of his hostess; and a note was sent to the guard in answer to her request.
The good woman continued her entreaties, and still plied the wine; when, at the proper moment, the wife was introduced. She fell on her knees before him, burst into a flood of tears, and told him who she was, and, with all the earnestness, feeling, and eloquence of a loving wife pleading for the one she loved best on earth, begged him to spare her husband’s life. Her entreaties were of a nature hard to be withstood. He remained some time silent; then, raising her to her feet, he said, “Madam, you have conquered. I must relent at the tears and supplications of so noble and so good a woman as you. Your husband is saved.” He immediately wrote a pardon for the prisoner, and ordered his discharge. The happy pair now returned to their homes rejoicing.
Such friendly meetings do not always end well. Quaker Henry Paxson found this out when he was visited by the tax collector some 300 years ago:

Paxson kindly treats [the tax collector] with best he had, and when he had filled his wem, and drank plentifully of good cider, he distrains the plates he had eaten on, and the tankard he so freely toped out of, but the wife begged the tankard, and bid him take something in lieu of it.
In 1779, a delegation of Quakers met with the sheriff, his sub-lieutenants, a judge, magistrates, and a tax collector in their area of Pennsylvania. They reported:

[We] had opportunity of laying before them the reasons and grounds of our refusal to comply with several requisitions, made for the support of, or that have near connection with, war; and to open our principles, and the consistency thereof with the doctrines of the Gospel, as set forth in the New Testament and pointed out by the prophets, and the inconsistency of Christians oppressing one another for conscience sake.
They generally appeared friendly, and to receive our visit kindly, some of them particularly so; and most of them acknowledged that the prophecies concerning the disuse of carnal weapons, pointed to the Gospel dispensation, and was much to be desired.
We had good satisfaction in the performance of this service, believing truth owned it, and that there is encouragement for Friends to use further endeavors of this kind.
The Rebecca Rioters could be cruel, or even deadly, to the keepers of the toll gates they were destroying. More frequently, they would allow the keepers a few moments to collect their personal belongings and remove them from the building before they demolished it. And on some occasions, the encounters were almost cordial:

The gate-keeper begged of them not to destroy the furniture, as it was his own; and his wife and child were in bed, but they might do as they liked with the gate and toll-house. Rebecca went to the door, and ordered her [Rebecca’s] daughters not to touch anything but the gate and the roof of the toll-house, and not to break the ceiling for fear the rain would harm the woman and child in bed. In their hurry, however, to unroof the house, one of them slipped between the rafters, and his foot got through the ceiling. Rebecca expressed her sorrow at the accident, as it might cause inconvenience to the gate-keeper.

They behaved remarkably well to the gate-keeper, and frequently desired him and his wife not to be alarmed, as they would not injure them in the least; but at parting Rebecca desired him not to exact tolls at that gate any more.
There was no more persistent foe of the IRS than Vivien Kellems, but:

Miss Kellems stresses that she holds no animosity toward the officials who enforce the tax laws. When IRS Commissioner Johnnie M. Walker took office earlier this year [1971] she sent him a note outlining their differences but congratulating him on his appointment. “He sent back a nice thank you note,” she said.
During the tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain, good relationships between the resisters and the auctioneers who were enlisted to sell off their goods for taxes allowed them to better use these auctions as rally and propaganda opportunities. On one occasion:

…the auctioneer opened the proceedings by declaring himself a convinced Suffragist, which attitude of mind he attributed largely to a constant contact with women householders in his capacity as tax collector.

When Kate Raleigh’s property was seized by the tax collector:

Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he accepted. Before taking his leave he expressed himself as, on the whole, in favour of women’s claims to enfranchisement.
The movement against Thatcher’s Poll Tax initially tried to reach out to the councils who were responsible for setting the budgets that implemented the tax, and to the labor union representing the tax collectors who would be enforcing it, to ask them not to cooperate. However, this met with very little success.
War tax resister Robin Harper met with a tax auditor and a “frivolous tax coordinator” at an IRS office in 2000. He described how it went:

I quickly assured them that an accurate accounting should of course be established, but that in no way could I alter my refusal to deliver my tax dollars into the U.S. military machine. Earlier I had described how my Conscientious Objection was rooted in our Quaker Peace Testimony and how I had performed two years of civilian alternative service with a self-help housing project during the Korean War.
With his defensive posture evaporating, Mr. Means [the “frivolous tax coordinator”] told us that his father fought in the Korean War and came home tormented by post traumatic stress disorder. Thereafter he would have nothing more to do with guns, “because he had seen what guns can do.” That gave my supporter, who had lived through World War Two in Germany, an opening. Drawing a parallel with my war tax refusal, she pointed out how German income taxes funded the governmental atrocities of the Third Reich.
…
At one point, when I was describing how the International Center has been installing solar water purification units in Central American villages, Mr. Means broadened our discussion, noting that the scarcity of safe water is becoming a global problem. In my followup letter to our interview, I sent him a copy of an eye-opening article from the Resist newsletter discussing this issue in depth.
Near the end I took the opportunity to unfurl the large chart which chronicles my war tax redirection these past forty-one years and to describe how I was first propelled into war tax protest by U.S. nuclear atmospheric bomb testing in Nevada and the Pacific.
After more than three hours (and well past normal lunchtime), the two finally closed the interview with smiles and friendly handshakes. Mr. Means even admitted that his title of “Frivolous Tax Coordinator” was really a substitute for “Tax Protester Coordinator,” an internal administrative category which Congress had abolished in recent Taxpayer Bill of Rights legislation.
Despite their training to be suspicious (all taxpayers are trying to get away with something), IRS folk, like all human beings, can be positively affected by openness, honesty and sincerity. Transparency can often trump suspicion.
I have learned how we all hunger for caring, person-to-person exchanges. Look how a one hour audit stretched into more than three hours, much of which involved genuine sharing far beyond the scope of the audit!
As our discussion rose above tax details, Mr. Means, the tax protester “sheriff,” was led to cast aside some of his official person and let his personal feelings and thoughts come through. He also became increasingly interested in discerning what makes war tax refusers tick. I am sure he came to understand that our witness is anything but “frivolous.”

Here’s a bit more about the tireless paleocon tax resister Vivien Kellems. This comes from the 17 March 1952 edition of The News of the Tonawandas:

Miss Kellems Refuses to Pay Social Security

Stonington, Conn. (UP) — Vivien Kellems, veteran campaigner against “socialistic” federal tax laws, refused today to pay the new Social Security tax on self-employed persons and recruited four other small employers to join her tax strike.
Miss Kellems, who owns a cable grip factory here, sent a letter to Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder with her income tax return, pointing out that she had not included the $81 due for the new tax. She told Snyder that she carried “adequate insurance” and did not wish “further coverage.”
“It will clarify the whole matter if you will please indict me and let us submit this law to the Supreme Court, in the traditional American manner, in order to test its constitutionality,” she told Snyder.
Has 4 Followers
Miss Kellems made public similar letters to Snyder written by John F. Andrews, a Beach City, O., auctioneer; Ralph Bly of the Bly Auto Supply Co., Shelby, O.; Thomas Gaskins, owner of Cypress Knee Products, Palmdale, Fla.; and Mrs. Mary D. Cain, owner-editor of the weekly Summit Sun, Summit, Miss.
Because they are their own bosses, the small business owners are required to pay their own Social Security taxes by means of the self-employment tax. They are supposed to deduct Social Security taxes from their employes’ wages, too, but Gaskins told Snyder he would not do that for his two employes.
“The reason for not paying is because we believe this law to be unconstitutional,” he wrote. “for those of us who still have confidence in our own ability (to take care of personal security), such a socialistic thing should not be forced upon us.”
Treasury Department spokesmen in Washington said that “several” persons have refused to pay Social Security taxes. They said revenue agents would be assigned to investigate as soon as their tax returns, which are due at midnight tonight, are checked.
She Withholds Now
Miss Kellems announced the names of her fellow dissidents yesterday in Bridgeport, Conn., at a rally of the Liberty Belles, a national women’s action organization which she founded last September. One of the Liberty Belles’ objectives is to repeal the personal income tax and the Social Security law.
Miss Kellems’ feud with the Internal Revenue Department dates from 1948 when she refused to deduct income tax from the pay checks of her employes because “no one has paid me to be a tax collector.” She asked the government to prosecute her for criminal violation of the revenue code, but the Treasury Department merely attached her property, taking $7819 it said she owed in back taxes and fines.
The 55-year-old manufacturer sued the government for return of her property in a Hartford, Conn., Federal Court and recovered $6133. The government asked for a dismissal of the verdict but was rejected. Miss Kellems claimed a “moral victory” and then complied with the withholding tax law.

Here’s another note about Utah Governor J. Bracken Lee’s tax resistance. From the 7 October 1955 Albany Knickerbocker:

Unconstitutional, He Says

Governor of Utah Defies U.S. on Tax

Salt Lake City (AP) — Utah’s Gov. J. Bracken Lee said yesterday he will refuse to pay at least part of his income tax this year.
Republican Lee, now in his third year of his second term as governor, says he’s taking the stand because he thinks “it is unconstitutional for this nation to tax its citizens for the support of foreign nations.”
And for the fourth straight year he refused to proclaim Oct. 23 as United Nations Day in Utah. Instead, he said, he will proclaim Oct. 23 as United States Day.
Mr. Lee said he will refuse to pay income tax on personal income over and above his gubernatorial salary, from which the tax already has been withheld so far this year.
“Very likely I might decide I will also attempt to act on this withholding thing,” he told the Associated Press. “But I’m undecided whether I want to act on that or not.
“I plan to figure out my tax return and send it to the government together with a letter saying I have placed the money aside and will not pay it until the United States Supreme Court orders me to do so.”
Mr. Lee elaborated on his tax-fighting plan in an interview after he announced it at a meeting of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. At the meeting he put it this way:
“I shall put my tax in the bank here in Salt Lake City. Not a dollar of it will they (the federal government) get until legality of the case is tested in the United States Supreme Court.”
To Awaken People
Mr. Lee said he is taking his tax action to “awaken the American people.”
“My main thinking,” he said, “its if I can get this before the public I can get some people to thinking about this thing. I’m interested in having the American people awakened to what’s occurring in this country.”
Mr. Lee’s announced plan recalled the cases of two women whose defiance of the federal income tax laws drew considerable attention not many years ago.
One involved Miss Vivien Kellems, a Stonington, Conn. industrialist and critic of government tax policy. The other concerned Mrs. Caroline Foulke Urie, a Quaker widow from Yellow Springs, Ohio, who objected to government expenditures for war. Mrs. Urie died last April at the age of 81.
Kellems Case Recalled
Early in 1948, Miss Kellems stopped withholding income taxes from employes of her cable grip firm, contending the tax law was unconstitutional and claiming the government couldn’t require her to serve as an unpaid tax collector.
The government paid no heed to her requests to be indicted to provide a test case. Instead, it levied penalties totaling $7,819 and seized the money from the Kellems company’s bank accounts. However Miss Kellems and her brother, David, sued to recapture the money. In January, 1951, a federal court jury in New Haven decided she had not acted “willfully” and returned a verdict entitling Miss Kellems to recover most of the money the government had seized.
Mrs. Urie’s case arose in the late 1940s when she decided to withhold part of her income tax because she believed it would be spent for war purposes. The amount so withheld she donated to organizations she felt were promoting peace.
The government never sought to prosecute.

More links that have scrolled through my browser recently:

Scott Alexander has an insightful review of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State up at his always-mind-stretching blog Slate Star Codex.
In the New Republic, Kevin Baker promotes Bluexit: A Modest Proposal for Separating Blue States from Red. He notes that the “blue states” tend to pay more into the federal treasury than they take out, and the “red states” on the other hand tend to be net recipients of federal money. He suggests that the blue states stop subsidizing the red and that liberals reembrace federalism:

We won’t formally secede, in the Civil War sense of the word. We’ll still be a part of the United States, at least on paper. But we’ll turn our back on the federal government in every way we can, just like you’ve been urging everyone to do for years, and devote our hard-earned resources to building up our own cities and states. We’ll turn Blue America into a world-class incubator for progressive programs and policies, a laboratory for a guaranteed income and a high-speed public rail system and free public universities. We’ll focus on getting our own house in order, while yours falls into disrepair and ruin.

For starters, we now endorse cutting the federal income tax to the bone — maybe even doing the full Wesley Snipes and abolishing it altogether. We will raise our state and local taxes accordingly to pay for anything we might need or want. We ask nothing more from you and your federal government. Nothing for infrastructure, or housing, or the care of the poor and sick — not that you gave us much, anyway. All we want is our money, and you can keep yours, dollar for dollar.
Learn Liberty has a feature on feisty tax resister Vivien Kellems.
Seattle Weekly tells the story of the war tax resisting Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen.
The IRS considers bitcoin a kind of investment, and so if you buy or earn some, and later spend it, the difference between the value of the bitcoin at those times counts as a capital gain or capital loss, and you’re supposed to file a Form 8949 to report it. But to bitcoin users, the stuff is a currency, and it would be folly to keep track of how much it’s worth every time you earn and spend it and keep an account book like that. So it’s little surprise that only about 800 people report bitcoin transactions on Form 8949, according to the IRS.