Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → how tax resistance fits the bill → isn’t some government worth paying for? → can libertarians, peaceniks, anarchists, environmentalists, paleocons, and lefties get along? → about those libertarians

A friend wrote me recently and asked what my opinion of charity and generosity were, “as a libertarian.”

There’s a strain of libertarianism, influenced by Ayn Rand’s “objectivism,” that considers altruism and charity to be a vice practiced by people who have been brainwashed into a slave morality. They’ve got their reasons for holding this point-of-view, and they shouldn’t be dismissed out-of-hand, but some of them are fond of saying that this view is a logically necessary part of libertarianism. I think it’s more accurate to say that this view and libertarianism don’t depend on each other so much as on a previous cause — typically that of reading Ayn Rand at an impressionable age. (The same way humans didn’t evolve from chimpanzees, but both humans and chimps have a common ancestor.)

Anyway… Some of the most public faces of libertarianism in the U.S. today are the “libertarian wing” of the Republican party, the Libertarian Party itself, and Reason magazine.

And, sad to say, you can’t listen to these groups very long without discerning a common set of prejudices above-and-beyond a stated love for liberty. Among these: that a rich person can probably be assumed to be more virtuous than a poor person, that technology and the marketplace are bound to leave things better off than they found them, that the economic system advocated by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal approximates a libertopian free market for all intents and purposes, and that there’s no environmental crisis that won’t go away if you just look at the data the right way.

It’s a weird mythology that makes the government out to be this evil conspiracy to take money from virtuous rich people who have somehow managed to earn their money in spite of the politicians who hate them, in order to give the money away to lazy poor people who hold these politicians in their greedy little hands. Meanwhile, the government relies on junk science to suppress beneficial technologies in a vigorous quest to save worthless species that aren’t even endangered.

Anyone who looks out one of the portholes of the S.S. Libertarian and notices that the government is really one big redistribution scheme to take money from the productive and give it to rich campaign contributors and government contractors, or that the government is one of the worst polluters and disregarders of the environment, or that it subsidizes wasteful and unneeded and dangerous technology, is told that there’s plenty of room on the S.S. Whiny Liberal for that kind of talk.

There are exceptions — for example in today’s Reason Online, the article Confessions of a Welfare Queen, which notes that “the biggest welfare queens are the already wealthy” and frankly discusses some of the many ways the rich benefit from milking the government.

If you look beyond this most public face of “libertarianism” you can find a more balanced outlook — one which recognizes that being rich under the current economic system is as likely to mean that you traffic in stolen goods, bribes, and extortion as that you are a virtuous entrepreneur — one that recognizes environmental tragedies of the commons as challenges to which libertarian theory must adapt rather than unfortunate facts to be wished away — one that realizes that “free market” reforms like NAFTA are only window-dressing for a government-controlled economic system — and one that knows that you can only call Alan Greenspan a libertarian in a joke.

It hasn’t always been like this. Believe it or not, there was even a time when libertarian orthodoxy was profoundly anti-capitalist. Times change, and intellectual trends along with them. It should be no surprise that a viewpoint that flatters the rich has become one that has a loud voice and a gilded megaphone — it’s one of the consequences of libertarian ideas moving into the mainstream. Consider Christianity, which started with a fellow who encouraged people to sell what they owned and give the proceeds to the poor because it was so difficult for a rich person to be saved — today a Christianity that quite shamelessly flatters the rich is mainstream.

That said, people sometimes look at my experiment in tax resistance via income reduction and assume that I think that poverty and simplicity are virtues in and of themselves. That’s not my point-of-view.

I guess what I wanted to say was this: If when you think “anarchist” the image that comes to mind is a college kid in a black balaclava throwing a brick at a Starbucks, you might want to revisit the topic. Ditto if when you think “libertarian” the image that comes to mind is a guy in a three-piece suit yelling into his cellphone “I don’t care if they are widows and orphans, I want ’em out of there by this time tomorrow!”


So I took a bit of a spontaneous vacation from The Picket Line to take care of some things off-line. Some of what I was up to was working with some people who are planning a protest action for  — I’ll have more on this later, when there’s more solid news to report.

The protest is a coordinated effort of a group of war tax resisters and an assembly of groups that have organized around opposition to the war in Iraq and to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The groups have some ideological and style differences, but are putting those aside and working well together so far.

I’m trying to push this incipient solidarity even further and see if we can also bring in the local Libertarian Party activists, who also traditionally do an demo. It’s an uphill battle. I haven’t been very successful at convincing the leftish core of our demonstration planners that they have much in common with the Libs — and I haven’t even started trying to convince the Libs that they’d be interested in going to a protest organized by a bunch of lefties.

Myself, I see a lot of advantages in such an alliance, but I’m not the one who needs convincing. The local Libertarians are a small group that barely registers on the political radar. They might gain from an alliance with the much larger leftish coalition. Also, if they crafted their message well, they could reach out to and influence a Left that libertarian activists have sadly abandoned in recent years.

(I’m not the only one to mourn the stubborn association of libertarianism with the American right-wing. For instance, there’s been a discussion over at Liberty & Power this week on the subject.)

The San Francisco peacenik left could also gain from such an alliance. We often talk about bringing a broader group of dissatisfied Americans into the active opposition, but if we can’t even reach out to Libertarians — who are already with us, by and large, on the war and aid-to-Israel issues, and who have already given up on business-as-usual — what are the odds we’ll ever reach Joe Sixpak?

And for that matter, the libertarian critique of coercive state power is a good one and the Left would gain from confronting it honestly, addressing it well, or (dare I hope?) adopting it for its own. Too many people on the Left think that the state is on our side — that it can be tamed and turned into our defender and our helper. In all times and all places, the state has been a mechanism to give money and power to unethical people who already have more than their share — it’s about time that the Left recognize that the state isn’t their friend and isn’t going to be.

(As a tax resister, I’m also interested in reaching out to the Libs because they seem like good candidates for tax resistance — they already hate taxes but might benefit from a little practical assistance in learning how to put their money where their mouths are. The leftish war tax resistance movement knows what it’s talking about in this regard, and libertarians would be smart to listen-up.)

A friend read my Picket Line entry from about why libertarians are frequently caricatured as ideologically rigid, self-centered greed-heads, and to what extent this caricature is a hard-earned reputation and to what extent it’s a stereotype. He asked why I hadn’t given up on libertarianism yet:

I told him that there were two reasons I haven’t given up on libertarians yet: 1) The lefties can also be a bunch of difficult-to-get-along-with people (in other words, mavericks and freaks like me) with simplistic political views — if I can’t get along with libertarians or lefties, I’m gonna get mighty lonely on the barricades. 2) The folks who most seem to “get” what I’m doing with tax resistance, culture jamming, and such have been from the individualist anarchist and libertarian traditions: folks like Wendy McElroy and Claire Wolfe, for instance.


Bureaucrash — which is trying hard to be the hip face of free-market libertarianism — has released its Tax Slavery Sucks propaganda for this year.


As long as I’m stooping to being a politician-booster by covering Democratic state House candidate and war tax resister John Kefalas, I should mention that the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, Michael Badnarik, is also a tax resister:

Badnarik believes that the federal income tax has no legal authority and that people are justified in refusing to file a tax return until such time as the IRS provides them with an explanation of its authority to collect the tax. He hadn’t filed income tax returns for several years.

In order to avoid the inconvenience of being indicted while on the campaign trail, however, Badnarik plans to come to some sort of settlement with the IRS and pay them what they think he owes. “Well, the IRS wants money,” Badnarik says, “They don’t necessarily want me in jail, they just want compliance. I intend to start paying them the money, then there’s no reason for them to throw me in jail. As an interim measure, I will resolve my differences with the IRS so that it doesn’t bring any embarrassment to the LP and then once I’m finished with the election after , I will pick up my battle with the IRS again.”


I’ve been noticing a number of stories showing up here and there about civil disobedience being used as a tactic by libertarians.

I hope this catches on. What the libertarian movement has been lacking lately is just this sort of grass roots in-your-face activism. Too much jaw-wagging about theory and hoping the politicians will throw you a bone and not enough getting your hands dirty, or, in this case, manicured.

“Libertarians have spent so much time complaining about government, but civil disobedience is a path to actually fixing things,” [Russell] Kanning said. “Who knows what this might inspire?”… He claims not to have paid federal income tax and drives without a valid driver’s license because he thinks it’s a nuisance. He’s considering burning his Social Security card.


The current motto of The Libertarian Enterprise is “taxation is the fuel of war” — a phrase found in the L. Neil Smith essay from which these excerpts are taken:

, Western populations have gradually become accustomed to higher and higher rates of taxation. Americans are presently commanded to stand and deliver about half of what they earn to governments at one level or another. Whole volumes could — and have — been written about the economic and social damage this kind of taxation does to a culture.

But what concerns me here is that taxation is the fuel of war. Warfare of the kind witnessed for the first time only in , warfare that kills tens of millions in the space of only a few years, warfare that snuffs out whole cities in the blink of an eye, is possible only when governments can seize and spend a significant fraction of the economic output of their host populations.

What makes dealing with this problem most difficult is that many still believe high rates of taxation and government spending can be employed benevolently, on various sorts of social programs from free public education (itself a major source of war) to transfer payments to various people and organizations for various reasons. But the power to do great good is the power to do even greater harm.

Setting aside many another argument against such programs — most of them supplied by several decades of cold, hard reality — the most important is that sooner or later, supposedly benevolent programs will be used, one way or another, for war. To supply an example, the government has threatened on many occasions to use Social Security rolls to ensure compliance with Selective Service. Student loans are used as an inducement to sign up, as well. Give it to government, it will be used for war.

Our culture desperately needs to reconsider the whole notion of taxation. There may be a hundred “worthy” objectives you’d like to see achieved with money taken from your neighbor — or you may simply like seeing your neighbor humbled and diminished. I worry about how it affects children when they finally figure out that they’re living in a kleptocracy.

One thing is sure: no government forced to subsist on bake sales and TV benefits will go looking for trouble in a world full of other tax-fattened, slave-owning governments eager to supply it. If Princess Di had focused on the ability of governments to pay for landmines, there would be fewer of them in the world today.


Lawrence Samuels, Northern California vice chair of the Libertarian Party, almost but doesn’t quite call for tax resistance in his brief essay Don’t Be an Accessory to Murder in ’s AntiWar.com:

“In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.”
―Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

…[M]ost people are putting money into the federal tax pot. A sizable portion of that money is being spent to fight a preemptive-strike war in Iraq — a nation that neither attacked nor directly threatened the sovereignty of the United States. And although it is common knowledge that thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens have died at the hands of U.S. troops, many American citizens still support and willingly pay taxes to the U.S. government.

…[T]his “collateral damage” means that most U.S. citizens paying federal taxes have blood on their hands. Technically, any taxpayer paying federal taxes can be considered an accessory to murder if they support involuntary taxation.

…Under criminal law, anyone funding criminal activity or withholding knowledge of the criminal act can be charged as an accessory to the crime, before or after the fact.

To the libertarian, the best way to stop criminal activity is not to support it financially. Without an ample supply of money coerced from citizens, the war of empire-building and its murderous consequences cannot be sustained.

As Supreme Court Justice John Marshall wrote in , “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” We must stop this destructive taxing and warring apparatus of the state if we wish to preserve human life and liberty.


This sounds interesting: Beyond Ballots or Bullets: Creating a Free America (A workshop to develop freedom strategies).

It looks to be an attempt to get a nonviolent resistance movement of the Gene Sharp variety going in libertarian / anarchist circles. “In this workshop we will explore non-electoral, nonviolent strategies to decrease the state’s ability to coerce us and increase our own powers of resistance. We will also receive training in nonviolent struggle and make plans for action.”

The workshop will be held in Utah .


An American libertarian-oriented tax resistance movement is starting up. They’re calling it a Slave Uprising.

Two thousand years ago, a Roman Senator suggested that all slaves wear white armbands to better identify them.

“No,” said a wiser Senator, “If they see how many of them there are, they may revolt.”

Starting on , we are calling on all champions of liberty to wear a white armband to affirm your commitment to resisting tax slavery.

Campaign organizer Adam Kokesh, who is also a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, explained: “The white band is a symbol that represents our unity and identity as citizens of the United States Empire who refuse to be slaves. The white armband is an affirmation of our commitment to resist the Federal income tax.” While the campaign has a libertarian bent, much of its rhetoric would not be out-of-place in the more left-oriented war tax resistance movement:

“I will no longer work for unjust warfare.
 I will no longer work for bailouts.
 I will no longer work so that I can be spied on.
 I will no longer work for torture.
 We refuse to be enslaved.”

They’ve also printed up “Certificates of Debt” to show people how much they individually owe as a result of the government’s deficit spending.


Some tidbits that have caught my eye lately:


In Jerome Tuccille joined the libertarian exodus from Young Americans for Freedom and, along with other disaffected libertarians like Karl Hess and Murray Rothbard, tried for a time to find common ground with the radical left.

Tuccille’s exodus came complete with a manifesto: Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative. In it, he lays out the case for radical libertarianism as being what the radicals of the day really want, if only they knew it, and for why people with “old Right” values — like small government, free enterprise, individual responsibility, and isolationist foreign policy — ought to give up on the government-loving, protectionist, imperialist conservative movement.

He also considers something that few libertarians of his time, and even fewer since, seem willing to: the role of civil disobedience and direct action in libertarian activism. As part of this, he advocates tax resistance. Some excerpts:

When the average American is compelled to work nearly two days a week for the so-called benefit of the “common good,” it is clear that not only the income tax but the entire taxing mechanism of the state is perhaps the next most serious [after military conscription] abridgment of individual freedom in our society. The time for a taxpayers’ revolt is long overdue.

Libertarians should undertake a program designed to throttle the taxing power of government on federal, state, and city levels. Picketing of revenue offices is only the first step. Harassment techniques should be employed: refusal to file income tax forms combined with putting forms in the wrong envelopes; formation of anti-real estate tax committees, anti-sales tax associations, anti-liquor, cigarette, and gasoline tax organizations to make the voice of the people heard loud and strong, not only during election years, but at all times; lending moral and physical support to those under indictment for tax evasion; passing out anti-tax literature at revenue offices; organizing anti-tax groups on all levels of society, from the lower-income minority ghettos to the affluent suburbs, and coordinating their activities for common ends, and so on. With the pay-as-you-go system now in effect, it is admittedly more difficult to resist the power of government looters. But a well-organized program can throw a king-sized monkey wrench into this totally inhuman taxing machine.

There are incidents in various sections of the country — Wisconsin, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Long Island — of successful attempts by taxpayers to keep their taxes from rising. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania landowners have banded together and are refusing to pay their real estate taxes; in Wisconsin and Long Island the voters have turned down an unprecedented number of school bond issues. This is a beginning. Hopefully, these successes are a prototype of things to come.

[T]he state cannot operate without politicians and politicians cannot function without money. For this reason, an economic boycott of the state is perhaps the most powerful weapon that people can employ in their efforts to rid their lives of the legal looting and murdering that is now being undertaken in the name of government. The concerted and organized withholding of tax revenues is the biggest and most frightening stick that the large American middle class can shake in the face of government. If such an operation can be properly organized and mobilized, the American people can succeed in breaking the back of coercive government and conclusively rid our society of state intrusion into the life of the individual.

These methods may sound drastic and extreme to many advocates of the libertarian philosophy. But if they are not put into operation — and put into operation now — the libertarian dream of a free society for each individual may well be destroyed while it is still in its gestation period. If we are to realize even a close approximation of libertarian justice within our lifetimes, we must begin now to take a more militant role in achieving it.


Here’s a nice animated video, called “George Ought to Help” that attempts to show that when people call on governments to mandate contributions to otherwise charitable causes, they are using disreputable violent means to feel-good ends:

It still perplexes me when I talk to people from the substantial pacifist contingent in the war tax resistance movement and find that for many of them, while they’re not convinced violence or the threat of violence would be an appropriate response to the aggression of, say, a Nazi Germany, or even to an armed intruder trying to break into your home — the government using violence to force people to contribute to education, the arts, scientific research, and other such nice things is peachy keen. Would they go door-to-door taking donations for the National Endowment for the Arts at gunpoint, I wonder?


Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • A Ron Paul Republican going by the name Simon Rierdon has decided to shrug, saying “the past two tax seasons when I’ve had to fork over thousands of dollars to a government that I don’t think is legitimate, and even more, murderous, has made me rethink my priorities.”
  • A liberal group going by the name War Costs is swimming upstream against the tide of military contractor lobbyists and trying to put America’s cancerous military spending on the agenda of the Congressional deficit committee.
  • Speaking of putting military spending on the agenda, you might consider dropping this article in the inbox of your climate activist friends. It talks about the impact of America’s military adventures on climate-changing atmospheric emissions. “The Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements” and uses an enormous amount of fossil fuel. According to the article, the war in Iraq itself was a bigger contributor to annual CO2 emissions than 139 of the world’s nations.

So I harshed on Edward Tverdek for his justification of statist liberalism by prioritizing the needs of social groups over those of the people who compose them.

But coming up with good, solid philosophical justifications for your instinctive political hunches is notoriously difficult.

The other day I stumbled on Will Wilkinson’s “Eudaimonism is False,” which he wrote in response to a couple of libertarian sorts who were trying to figure out what the best philosophical grounding for their political instincts might be:

Kevin Vallier argues, correctly in my view, that “Utilitarianism is too consequence-sensitive and self-ownership is too consequence-insensitive.” Contractualism, he suggests, offers a third way that gets it just right in the consequence-sensitivity department.

Roderick Long replies by offering an alternative third way: an interesting version of eudaimonism that includes a not-overly consequence-insensitive version of the self-ownership thesis. Vallier responds by embracing eudaimonism himself, while countering that “the content of the virtue of justice is best specified by a contractualist principle rather than the self-ownership principle.”

If you’ve been in my bloggy neighborhood a while, you’ll know that I devoted several posts to a chapter-by-chapter close reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the granddaddy of the virtue ethics / eudaimonism school of thought.

Roderick Long makes the case that the various virtues that Aristotle mostly treated independently from each other are actually mutually dependent, and to some extent justify each other:

For example (to simplify somewhat), if courage is the virtue of responding appropriately to danger, and generosity is the virtue of responding appropriately to others’ needs, then when meeting other people’s needs is dangerous, there is no way to define what course of action generosity requires independently of defining what course of action courage requires, and vice versa. The final contents of the virtues are thus constructed out of their prima facie contents, subject to the constraint of mutual determination.

(Interestingly, Alisdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, considered this “unity of virtue” idea to be a major symptom of the decadence of modern ethics relative to Aristotle’s.)

In Long’s framework, the virtues sort of pull each other up by each others’ bootstraps into a mutually-justificatory foundation that leans both on consequentialism and deontology in a satisfying way.

Interesting. Wilkinson, though, goes for the jugular by noting that an important foundation for Aristotle’s remarkable and interesting ethics is a theory of human nature that nobody takes seriously anymore. Aristotle believed that everything had a purpose, and that you could discern its purpose by figuring out what it was uniquely designed to do, and that something was “good” to the extent that it fulfilled this purpose well. He then determined that human beings were uniquely designed for intellectual contemplation, and so we were most flourishing — most eudaimon — when we were philosophizing well.

But now we understand more about the origin of species than Aristotle did, and we know that individual species are not uniquely designed to do anything, but are all designed to compete well in the contest of natural selection, and can only be said to be uniquely designed to fit some environmental niche or other.

But while Aristotle’s idea of man’s purpose was suspiciously like Aristotle’s idea of a good time; Darwin’s insight into man’s purpose is disappointingly banal and doesn’t seem very helpful as a guide. As Wilkinson puts it: “Making copies of your genome is, in an important sense, what you are for. But it has next to nothing to do what what you ought to try to do with yourself.”

He concludes, then, that contra Aristotle, “there is no non-stupid natural fact of the matter about what it would mean for you to realize or fulfill your potential, or to function most excellently as the kind of thing you are.”

This is what attracts me to the existentialists, I think. They came to the same conclusion that you cannot discover the meaning of life in human nature, and most of them also believed the supernatural was no help either. The ethical programs they wrestled with hinted at a number of other approaches, but focused on the reminder that we (must) create our own values in order to decide how to live.


For all of their grumbling about taxes, you don’t often hear calls for actual tax resistance from American libertarians these days. Here’s an example from the issue of Reason magazine, though:

Taxes Are Revolting: Why Aren’t You?

As I sit in a Zurich cafe writing this month’s column, nothing seems further from my mind than taxes in the United States — or anywhere else for that matter.

In a sense, I am in the position of a blind man advising those with sight. I pay no taxes worthy of mention to any government in the world. That fact, plus the delightful distractions of Zurich, probably accounts for my view that, in a personal sense, the taxes you and the majority of people pay are, at most, a minor irritant.

One thing I do not feel is that my tax-free status in any way contributes to the downfall of a government. According to one libertarian argument, the widespread failure on the part of citizens to contribute to the support of their government would lead to its downfall. But even if everybody utilised every possible legal means of tax minimisation, the government would simply react by closing tax loopholes, increasing tax rates, or imposing new taxes which are difficult to avoid paying.

Indeed, most tax revenue falls into three categories which are pretty secure from the government’s point of view:

  • corporation taxes;
  • income taxes paid by salary earners, and
  • sales or excise taxes.

In all three cases, the taxpayers have little or no means of escape. The salary earner has his tax withheld before he even sees his money. The corporation is a sitting duck and sales taxes must be paid as a condition of doing business. While it is not impossible for some individuals to avoid most or all of these taxes, it is inconceivable that a majority of such taxpayers can or will do so.

This means that if taxes are to be used as a weapon against government, a tax revolt or rebellion is the only method with any chance of success. As long as the war between government and taxpayer remains secret and individual, no politician or bureaucrat will feel threatened. The only policy change will be to intensify and strengthen the efforts of the tax collector.

An example comes from Italy where tax evasion is a national pastime. The taxman routinely increases assessments by 50–100 percent on the basis that you must have understated your income. Thus, even if you want to pay just what the law says you should, you must cheat to avoid paying more! Though the Italian government is in continual danger of collapse, it is not about to collapse into libertarianism.

While to pay no taxes may be virtuous, to do so legally or secretly is of no political significance. I would go so far as to say that if one pays no taxes, one cannot join in a tax rebellion! To rebel against taxes, to use taxes as a political weapon, one must openly and publicly refuse to pay taxes. Once one takes such a public stance, one invites retaliation by the tax authority. It is this fear of retaliation which prevents many people from joining the tax revolt.

Although tax minimisation depends for its effectiveness on secrecy, while tax rebellion requires open refusal, it is possible to “eat your cake and have it too.” Success depends on following a few simple rules, though there always remains an element of risk.

What is the risk? That the IRS will decide to focus its attention on you. Should it do so, your tax resistance would prove a highly expensive undertaking even if you have nothing to hide!

The powers of the IRS are totalitarian and wideranging. Their law is the Napoleonic Code: guilty until proven innocent. They are also willing to spend $1000 to get $10, which weighs the odds severely in their favor. Thus, if you do become the target of an IRS investigation, you could face a long and expensive legal battle to prove your innocence.

In one sense, however, the powers of the IRS are overrated. One hears many stories which give the impression that the IRS knows all about every American’s tax affairs. The IRS’ awe-inspiring image derives from those widely-reported, but very few cases (as a percentage of the tax-avoiding population) where the IRS has spent virtually infinite resources in constructing such detailed knowledge. The payoff is not in the dollars of tax money collected; the payoff is that millions of Americans live in abject fear and awe of the IRS.

Let’s not swing the other way and under-estimate the expertise of the IRS. The United Kingdom tax authorities, for example, have just sent a study team to the United States with the aim of adopting the American techniques against the erring British taxpayer.

The risks involved in tax rebellion are reasonably low if:

  • You are confident your tax minimisation arrangements are perfectly secure and secret (if illegal); or entirely within the spirit and letter of the law.
  • You are an “average taxpayer” who does nothing illegal.
  • Your tax minimization arrangements are perfectly normal methods.

If, on the other hand, your tax arrangements would not stand up under scrutiny; you have not kept your foreign bank accounts or use of tax havens properly secret; if, in other words, there is something the IRS could get its teeth into, you could do the tax resistance movement positive harm. I have no doubt that should the tax rebellion spread, the IRS will do as much as possible to destroy and discredit it. Proving to the public that a few of the people involved (and by implication the movement as a whole) are merely tax evaders seeking to feather their own nests would do much to undercut the movement’s ethical base.

One final safety is in numbers: the more people involved, the fewer resources the IRS will be able to direct at you. So which do you want to be: the chicken or the egg?

Mark Tier

Mark Tier is still avoiding taxes overseas. His website says, in the “about Mark Tier” section:

Mark Tier is an Australian writer and businessman who is based in Hong Kong “partly because paying taxes is against my religion.”


The “Radical Libertarian Alliance” was founded in and lasted until  — making it one of the earlier organizations in the modern libertarian movement. It was small, decentralized, and part of the left/libertarian outreach of that period — with free-market anarchists Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess among the more prominent members.

It for a time issued a publication called The Abolitionist. The issue featured an article by Jerome Tuccille titled “What Happens Now: Some Thoughts on the Movement” that tried to anticipate the future of libertarian influence in the counterculture, the anti-war movement, and the loose coalition of groups who had given up on the centrist strong-central-government consensus.

Among his predictions of how libertarians would change society for the better:

The major changes will come about through the use of revolutionary strategy, and this is the most valuable tactic of all as far as immediate change is concerned. Libertarians will continue their efforts in the realm of non-violent revolution, concentrating most of their energies on the anti-draft and anti-tax issues, the two bête noires of Right Wing libertarians. Potentially, tax resistance is the most effective means available to reduce the power of government, and the one feared the most by political authority. It is the one tactic which is likely to attract the interest of middle-class Americans, over [a] sustained period, and it is valuable from that standpoint alone. It is also vitally important since it deprives government of the capital it needs to finance its own institutions. While it is true that government does have the capability of printing more paper currency as long as it maintains a monopoly on our money supply, this would inevitably lead to the destruction of the state money system and the state’s credit standing in the international marketplace. It would also bring about the destruction of the state-controlled and state-regulated economic structure. People would be forced to find a new medium of exchange as the state currency plummeted in value; in short, it would lead to the creation of a more stable and viable form of “people’s money,” probably gold and silver-backed certificates, which would be more acceptable in world markets.


Some bits and pieces from here and there in the libertarian corners of the web:

  • At the Bleeding Heart Libertarians group blog, which tries to use intellectual arguments to meld libertarian instincts with liberal sensitivities, Matt Zwolinski makes a libertarian case for good manners. Good manners? Really? Really. They’re by no means as trivial as they’re often treated by ethicists:

    It is a mistake, first of all, to think about rules regarding the location of forks as paradigmatic of manners and etiquette. It is a mistake, too, to suppose that there is no important distinction to be made between the rules of etiquette and the principles of manners. And it is a mistake for libertarians, especially, to disdain all this business as the stuff of authoritarian busy-bodies.

    …Societies… need rules to keep people from bumping in too each other too roughly. The state is one potential source of those rules. Morality is another. But we should not… neglect the importance of etiquette. Especially if, as libertarians, we want to minimize the role of the state as rule-maker and enforcer.

    …I would think, moreover, that libertarians would find the topic of good manners theoretically interesting. Manners and etiquette are, after all, kinds of spontaneous orders.

  • Wendy McElroy, at Laissez Faire Today, writes about Freedom and Frugality. Excerpt:

    I no longer believe the American dream is functioning. My choice is to earn and spend less in order to control my own time and to avoid fueling the State through more taxes. I have called this choice “frugality,” but some people are more comfortable with the term “voluntary simplicity.” The point of such simplicity is not to save every possible penny. It is to ensure that your time and money are expended on your goals. Voluntary simplicity can be viewed as a “business plan” for getting the most out of life. Ask yourself what your goals are and what is necessary to get there. Of equal importance, ask what is not necessary.

  • Paul Bonneau, at Strike the Root, notes that libertarians can be just as susceptible as liberals and conservatives to squabbling over symbolic elements of ideological tribal belonging when they’d be better off making friends and knowing who their real enemies are.
  • Matthew Feeney, at Reason, reports that Alternative Currencies Rise as the Eurozone Crisis Worsens.

If resisters can encourage more people to evade more taxes, even if they do so for non-idealistic reasons, this both takes resources away from the government and increases the number of targets the tax enforcers have to pursue, thereby taking some pressure off of the resisters.

Today I’ll cover how tax resistance movements can contribute to tax evasion in the culture at large. (At the same time I’ll give a sneak preview of some of the slides I’m preparing for my upcoming talk in Colombia — beware: I haven’t asked anyone to proofread my shoddy Spanish translations yet.)

There are three attitudinal pillars of taxpayer compliance that the government relies on to make its tax system function efficiently.

Taxpayer compliance is a challenge for governments to create and maintain, and they spend a lot of effort trying to understand the mechanics of it and engage in a lot of propaganda and other forms of manipulation in order to bring it about.

I’m reminded of the Disney short The Spirit of which told theatergoers that it was Taxes that would Defeat the Axis… or the short film The Tsippori Affair produced by Israel’s propaganda department (with American help) that showed shocked audiences what would happen if nobody paid their taxes (for instance, the schools would all shut down, and school-aged children would lounge about playing cards, drinking wine, and smoking cigarettes).

Pillar #1: Taxpaying is normal, expected behavior. People who do not pay taxes are anti-social deviants.

I’ve noted before one of the ways the IRS supports this pillar. Every year they conduct something they call the “Taxpayer Attitude Survey” in which they ask a set of questions to 1,000 randomly-phoned American households. The survey contains carefully-loaded questions like these (emphasis mine):

  • How much, if any, do you think is an acceptable amount to cheat on your income taxes?
  • [Do you agree that] it is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes?
  • [Do you agree that] everyone who cheats on their taxes should be held accountable?

Predictably, people overwhelmingly report that cheating is bad and fair shares are good. The IRS then puts out a press release about how Americans overwhelmingly believe everybody should pay what the government tells them to. Typically the news media go along with it, composing stories that follow the press release script.

Pillar #2: The government spends tax money wisely for things of public benefit.

The government is always eager to draw your attention whenever it spends your money on something nice. There’s hardly a bridge, library, overpass, park, or other partially-public-funded thing in my town that doesn’t come with a plaque attached, listing the names of the city councillors and mayor who signed off on it — though that’s about all they had to do to get such credit.

Pillar #3: Tax evaders are caught and dealt with harshly (but the law abiding are safe).

This is why in the weeks before Tax Day, the IRS breathlessly announces indictments against famous people and big-time tax evaders. Don’t think of stepping out of line, they’re saying, because you’re sure to get caught. Anecdotes speak stronger than statistics here.

Note that these pillars are self-reinforcing. The more people believe the attitudes expressed in the pillars, the more people will be tax compliant. The more people are tax compliant, the more plausible the attitudes expressed in the pillars seem.

It takes a lot less work for the government to keep taxpayer compliance from slipping from 90% to 80% than it does for the government to raise taxpayer compliance from 80% to 90%.

If taxpayer compliance is high, taxpayers will convince themselves of the attitudes in the pillars. Why am I allowing myself to be fleeced like this? Well, I must have good reasons: it’s because I’m a good citizen, and I want to contribute to useful things, and besides if I don’t I’ll get caught. Everybody knows these things.

If taxpayer compliance is low, taxpayers have to be convinced — they ask instead: Why am I allowing myself to be fleeced like this (when so many other people aren’t)? Am I getting played?

Attacking pillar #1: The new message you want people to hear is “Lots of people don’t pay their taxes: rich people, powerful people, and even people like you. People who pay taxes are suckers.” Publicize cases of well-known people and businesses who evade their taxes. Publicize the cases of tax resisters who are “normal people just like you and me.”
For example, Timothy Geithner, U.S. President Obama’s Treasury Secretary, took improper tax deductions and failed to pay taxes due on some of his income. “Even the boss at the Treasury Department is trying to get away with something.”

It is easy to point out how many wealthy people and fat corporations get away with paying little or no taxes. I won’t list examples here as I’m sure you’ve heard plenty, but here’s one way a group of war tax resisters made this a little more in-your-face:

At , a merry band of activists from the local [Bangor, Maine] Peace & Justice Center swapped their cozy jeans & t-shirts for swanky gowns & tuxedos, hopped in a verrry conspicuous white stretch-limo, and motored their way to the P.O./Federal Bldg., to perform a bit of satire-filled street theater.

This division of the “Rich People’s Liberation Front” did a skit to expose the huuuge tax breaks which America’s corporations & our wealthiest citizens receive; then thanked intrigued passersby with Dum-Dum lollipops. (“Suckers for the suckers!”)

Attacking pillar #2: The new message you want people to hear is “The government wastes your hard-earned money and gives it to people who do not deserve it.” Publicize boondoggles of wasteful government spending. Publicize examples of government corruption. Contrast government spending priorities with popular ones.

This is related to what tax geeks call the “salience” of taxation — that is, how aware you are of the hand that is picking your pocket. If you had to write a check to Washington every couple of weeks, your income tax would be very salient. If the money is automatically withheld from your paycheck before you get your hands on it, it’s less salient. If it’s invisibly included in the price of the goods you buy, it’s less salient still. Governments are eager to find ways to tax people in ways that make them less aware that they’re being taxed, because the less you’re aware of it the less you’ll resist.

For example, the War Resisters League publishes a pie chart to inform people about the surprisingly large percentage of U.S. federal spending that goes towards armaments and military expenses.
For example, American war tax resisters hold “penny polls” asking passers-by to distribute pennies among a set of containers representing government spending priorities, as if they were the government making spending decisions. They then contrast this with the government’s actual spending.

There are many other similar examples, both from the war tax resistance movement and from other movements:

  • The “Death and Taxes” poster is a great infographic about U.S. government spending priorities.
  • The Tax Foundation raises a ballyhoo every year about what it calls “Tax Freedom Day” — “the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay off its total tax bill for the year” and which lately has been arriving about the same time as federal income tax returns are due, which increases the publicity impact.
  • The Mennonite Central Committee turned the penny poll idea into an on-line game; another site put together a $3 trillion dollar shopping spree to give people an idea of what kind of cool things they could be investing in if the government weren’t spending all that money on war.
  • Libertarian Party activists often will hand out fake million dollar bills, each one printed with an estimate of how quickly the government spends that much money. Another tack is to hand out “Certificates of Debt” that show how much government debt each American taxpayer is on the hook for.
  • One war tax resistance group held a “Tax Day” protest in which they facetiously labeled the mailboxes down at the post office with the names of military contractors like Lockheed-Martin, Halliburton, and Bechtel, to point out where the money was really going to end up.
  • “April 15th is ‘Support the Pentagon’ Day” read ads in the New York Times . Under this headline, a cartoon showed a hapless taxpayer with a bit in his mouth, with a load of generals, admirals, and armaments on his back.
Attacking pillar #3: The new message you want people to hear is “Evaders usually get away with it (but the tax agency often persecutes the innocent).” Publicize examples, statistics, and studies that show that frequently tax evaders come out ahead (sometimes even the ones who get caught). Publicize examples of successful tax resisters who have been resisting for years.
For example, long-time war tax resisters can emphasize how long they have been resisting and how mild the actual consequences have been. (Photo shows American war tax resister Wally Nelson holding a sign that reads “Haven’t paid taxes since 1948”)

On a few occasions, tax resisters have turned themselves in to law enforcement as a way of showing how little they are afraid of prosecution. For instance, in Australia’s Northern Territory in , “the residents drew up a monster petition, which almost everybody signed, and insisted on the government standing up to its own laws by taking action against them. They also defied the government to put them into jail.” And in , three war tax resisters went to the IRS headquarters in Washington to turn themselves in. “If the resisters are not arrested and prosecuted,” Mary Loehr of NWTRCC said (and they weren’t, and still haven’t been), “it will expose the myth that people go to jail for not paying their taxes.”

Note that these attacks are also self-reinforcing. The less people believe the attitudes expressed in the pillars, the more people will evade taxes. The more people evade taxes, the more implausible the attitudes expressed in the pillars seem.

As professor James C. Scott said of his studies of resistance to government-mandated tithes in Malaysia, once tax resistance “has become a customary practice it generates its own expectations about what is permissible [and] raises the political and administrative costs for any regime that subsequently decides it will enforce the rules in earnest. For everyday resisters there is safety in numbers and successful resistance builds its own momentum.”

The examples I have given here are largely indirect ways of promoting a cultural atmosphere in which tax evasion seems like more of a good idea. But there are also more direct ways in which people can assist in the tax evasion of others. I’ve already mentioned the tactic of paying in cash so that your transactions leave less of a paper trail for the government to follow. Here are a couple of others:

  • You can spread rumors that a tax has been abolished. This worked with great success at the time of the French Revolution, when such rumors became self-fulfilling prophecies. This was also common in Czarist Russia, when people extrapolated from the propaganda-fuelled image of a benevolent Czar to conclude that such a Czar must have abolished such awful taxes. And the present day United States has long had a cottage industry of people who are convinced (and convincing) that the real United States Constitution would never permit something as awful as the federal income tax.
  • You can manufacture the paraphernalia of tax evasion. For example, in Mexico City, you can visit a taco stand and walk away not only with lunch, but — for a small price — with fake receipts from a variety of restaurants, hotels, and stores, that you can then use to declare business expenses on your tax returns.

Some links to things of note:

  • Former Republican congresscritter/presidential candidate and libertarian darling Ron Paul has a new book out. It’s called Swords Into Plowshares, and, among other things, it seems that it explicitly advocates mass civil disobedience in the form of war tax resistance to prevent empires like his from engaging in militarist adventures. I’ve still not read the book — the libraries hereabouts don’t seem to go in for libertarian literature — but some excerpts I’ve seen call for “refusal to participate in government crimes through the military and tax system with full realization of the risks of practicing civil disobedience.” Also:

    If limiting government power by constitutional restraints doesn’t work, and if trying to influence elections to keep evil people out of office doesn’t work, what is left? Some would argue nothing. But, in reality the people can go on strike and refuse to finance or to fight in wars that have no legitimacy.

    If the authoritarians continue to abuse power in spite of constitutional and moral limits, the only recourse left is for the people to go on strike and refuse to sanction the wars and thefts. Deny the dictators your money and your bodies. If enough people do this, the time will come when the dictators’ power will dissipate.

  • This month marks the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act Riots that crushed Britain’s attempt to subject American colonists to a variety of taxes, that demonstrated the power of mass noncompliance, and that led the way to the American Revolution.
  • James Edward Maule’s Mauled Again blog touches on the tactic of paying your taxes in pennies or other low-denomination coins as a protest.
  • Jennifer Carr has penned a paper on how to improve the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act for the University of St. Thomas Law Journal. It is… strange. It puts some effort into tracing the history of conscientious objection to military taxation and the various legal arguments that have been put forward in its support. And then it makes some suggestions for how to make “Peace Tax Fund” legislation more effective, suggesting that this moment of history is especially ripe for such a bill since politicians are sensitive to issues of conscience that showed themselves during and after the drafting of Obamacare. But the paper doesn’t address the most glaring flaws of the current Peace Tax Fund legislation, and its proposals don’t really make the bill any better. Still, there’s some satisfaction in seeing someone try to take all of this seriously and as worthy of some scholarship.
  • Civil rights activist Julian Bond died recently. Ruth Benn remembers when Julian Bond explained how he learned about the power of nonviolent civil disobedience from the example of Quaker war tax resisters.

Gabriel Colominas Bigorra, an economist from Barcelona, has written a libertarian defense of tax resistance. My translation:

Deconstructing Myths:
Liberalism, Taxes, and Tax Resistance

It’s strange to see how often tax evasion is identified as a purely selfish and heartless thing, as something immoral, when in my opinion it is very much the opposite. Those responsible for criminalizing tax evasion or tax fraud are the state and all of its functionaries (politicians and high officials). The context and institutions that surround us are mainly statist and it is for this reason that almost all public opinion is convinced that the evasion of taxes is something bad because “the treasury is all of us.” But when push comes to shove, we discover many people taking part of their salary in cash or our mechanic, no dummy, not writing out a receipt for the repairs and in that way avoiding the value-added tax. This scenario clearly contrasts with the typical Spanish attitude of “que me lo den todo echo, pero que pague otro” [an idiom I could not find a good translation for; maybe something like “I’d like to order everything on the menu except the prices” — ♇] that was reflected in the election held . We want a soviet state economy, but not to pony up its cost.

The tax burden in Spain is especially high, with some taxes that rise and rise without end to strip from people the fruits of their labor. Fortunately there are those who say that although we must contribute, the tax reform carried out by Hollande (in which those who earn more than a million euros must pay 75% of their income) is a monumental atrocity. I do not agree with the idea that everyone is obligated to contribute, but this is better than the people who say that “the rich” are to be expropriated for the purpose of guaranteeing a basic income to everyone, the typical fantasy land proposal.

Libertarians are thought of as misers who are incapable of helping others or giving them some of the money that they have, a picture totally removed from reality. People often spout off words like generosity when to pay taxes has nothing generous about it. To pay a tax to me signifies accepting our wasteful and extravagant authorities as our legitimate masters and complying irresponsibly with respect to the part of our money that we are forced to give. It’s true that we do so under the coercion of the monopoly of violence possessed by the state, but I believe that we have the obligation to search for better managers of our money, for example ourselves, and to do this begins with tax resistance.

Is tax resistance a purely libertarian tool? Well, no, in fact it is the act we all should perform when the state spends a part of our taxes on something that we do not want to invest in. Is there anyone who agrees with all of the spending and investments made by the state? Absolutely not. There is not even one taxpayer who sees their taxes spent as they would like. To give some examples: Catholics do not want abortions performed with public funds (they would be morally responsible for this), pacifists do not want to finance the army and much less to undertake a war, there is a significant number of people who do not want money used to bail out the banks and banking conglomerates in the way that has been done, others would like to use funds to protect the forests more or to strengthen public services, there is a large group of scientists who want to see boosts to funding for R&D, not to research them, but because they believe that research itself is a pillar of human development. There are many examples and I’m not going to bore my readers with many others.

But aside from not devoting our money to what we we want, there are other problems that we must keep in mind if we really want the apparatus of the state bureaucracy to manage our money. If we imagine someone who obtains a government that uses the taxes exactly as he wishes, even in this case the management costs that the government generates must be considered losses from our taxes, as we have seen over and over how the costs of certain parts of the budget increase without this translating into better service for citizens. A part of this sequence of problems we have the embarrassment of corruption and embezzlement of funds as well as the abuse of the budgets on the part of a sizable group of public managers, especially those most connected to the party system. If we observe the entire process we see that financing by means of taxes means that for every euro that we pay, a really significant part is diverted to invest in projects we don’t want, to pay for the bloated costs of administration, and to maintain a rogues gallery from whom we get too many cases of corruption.

Having reached this point, we see that really the enormous state bureaucratic system is not the best option for managing our money. What is the argument in defense of choosing to continue to pay taxes? In my opinion there is none that justifies the loss of money, especially taking into account that, as has been shown: From donations to voluntary, non-government organizations, we can develop a social structure apart from the state that better manages our money. And if you are one of those who thinks that with a different government, one that is truly “good and responsible,” things would be different as has been said, I want you to look at the structures and synergies of power that govern themselves by their own nature, the important state apparatus has developed a way of doing things just so that only a politician who disassembles it would be capable of getting rid of these dynamics turned sadly into vices.

Tax resistance is not only a tool for individualist libertarians; it is an action that any taxpayer must consider whenever any government, whatever flavor it has, employs money in a way that he does not like.


Some other tabs I’ve opened in recent weeks:

  • Some Tax Day Reflections from Bryan Caplan, from back when he was a grad student (he’s now a professor of economics at George Mason University). Excerpt:

    Morally, taxation is unjust; practically, it is unnecessary. Yet taxation is unlikely to disappear in the near future; so what is the right thing to do in the meanwhile? Thoreau’s advice is again sound: “It is not a man’s duty’s to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.” Which means: Don’t work for the IRS, never support higher taxes on anything, and never let anyone pretend that you pay taxes of your own free will. Taxation is always theft, and the more people hear this insight repeated, the sooner they’ll see taxation for what it is.

  • The war tax resistance campaign has kicked into high gear in Spain. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Jesús Paz of the Mambrú Antimilitarist Collective:
    What is tax resistance?
    It isn’t a model regulated by the Treasury, but a campaign of civil disobedience that has been practiced for more than thirty years in countries like Spain, the U.S., Canada, Holland, Germany, France, or Italy. Simply, it is the use of the tax return as a tool for redirecting to socially useful purposes the portion of military spending from each citizen. Antimilitarist Alternative coordinates a state-wide campaign to help the maximum number of people to participate. We collect data from various peace research centers and we compose a study that adds the Defense Ministry budget to the spending on other armed forces and also other items that are dispersed by other ministries, such as credits to arms companies for so-called research & development of a military character. These credits, in reality, have ended up financing the arms industry, generating along the way €27,000 million in debt. We also include spending that, in our view, tends to a more militarized society: for example, a large part of the prison population is there because the system does not facilitate social integration. So, with all of the global military spending and spending on state repression and social control, we calculate that the military spending per person is greater than €700 this year. In any case, we make it clear that the objective is not to object to a particular amount, but that people take this step of disobedience and demonstrate that we are not going along with this. From conscience, acting collectively, it is an organized political campaign of disobedience. We also make it clear that this is not a campaign for paying less to the Treasury: the tax resister pays exactly the same tax the Treasury asks for, but a part of this money is not allocated to military spending, but to a social project.
    Have any cases of war tax resistance reached the court system?
    We don’t put much stock in the legal process; recognition of the right to tax resistance has already been rejected on two or three occasions in various instances. The philosophy of the vast majority of campaign groups is not to search for a legal body to give us a legal right; it is fundamentally a protest campaign. That said, there is one unusual judgment from the Supreme Court of Catalonia concerning the tax resistance of representative Joan Surroca of the PSC: although the Court rejected the right to tax resistance, it also declared it illegal for the Treasury to fine Surroca for something where he could not be considered to have committed fraud, that is, the intent to conceal money. We consider this a small victory that the Court recognizes that it is not simply an individual matter or a scheme to pay less. There is a space for someone who does not do what the Treasury orders, but who does so in a public way, without concealment.
  • War tax resistance groups in Catalonia are redirecting their taxes to groups that are trying to ameliorate the refugee crisis.
  • “Divest from Pentagon, invest in people,” headlines the People’s World in their article about a war tax resistance demonstration in San Diego. The resisters there redirected $6,000 in federal taxes from the Pentagon, including a donation to an organization that is trying to build tiny, affordable homes for the homeless. One of these homes was wheeled to the outdoor redirection ceremony to give it some extra splash.
  • Raul Perez is going to try to figure out some new angle to get the U.S. courts to recognize a right to conscientious objection to military taxation. He also wants to make a documentary film about the process.
  • Erica Weiland, at NWTRCC’s blog, makes note of some recent war tax resistance demonstrations.
  • “Is it immoral to evade taxes?” asks a columnist for Tiempo Digital of Honduras. He reviews some of the historical tax resistance campaigns in the service of justice, and then asks: “Can we in Honduras feel morally comfortable and have clear consciences while paying taxes?” Citing corruption, the bulk of government spending compared to national gross domestic product, and the abysmal lack of security and legal protection for citizens, he concludes that Honduran citizens do not owe allegiance or tax to the government.
  • Finally, here’s Joan Baez dedicating a song to the IRS:

Some tax resistance news of note:

  • I’m seeing some signs of organized tax resistance as part of the ongoing protests in Nicaragua, which are aimed at the unpopular policies and the general repressiveness of the Sandinista government:
    • Attorney Julio Francisco Báez has produced a video for Nicaraguans who want to participate in tax resistance.
    • The Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences and Academy of Legal and Political Sciences have called on people and businesses in Nicaragua to stop paying taxes and bills from the state electricity monopoly.
    • There is talk of a tax strike in the Mercado Oriental in Managua, mirroring a general strike there in the last days of the Somoza regime in . Merchants there met and voted to stop paying taxes and utility bills. Merchant Irlanda Jerez told an interviewer:

      When we talk about civil disobedience in the Mercado Oriental, we are talking about not paying city taxes, not paying Conmema [vendor fees], not paying trash, not paying any tax that has anything to do with government entities. First, as disobedience, and second, because it is prioritizing the salaries of the workers.

      Of course [we fear reprisals]. We know that this dictatorial government always takes reprisals against anyone who rises up. The merchants are afraid. I am afraid. It’s normal, but in this moment we have to put aside any fear of economic loss.

    • Student protest leaders called for tax resistance and boycotts of businesses owned by the ruling family as part of a nonviolent resistance campaign.
  • Alex Tabarrok has an amusing post demonstrating the sort of magical thinking that progressives sometimes have about taxes and government spending.
  • TheNewspaper continues to report on people around the world who are disabling traffic-ticket-issuing machines: in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many times over in France, in Italy, England, Russia, and several more times in France.
  • Some people every year get it into their heads that it would be a good idea to donate money to the U.S. government to help it pay down the national debt. That debt stands at something like $21,000,000,000,000, so those donations, though they amount to millions of dollars a year (go figure), only pay down something like 0.00001% of this amount. People may be wising up, though. These voluntary contributions seem to be sharply down this year.