How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
switch to alternative currencies →
“time dollars”
I touched on alternative currencies, a concept which is tangential to my experiment, in an entry.
If you’re intrigued by that sort of thing, you’ll probably be interested in this interview with Bernard Lietaer.
He discusses several alternative or complementary currency systems in use worldwide.
He also claims that something called the “time-dollar” that is being used in the U.S. has been ruled tax-free by the IRS, something that I would want to see documented before I’d believe it, since the feds aren’t usually so kind to barter or mediated-barter arrangements.
Some bits and pieces from around the great big web:
One way to avoid paying taxes to whatever jurisdiction is lording it over you would be to move to another jurisdiction.
The problem is figuring out how to take your assets with you before the folks in the revenue office figure out what you’re up to.
Kathleen Macaulay has written up her advice for people considering what she calls the “ultimate estate plan” — taxpatriatism — in the wake of new laws that changed the rules for U.S. taxpatriates .
Matthew Yglesias notes that the news media allowed themselves to be used as a propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex, shamelessly and without remorse.
To which IOZ responds — allowed themselves? hell — they’re an essential part of the military-industrial complex.
Who do you think owns NBC?
Trying to convince folks that their tax dollars might be better spent by anyone but the Pentagon?
You could do worse than pointing to them to a new report from the Center for Defense Information about Pentagon waste and budgetary shenanigans.
Bureaucrash, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s attempt to make capitalist ideology hip and exciting to the Internet generation, is sponsoring a “crasher challenge” — “a monthly drive to inspire activism on a specific issue.
We’ll help provide the initial resources to help you and other crashers get your creative juices flowing and we encourage you to share those resources that you create.
At the end of the month, the best submission (i.e. video, documented crash, writing, etc.) will be rewarded with Contraband t-shirts and props on Bureaucrash Social.”
This month’s challenge is called Stop Wars and it would be ideal for a project that ties taxation to warfare.
I was so busy this time around putting on seminars and facilitating workshops and such that I didn’t take very good notes, but here is some of what I remember.
we were treated to a panel
featuring Mira Luna, who is active in local alternative economic projects like
the Really Really Free Market and a Time-Bank alternative hours-based currency,
and Kwan Booth, who is at the forefront of the movement to build a grassroots
hyperlocal journalism out of the ashes of the collapsing news media empires and
who covers much of the up-and-coming innovations in community organizing.
we had panels and presentations on
outreach strategies, in-your-face confrontational war tax resistance, working
with Thoreau in the classroom, home-brewing beer as a tax resistance strategy,
an introduction to the low-income simple-living tax resistance method, a look
at the New Priorities Project… and I’m probably forgetting some others. We also
split into a couple of “War Tax Resistance 202” sessions at which people who
practice the low-income method or the refuse-to-pay method could get together
and talk over the nuts and bolts.
In one of two break-out groups on , experienced resisters talk about their strategies for dealing with the IRS
, our local war tax
redirection fund held its redirection ceremony at which it awarded
$1,000–$1,500 grants of redirected war taxes to a number of local groups who
would spend the money more wisely than the government would. Interspersed with
the grant awards were performances by musician Francisco Herrera and a talk
from the irascible, inspirational, uncompromising radical lawyer Tony Serra,
who has been twice honored by the legal system for his tax resistance by being
awarded with prison time — which he compared to “throwing a doctor in a
hospital.”
J. Tony Serra addresses the gathering
, the coordinating committee of
NWTRCC
met to go over business — finances & fundraising, objectives, proposals,
changes of committee membership, that sort of thing. This was my last meeting
as a member of the Administrative Committee, as two of us rotated off and were
replaced by a couple of others.
I signed up for a new working group — the “rapid outreach working group” — which is tasked with identifying emerging groups, actions, and movements that
have a message that is harmonious with war tax resistance and reaching out to
them to show them how
NWTRCC can help them make war tax resistance a useful part of
their actions.
Members of the coordinating committee stuck around on to work out the nitty-gritty business of NWTRCC
Coincidentally while the meeting was going on I got two letters from the
IRS.
One was a copy of a “Notice of Levy” they sent to Fidelity, which
holds my retirement accounts, in an attempt to seize money to pay the taxes I
refused to pay for the tax year. But the
levy explicitly does not apply to
“IRAs,
self-employed individual retirement plans, or any other retirement plans in
your possession or control” so I don’t think the
IRS will
get anything out of it.
The other letter was a “Final Notice of Intent to Levy” based on what I
refused to pay for the tax year. For some
reason they sent me two copies of the same notice in the envelope. This notice
was packaged with a Form 12153 (“Request for a Collection Due Process or
Equivalent Hearing”) in case I wanted to bother with that, a copy of
Publication 594 (“The
IRS
Collection Process”), and a copy of Publication 1660 (“Collection Appeal
Rights”).
Each letter had a table on the back showing the amount they were after me for,
including “Statutory Additions” (interest and penalties).
Some people have tried to use alternative currencies (alternatives to official
government-created legal tender, that is) to facilitate tax resistance. Here
are some examples:
Missouri started issuing what it called “Time Dollars” to people who
volunteered to spend their time helping the elderly. These volunteers
could in turn use these Time Dollars to hire help if they needed it later
on. And the state vowed that it would honor these Time Dollars if no home
care workers were available who would themselves accept such currency.
Though Missouri did not have a tax resistance motive in
establishing this program, they did seek and obtain an
IRS
ruling that these Time Dollars did not represent taxable income.
(Here is some background,
and some additional commentary.)
The currencies in massively-multiplayer online games are taking on the appearance of a plausible challenger to legal tender.
A silly on-line currency called the “QQ coin” became a craze in China, which exposed a latent demand for an alternative to the tightly-controlled legal tender there.
For a time in the United States, you could go to a bank and buy an “honor bond” (or “bearer bond”) for the face value of your purchase.
Such bonds were anonymous, and earned interest, and so for a certain class of savvy people, tax resisters in particular, were better than money for conducting high-denomination transactions.
The government has since cracked down on the practice.
The U.S. government also cracked down, hard, on a fellow who started coining a parallel currency called the “Liberty Dollar” that he hoped would be more reliable and valuable than the stuff they print out at the Mint.
In present-day Greece, people are turning with creativity born of
desperation to a variety of alternative economic tactics, including the
use of an alternative currency called “tems” which the government there has not yet figured out how to tax.
