Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
American conservative arguments for tax resistance
In Jim Kiser’s opinion piece for the Arizona Daily Star, he notes the concerns of some taxpayers that their money may be funding, quite against their wishes, embryonic stem cell research.
Kiser says that in their attempts to keep from funding activities they believe to be wrong, “the conservatives may find supporters in places where they might never think to look”:
I gleaned some suggestions for them from the Web sites of three groups that have a long history of resisting the use of their members’ tax dollars for morally offensive activities.
The conservatives could withhold $10.40 of their income tax, for instance, and contribute it to a nonprofit organization in which they believe.
That is a strategy suggested by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
Such a protest is largely symbolic, of course, but it would be powerful symbolism if practiced by people such as [Mike] Pence, [Tom] DeLay and [Gary] Bauer.
Withholding part of your taxes is illegal, however, and for that reason the conservatives may prefer a suggestion by the War Resisters League that protesters trim their lifestyle to the point they earn so little money they don’t have to pay taxes.
This is legal, and while difficult to do, I am sure the conservatives have sufficient discipline.
I understand, though, it may not fit with some of their other values.
The conservatives should find common ground, however, with the approach of a nonprofit group that wants Congress to pass a law called the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.
“The Peace Tax Fund is part of a long and distinguished history of religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and conscientious objection to war in the USA,” the Web site says.
“We want to grant conscientious objectors the right to refrain from paying for war, just as they already have the right to refrain from fighting in war.”
Kiser seems to be saying this with tongue-in-cheek — not really suggesting that the conservative “pro-life” crowd learn a thing or two from the peaceniks but implying that these conservatives probably have a fairly partisan notion of which taxpayers’ consciences ought to be respected.
But why shouldn’t tax resistance — the conscientious kind I mean, not the loony “you’re not a real judge because your flag has the wrong kind of fringe around it” kind — become a strategy of dissidents on the right as well as the left?
Imagine a former staff member of Soldier of Fortune magazine and cop beat reporter for the Washington Times, who calls the Vietnam Memorial “Jane Fonda’s wall” and says that “without men, civilization would last until the oil needed changing.”
That’s Fred Reed, and a liberal peacenik he’s not.
I wish to propose a salubrious anarchy, a deliberate renunciation of fealty to country, society, and government, an assertion of independence from folly and moral decay.
Permit me to offer a taxing political idea: When a society ceases to be worthy of support, it is reasonable to withdraw support.
The time, I submit, has come.…
Let me suggest that one owes loyalty to one’s family and friends, to common decency, and to nothing else.
Render under Caesar what you must, keep what you can, and swear allegiance to nothing.
Here I do not mean just the government, but the zeitgeist, the miasmic fetor of trashy culture, the desperate consumerism, the entire psychic odor of a society in decomposition.…
Ask not what you can do for your country, but what it can do for you — you ought to get some of your taxes back.
Do not tie yourself to… anything.
The price of freedom is poverty: freedom grows as your needs diminish.…
I lived years ago in a second-hand house trailer in the woods.
I do not know what it cost, or would cost today, but perhaps fifteen thousand dollars.
It was perfectly comfortable, warm in winter, air-conditioned in summer.
Mornings were blessedly quiet unless you regard birdsong as noise.
A brick barbecue provided a place to produce ribs and drink bourbon and water.
A couple of companionable dogs rounded out the ensemble.
They had the run of the trailer, as was right.
Now, living in a trailer is to the consumerist sensibility simply too degrading and so… I mean, my god, how could you face the neighbors?
(There weren’t any.)
But aside from damage to a servile dependent vanity, what is the drawback?
A couple of hundred dollars buys a remarkably good stereo, music is free, libraries are good, and I for one am more comfortable in jeans and tee shirt than in Calvin and Klein trappings.
When your expenses are few, your susceptibility to economic serfdom is small.
You do not need to work miserably in a pointless job for a boss you would gleefully strangle.
Yes, you need money.
The first principle is never to work in a job that you cannot afford to quit.
This means avoiding any job with a retirement, of which you will become a prisoner.
The second principle is to work at something portable that you can do independently and, preferably, without capital.
Retirement?
Save.…
Finally, work the system.
The government, if you let it, will take roughly half of your income, give much of it to useless bureaucrats, much to various forms of welfare, use much to bomb countries you may have no desire to bomb, and much to force upon you services, such as horrible schools, that you do not want.
The central question regarding government is whether you can take more from it than it takes from you.
It is much better to receive than to give.
Live cheap, work only as much as you like, enjoy life, and keep your taxes down.
You may remember these words:
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America establishes a bill of particulars in regard to intolerable infringements, abuses, and denials of political power which belongs to the people.
The Federal government of the United States of America today is guilty of exactly every sort of infringement, abuse, and denial stated as intolerable by the Declaration of Independence.
I cannot, in conscience, sanction that government by the payment of taxes.
Further, the Federal government of the United States of America has established as a principle, and ruthlessly by the power of its officials enforces as a practice, that it can demand the primary loyalty of the people, that it can exercise all political power on their behalf, that it can wage war without their approval, and that it can and should establish the standards of their behavior and the goals of their lives.
I could not in conscience sanction such a government by the payment of taxes.
Finally, the Declaration of Independence, in the clearest possible language, tells Americans that when a government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that it is the right and the duty of the people to abolish such government, to “throw off such government.”
It is in the spirit of that Declaration, and in comradeship with men everywhere who seek freedom and to throw off such governments, that I now refuse to pay the taxes demanded by the government in the attached form.
This phone tax has long been associated with war — it was enacted to fund the Spanish-American war and was raised to help pay for both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the military build-up of .
For this reason, war tax resisters in particular have targeted this tax.
But I’ll be surprised if the war tax resistance movement joins up with Americans for Tax Reform to try to get rid of the tax.
For one thing, they’d have to hold their noses to align themselves with a right-winger like Norquist, since they’re mostly lefties themselves.
But also, because resisting the phone tax is such an easy and risk-free way to play at tax resistance without having to become too committed to it, the war tax resistance movement has become weirdly dependent on that tax.
Some tax resisters don’t have it in them to do any more than phone tax resistance — if there were no phone tax, what would those tax resisters do instead?
A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would abolish the tax.
It currently has 137 co-sponsors.
Google is starting to do for newspaper archives what it has been doing for books: putting scanned images on-line and making them text-searchable.
Hooray for Google, says I.
Here are a few articles I found while browsing around today:
A couple of pieces regarding a reconstruction-era dispute over the legitimacy of the Louisiana state government (in which tax resistance played a role):
The Nixon Administration asked the Supreme Court today to rule out draft exemptions for men who are conscientiously opposed to the Vietnam war but not to all wars.
…
Besides, the Administration argued, if selective exemptions are approved people could refuse to pay their taxes on religious grounds or could defy other laws.
Washington [D.C.] Official Urges Tax Refusal to Push Statehood The New York Times (“Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to Congress, has urged residents here not to pay their Federal taxes until Congress makes Washington the 51st state.”
[C]ollection will be a formidable challenge after years in which taxes
were identified by Palestinians with foreign occupation.
Tax resistance is strong in the territories. It spread during a seven-year
uprising against Israeli rule, when Palestinians working in the tax
department resigned. According to Israeli estimates, only 20 percent of
Palestinians taxed in the West Bank met their payments in 1993, when tax
revenues totalled some $90 million.
The Palestinian Authority has already run into difficulties collecting
taxes in Gaza and Jericho, and it has published appeals in recent weeks
urging tax payment as a national duty. Outside of Jericho, it has no
police powers in the West Bank, and the legal system there remains under
Israeli control.
“Taxes are the dowry of independence and the key to democracy,” said Atef
Alawneh, director general of the Palestinian finance department, at the
ceremony today in Ramallah.
“Nonpayment of taxes under occupation was a national struggle worthy of
praise,” he added. “Now it is 180 degrees different. Now delay in paying
means a delay in building the Palestinian state.”
Zuhdi Nashashibi, the finance minister in the Palestinian Authority, said
he was confident Palestinians would now “hurry to pay” their taxes.
Mr. Alawneh argued that collection by Palestinians would be more effective
because it would lack the coercion of military occupation, would extend to
places the Israelis were unable to reach because of security concerns, and
would create new revenue sources. The tax authorities will not use force,
he said, but will rely instead on friendly persuasion and public goodwill.
Remember what this sort of thing used to be like? You’d get yourself down to
the library, and then you’d look through each volume of the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or whatever,
one at a time, hoping that what you were looking for was among the things the
editors of that guide felt was worth indexing. Then with luck, some of what
you were looking for was available in bound volumes, microfilm, or microfiche
on-site (elsewise you could always try for inter-library loan, but that might
take a couple of weeks). In the case of the first, you could find it on the
shelves or ask the reference librarian, and then thumb through the pages, but
in the case of the latter two, you’d have to haul your film over to a reader
(one that wasn’t broken or occupied) and then spend five minutes or so just
trying to locate the pages you were interested in. Then, if it turned out to
be good, you’d have to scribble things down or drop in some coin for a
barely-legible photocopy.
The Green Zone: How a Greening Culture Cannot Ignore the Military.
The elephant in the room during the debate over the environment and climate change and what-have-you is U.S. militarism.
If “the largest source of pollution in the world is the military, particularly the military at war” then maybe environmentalists have something better to do than encourage people to change their lightbulbs.
Tax resistance by American fiscal conservatives against taxpayer-funded bailouts and deficit spending continues to be an idea that has yet to come, though a lot of folks are meekly hoping somebody else will get the ball rolling.
The latest of these ideas goes by the name “Operation Dep 9” and encourages folks to re-file their W-4 forms, claiming 9 allowances so as to reduce or eliminate federal income tax withholding (this is the same technique that many war tax resisters use).
China’s official Xinhua news agency said the local government’s plan to more strictly enforce payment of taxes from the furniture makers and dealers has been suspended in the face of the opposition.
China’s furniture industry has suffered in the global economic downturn from a decline in demand from export markets.
Thousands of similar protests over taxes, land disputes or corruption are reported in China each year.
I thought this was a neat find.
John Patric was a sort of paleocon version of Ammon Hennacy.
Disgusted at how the government was using his tax money, he decided to drop out of the tax-paying world and support himself by going on the road and selling his self-published book.
The following tale comes from a zine called Faith and Freedom that attracted American Christians of a libertarian bent half a century ago.
The zine’s editor, William Johnson, wrote this profile for the issue, at the time anticipating that it would be the first of many portraits of eccentrics in an ongoing “God’s Irregulars” column.
Through the front door of a restaurant in Atherton, Kansas, you see a vintage Lincoln stutter to a stop.
The driver, a pipe-smoking man, wears a bulky overcoat. as he takes a stool at the counter.
In no time he strikes up a lively conversation with the waitress.
His name is John Patric, Frying Pan Creek’s most irregular citizen.
The waitress looks at a book Patric has handed to her.
You can’t hear the conversation but she smiles, reaches into the pocket of her uniform and hands some bits of silver to the pleasant man in the large overcoat.
This is the way he sells Yankee Hobo in the Orient, authored, bound, published and sold by John Patric.
Who is he?
He is a man with a free spirit.
Where most men pursue fame or fortune, Patric through most of his life has pursued the warm personalities within individuals — the spark that sets them apart.
But just as energetically, he scratches and bites, punches and slugs with his literary ju-jitsu against the state’s herding of men into selfless flocks.
Patric’s spirit has escaped; he is one of the happy few.
He sees his life as an adventure, a prank now and then, but a great talent for wanting to be — and remaining — independent.
As far as I know, Pat is the only author in America who has met over fifty percent of his book-buying public — one at a time.
A highly inefficient way to distribute books you say?
After listening to Pat explain why, I’m not sure.
You see, Pat wants to reach a different market; one not touched by the conventional libertarian channels.
“I find I’m most effective when I shoot with a rifle; I hide my economics under the best book jacket I can buy, full of cheesecake and adventure.”
He once sold a Hobo to a Jewish laundryman in Paterson, New Jersey who had an addressographed copy of PM on his desk.
He went back with trepidation to get his little laundry bundle (he always splits up laundry into as many bundles as possible because he always sells Hobos in laundries) because he knew the laundryman would realize that the book was not quite what it seemed.
“To my astonishment,” Pat reports, “he bought a dozen more and would take no money for my laundry.
‘Ralph Ingersoll wouldn’t like your book,’ he said.
‘But I like it.
You are the first reactionary I ever met,’ he said, ‘who really believes in what he says, and has justification other than financial for believing in it.’
“I have big pockets in my clothes; so that I can carry about six Hobos with me, or twelve if I wear an overcoat.
I can, in a good small town, and in the course of errands that seem perfectly legitimate (and are, except that I extend their numbers by buying a meal in four restaurants — soup and a glass of milk in the first place; hot beef sandwich in the second; piece of cake in the third; ‘just coffee, please’ in the fourth).
I can sell about 35 Hobos in a day of hard work without seeming to have tried to sell any.
“Each Hobo will take about ten hours to read and, because the buyers have met the author and have an inscribed copy, they lend the book more than usual.
So I figure maybe that those 35 copies — that’s a top day — would account for 2,000 hours of human time; time in which the reader is exposed to my reactionary poison in doses not too long to interrupt the narrative too much.”
There is a quality about his book (a terrific tale of how one American saw the Orient as no other American has ever seen it) which lets him get away with injecting his philosophy in among such off-beat chapters as “Her Father Consented, in Writing,” and “Rumpin on the Road.”
A rumpin, by the way, is the label Pat gives to his self-portrait.
“I was a rumpin, an obscure nobody, a hapless tramp, a good-natured guy who would sleep in a pile of straw, or sitting up; who would eat anything he could get; who required no service; and who got about much of the time afoot, a misadventure in every mile.”
Should your curiosity by this time be nudging your pocketbook, you can order one book by writing Pat at Frying Pan Creek, Florence, Oregon and enclosing a dollar.
This wasn’t meant to be an advertisement for Pat’s book; I was merely tipping you off to order just one book the first time.
You will order more, I’m sure, but when you send in the quantity order, if it’s big enough, Pat will write you a personal letter; one which will tickle both your intellect and your funny bone.
A friend of mine asked Pat to contribute an article and Pat refused in a ten-page letter.
He explained: “Because I wrote you a three-page letter, you bought 13 extra Hobos.
Anytime you buy more Hobos, I’ll write you another letter, because then I won’t have to use the time to go around selling them.
Yesterday, the day I got your letter, I drove 50 miles or so, sold 17 paper and 2 cloth copies of the Hobo.
Today I shipped you 13; not so good as yesterday, but I haven’t driven 50 miles.
I drove one mile, to mail your books.
I sold a copy to a laundry (cloth) where I left a little bundle, and two (one each) at a hamburger stand where I ate lunch.
Breakfast was a jumbo-size can of Rancho Vegetable Soup, 19¢, and a cup of coffee.
Dinner was a quart of most excellent milk, and, later, a can of Maine Mussels, 12¢ plus coffee.
So, while I earned little today, I had little expense, and did a good many chores in my trailer.”
Refused To Be An Accomplice
Pat lives a spartan life because he rebels at government compulsion.
“I have a mania for making personal expenditures with penurious frugality, while spending rather lavishly on anything that is a deductible expense, to the end that I personally pay the absolute minimum to the federal government without falsifying my own return.”
Once Pat turned down a lucrative job because “earning that much would have increased my involuntary financing of the further destruction with tax money of American freedom by the government in Washington.”
In Hobo Years, a book yet to be published, Pat promises to tell us how, to keep from financing the ever-so-voracious government, he shall be living on Frying Pan Creek and its 160 acres on $500 a year.
His hobo budget-squeezing stood him in good stead for his trip to the Orient.
To accumulate money for passage and to fit himself for living as an oriental in the Far East, he slept in his car, ate cheap food, walked all he could instead of riding; gave up comfort completely — all to save twenty dollars a week.
He would have little respect for the social worker who pleads that the “underprivileged” cannot, without government aid, work out their own destiny.
Pat would rather sell the man-in-the-street one book than the man-in-the-board-room fifty.
He has cast his lot with the little guy.
“I have found all over the world that the simplest, poorest people are least chauvinistic until they have been swayed away from their friendliness by government propaganda.”
Freedom For Me — Not You?
Pat has always resented any reference to “the masses.”
“When I hear the term used by an intelligent man, I know he means that he is not one of them; that what’s good for the masses doesn’t apply to him.
If he thinks that way, then that man is my natural ideological enemy, however in agreement he may seem to be.
Anybody who’s got any ideas for me that don’t apply to him, or any ideas for his kind that aren’t applicable to mine, is highly suspect in my mind.”
Pat doesn’t go in much for pitching in with conservative organizations.
“I find myself on all kinds of mailing lists, all kinds of people with all kinds of projects, all wanting help and money.
I get mad at one outfit because it’s for freedom but argues for tariffs and against free trade.
Another organization sends me some good stuff sometimes but they’re always asking for contributions and besides their name is a misnomer.
They’re supposed to be for political freedom but one of their releases proposed to outlaw the Communist Party.
Yeah, freedom, if you think like we do!
Some gent starts the Ben Franklin Book Club and has selected Hobo for it, and wants some.
He sends me his prospectus, containing ‘Ben Franklin’s Famous Expose of the Jews.’
I write him where to go and that’s the end of the correspondence with him.
Gosh, I believe in freedom for Jews, too.”
Pat pins most of the responsibility for tyranny’s growth on those that say “Let’s fight all other subsidies, but let’s keep ours.”
Upon the banks of a creek where Pat went swimming as a boy near his home town of Snohomish, Washington, he and a friend own a farm together.
Pat reports that his friend wrote him that the government would give them about $100 worth of lime to improve their soil.
“He didn’t have the slightest realization that if we accepted this, we couldn’t then consistently oppose anything else the government was going to do for the other guy.”
“Pat Likes Women”
The hundred dollars wasn’t much but Pat is extra careful about the way he looks at money.
He believes that men who put money first are always grubbing for it, and find it always elusive.
“If you think first of perfection of workmanship and service to the customer, money comes automatically and you needn’t worry about it.”
A woman who has gone out with Pat a few times writes of him:
“Practically nothing. is a ‘side interest’ with Pat.
Anything that wins his interest commands his study and attention.
He is interested in law, for purposes of using it or circumventing it; he is interested in printing and bookbinding, for purposes of demanding a good job on his own books; he is interested in art work and engraving because he uses them in his books; he is interested in 1927 or 1929 (or some other year at least 25 years ago) Lincolns because he has one and he needs new parts for it now and then.”
“Pat likes women, has had a lot of experience with them, and has even been in love once or twice.
He is always interested in getting a woman’s ‘story’ and is always sure he knows just what she needs — him!
At least temporarily, for the pattern of his life has so far not really had room for a permanent feminine alliance in it.
He counts on his charm and wit, his eccentricity and his reputation as an author to advance his suit — not elaborate dinners and high-priced entertainment.”
Because Pat has reduced his love of money to such a low level, he feels he has reached a relatively high state of independence: Pat has arranged his life in such fashion that he doesn’t punch a time clock, isn’t tied to a desk, doesn’t worry about a pay check, and doesn’t have to stew about getting somewhere on time.
Editors and publishers got to restricting his freedom, so he pulled out, resolved to write for only Publisher Patric and to publish for only Salesman Patric.
In one of his asides in Hobo he says: “That’s the nicest thing about a book — you can interrupt anywhere to say any gosh-darn thing you please, without having some stuffed shirt editor chop out something which he is sure the readers won’t like because he doesn’t.”
His insight into personal independence helps explain Pat’s theory as to why individualists don’t make much of a show in church politics.
“I see the left-wingers invading this field because the right-wingers are too busy working, solving their own problems and paying taxes to give them much opposition.
The folk who attend the meetings are always — or at least they tend to be — the ‘let George help us organize’ type of folk.
They want group action; that’s why they attend.
Men who don’t want group action but do things individually are too busy for such foolishness.
The danger is that the unthinking public will assume from the newspaper stories that to be a good Christian nowadays you have to be a leftist.”
Repairmen Will Gyp You
The best thing Pat’s father taught him: “If I learned to like work, I could choose for myself what work to do, and that I could earn more than fellows who didn’t like to work.”
Though Pat flunked English in school because he could never learn the rules of grammar, he is a top-notch reporter.
Remember his Reader’s Digest series (with Roger Riis and Lioy May) entitled Repairmen Will Gyp You If You Don’t Watch Out? (Pat inserts a note in Hobo when he mentions the series: “If we cannot always trust humble mechanics among our own countrymen to tell the truth, can we trust our politicians — whose profession is more devious — to tell us the truth about the events leading up to war?”)
Benefits For Camp Followers
Pat’s first rebellion against authority rose against the social-register behavior imposed upon him by his mother.
He didn’t kick or talk back; he took his wagon, put a sign, “John Patric — Junk Dealer” on it, and went about the whole community gathering people’s refuse from back alleys.
Some of his best prose pours out when he warns against government’s authority.
Example: “Government may benefit in the end only its camp followers, their numbers always growing.
Yet it takes ever heavier tithes from humble folk who confuse eloquence with truth, profession with honor and magnificence with merit.
This it does until at last, more honored than ever, secure-seeming behind its bastions of bronze and granite and marble, its pronouncements of its own holiness and selfless good, it decays unhurried, but decays so thoroughly that when at last it falls, men wonder how it stood so long.”
He likes to quote Don Marquis’ archie: “If you are a tyrant you can arrange things so that most of the trouble happens to other people.”
Pat found time in Hobo to reflect upon the plight of a Chinese coolie (who Pat believed to be intrinsically smarter than himself): “Had I been the Chinaman, he the American, I should have been pulling him, and doing a poorer job.
By what triumphant human justice was the American riding, and the Chinese pulling?
Well, my forebears and I had lived for a time under the weakest government the world had ever known.
We had been free.
His people had not for centuries been free.
That’s what relative freedom from government had meant to me, and that’s what the government with all its ‘laws for the good of the people’ had meant, in the end [for him].”
What does Pat believe the individual can do against government’s onslaughts?
Not much, really.
“Reduce by whatever peaceful means a man’s ingenuity may devise, the power of government — any government — to tell him what to do.”
But there seems little limit to John Patric’s ingenuity.
These are my favorite stories about his off-beat one-man rebellions.
This first one really can’t be labeled as a rebellion against government — but I like it because it shows off his inventive mind.
It happened during the presidential campaign.
Pat found himself rooting for Wendell Wilkie.
In New York, at the time, Pat noted the large number of Westchester County station-wagons sporting Wilkie stickers.
The stickers surrounded by shiny new automobiles, thought Pat, would be building protest votes for Roosevelt.
As a countermeasure, he filled his pockets full of the largest Roosevelt buttons he could find.
Then he headed for the Bowery.
He pinned a Roosevelt button on every bum he found lying in the gutter.
A Postmaster Threatened Him
The Post Office has been one of Pat’s chief adversaries.
It takes all of his resourcefulness to stay in the hair of this unfriendly monster.
Pat’s words here are better than mine.
“The other day I got a letter from the San Francisco postmaster, advising me that he had sent me a money order for $8.77 instead of the $3.77 to which I was entitled.
For years and years I have had to conduct all my business with the wholly monopolistic post office in their way; this was my first chance to handle a matter my way.
“So, I thought back on every squawk I’ve ever had about government-in-business, and I decided that, within the framework of an avowed effort to ‘handle the matter in the approved bureaucratic manner,’ to refund the $5 with just as much correspondence, just as many words, just as many individual reports, just as much expense, as I could possibly put into it.
The result was a series of four letters to the postmaster in San Francisco.
The first was a single page; the second was four pages; the third, five pages; the fourth and last, six pages.
It is, I believe, or so it was intended to be, redundantly self-explanatory ad nauseam.
I wound up by refunding 29¢ out of the $5.
“Apparently, without having realized it, I hit upon something that strikes a chord in the mind of most anyone who has ever had any dealings with the government.
Even at the Registry window of the post-office, where I anticipated a most hostile reception, they said, ‘You are closer to being right than you think you are.
You can have no idea of all the red tape we have to go through on even the slightest matters.
It must cost a terrific lot of money.’[”]
In past years, Pat has originated several unusual envelope devices.
One was a rubber stamp which imprinted a message on an envelope pointing to a row of six half-cent stamps.
(The six half-centers had to be hand-canceled for the canceling machine wouldn’t hit them all.)
The message, which Pat used a lot before the war, read: “Poor Richard’s Almanac is ‘anti-New Deal propaganda’; so the first Postmaster-General is demoted to little-used half-cent stamps.”
One postmaster called Pat into his private office, where he spread out some of the envelopes and, in a stern voice, said: “You don’t like the way things are being run?
There’s a federal penitentiary on McNeil’s Island you ought to know about.”
“Sir,” Pat said, “if you had called me in here for a gentlemanly conversation, that would have been different.
But it’s threats I get — so this visit ends right now”!
Out Pat started.
He called Pat back, apologized for the threat.
They had a friendly talk then.
Finally the Postmaster let down his hair and said he’d had the staff combing the rulebook to see if there was some way he couldn’t keep from handling mail so treated.
He couldn’t find one.
“Do Everything Thou Lovest To Do”
About ten hours each week, Pat devotes to striking blows for freedom — as he calls it.
“For instance, as I reach each congressional and many state legislative districts, I send postcards pleading for freedom — without any return address but postmarked as if from one of the legislator’s constituency.”
His inventiveness, of course, sometimes gets him into legal difficulties.
But he has a formula for this kind of trouble, too: “Be meek, act stupid, say ‘sir,’ and pretend a respect and — always — an awe that you do not ever feel.”
Should the extent of his involuntary servitude become too unbearable, Pat will be off for his Frying Pan Creek.
There on his 160-acre site amid game, fish and berries, Pat will contemplate the follies of man and the wisdom of God.
Should you ask him why, he may tell you the story about King Dabshelim and his search for wisdom.
Dabshelim summoned Bidpai, the wisest of men.
“Make an abridgment, a condensation of my library, selecting only that which is important for me to know.”
After forty years of grueling research, Bidpai condensed the contents of the King’s library.
Bidpai reported to the King: “Well, sire, your books on religion, philosophy, morals and ethics, all they say is this:
“ ‘Love nothing but that which is good; and then do everything thou lovest to do.
Think only that which is true, but speak not all that thou thinkest.’ ”
“But the rest?
The books on jurisprudence, planned economics, military strategy, sociology and political science?
What wisdom have you found in them?”
“All they say, sire, can be told in a word.
“And that word, Bidpai?
“ ‘Perhaps,’ sire.”
Michele Seven didn’t file her tax return in , not for ideological reasons, but due to some turbulence and disorder in her life.
The IRS caught up to her and sent her a letter claiming that she owed $640,000 and that they were looking to seize that much from her.
Well, that’s about ten times what she earned in .
The IRS got its figures by adding up all of her gains but not bothering to try to estimate her costs and losses.
She called up to find out what to do about it, and the IRS said, “just file your return.”
But the more she thought about it, the less she wanted to file.
She felt that by filing she’d be conceding a debt that she considered illegitimate, that it would be like certifying her own slavery.
I believe it’s my duty to resist laws that are unjust…
I know this is probably going to upset some, but I believe that Iraqis have a right to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well.
And the fact is that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people have been killed — paid for by United States tax dollars.
I am a Christian and I do believe that one day I’m going to stand before God.
And when I do, I really don’t want to say, “Well, God, I was so afraid to go to prison that I was willing to have babies aborted, people murdered…”
There are a bunch of new expansions to the various higher education-related tax credits and deductions in the United States.
Some of these may be helpful to folks who try to reduce or eliminate their federal income tax liability.
The IRS website has a good run-down of the details.
A pair of foes of the impending legislation had a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the history and use of tax resistance that I’m not used to seeing in protesters on the right-wing:
Here’s a partial transcript from where things get interesting (around 6:12):
Dave Ridley: Have you heard about this: I guess the IRS is going to be enforcing some of this possibly, and they’re going to be making you pay into [government-mandated health insurance].
Protester #1: Absolutely.
Dave Ridley: Will you do civil disobedience?
Are you up for it?
Are you willing to not…
Protester #1: Well, how do you do civil disobedience when they take it out of your check, when they take it out of a fine?
It’s confiscatory — we practiced that word earlier today — confiscatory taxes.
You don’t have a choice if you pay your taxes or not.
It’s taken out of your check, it’s a parking meter, it’s a fee, fine, or a tax on everything that happens behind the scenes.
The telephone tax was instituted during the war to pay for the war, and here we are 50 years later, we’re still paying for it — it’s one of the highest taxes we have on a percentage basis.
So [gesturing at fellow-protesters] I think this is civil disobedience.
I don’t know how you do civil disobedience out of confiscatorial taxes, when you don’t have them in your own possession to give.
If we did, then it’s a decision you can make.
Protester #2: Up your deductions [W4 allowances].
Change your deductions.
Protester #1: All right, there you go, she’s got an answer.
Protester #2: That’s civil disobedience.
Gandhi said that’s the fastest way to end a government, is to withhold the payment of taxes to it.
Protester #1: She’s absolutely right.
I’ve been reading stuff about the leading up to the [American] revolutionary war.
That’s exactly what they did against Britain.
They said, we’re not buying any goods against Britain, and anybody who buys them is going to be ostracized from the community.
And that’s what they did in local towns like Concord, Mass. And anybody who didn’t sign the pledge, people didn’t do business with them.
So they cut off Britain, they took off the life blood which was economic products and things like that, so… that’s… we have to think about that.
It’s fascinating to me to see this sort of lore starting to percolate through the American right-wing, and I’m curious to see whether or not it will emerge in actual tax resistance or whether it will remain mostly hypothetical.
Mother Jones: In , you renounced your American citizenship to be a full-time Brit.
Seems pretty extreme.
Terry Gilliam: Well, I don’t live there.
I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world.
Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.
The fact that Bush was there made it easier.
Mother Jones: Did you get any shit for your decision?
Terry Gilliam: Not really. It was very funny, ’cause you have to go down to the US Embassy and say, I want out, and then they counsel you and you go away for a month and think on it. And then you come back and they beg you to stay. Sorry!
Mother Jones: They counsel you?
What do they say?
Terry Gilliam: Oh nothing, just, “We’re great friends! We love your work! Oh, don’t leave us!” Sorry!
Mother Jones: Is it true that they limit your movement?
Terry Gilliam: Oh yes, I’m on probation.
I can’t be in America more than 30 days a year for 10 years.
And yes, Virginia, they really did
start newspaper articles with phrases like “An attractive woman newspaper
editor” (Rome News-Tribune,
):
Mary Cain, during her run for Louisiana governor
Woman Dares Court Fight on Social Security Tax
Summit,
Miss.,
— (AP), —
An attractive woman newspaper editor
refused to pay her social security tax, closed out her bank account and dared
Treasury Secretary Snyder to “pop your whip” and jail her.
“To force me to pay this outrageous demand you must either confiscate my
business or put me in prison,”
Mrs. Mary D. Cain,
editor and owner of the weekly Summit Sun, wrote
Snyder, “I hope you choose the latter course.”
“This is a test case in the matter of paying this thing,” she said. “Pop your
whip, Mr. Snyder. I am ready.”
Last year the government attached the bank accounts of a number of Texas
housewives who refused to pay social security on their domestic help.
Mrs. Cain announced that she had
closed her bank account, farmed out the task of printing her paper, and
released her husband from any obligation to pay either her own or the
newspaper’s debts.
Mrs. Cain’s 1,500 word letter to Snyder sounded a great deal like a playback
of the anti-New-Deal-Fair-Deal platform on which she stumped Mississippi last
summer as the state’s first woman candidate for governor.
Lately she has been mentioned as a possible candidate for congress or the
U.S. senate this
year. She has denied both reports.
Although she lost a battle that went to the Supreme Court [over her Social Security tax
resistance], the Government eventually dropped the case. The Social Security
program, she said, was “unconstitutional, immoral and un-American.”
Two revenue agents secured her weekly newspaper office in Summit with a
padlocked chain. Mrs. Cain sawed off the lock and chain and mailed them to
the Internal Revenue Department with a defiant note.
To frustrate the collectors she assigned her weekly paper,
Summit Sun to her niece, Mary Lou Butler, 20 years
old, but retained the authority of editor and manager, without pay.…
The government set a marshall to padlock the Summit
Sun…
Mrs. Cain sawed off the padlock and mailed it to the marshal. She repeated the
job for the benefit of newspaper, newsreel and television cameras. She made
her crime as flagrant as she could. She gloried and gloated. The violence
against the court’s padlock probably also made her guilty of deliberate,
defiant contempt of the federal district court, but still the Department of
Justice, like the Treasury, looked the other way.…
…She has received more than 7,000 letters and unsolicited donations of $700
for her legal expenses.…
The Treasury seizes the accounts of tax resisters who withheld from their tax returns the percentage of defense spending — The government does not recognize ideological objections as justifying a waiver
Jaime Prats,
Under the rallying cry of “No more VAT,” on began the “rebellion” that was launched by [Madrid President] Esperanza Aguirre against the tax increase agreed on by the government.
So far, the campaign has kept to the distribution of leaflets, the collection of signatures, and the holding of rallies.
“It’s a rebellion in the sense of putting up resistance, not in a military sense,” explained Aguirre.
And much less is it supposed to be an invitation to insubordination, as leaders rushed to announce when Aguirre called for rebellion.
“It’s a way to remove the shame in the system,” declared a resister.
They have seized 276 euros from Hugo, and they claim another 1,713.
Part of the protest consists in redirecting the funds to humanitarian NGOs.
“Taxes are a whole and cannot be cut up in pieces,” says one professor.
Resisters broadcast their acts; evaders hide them.
Anti-abortion movements have taken note of the tax rebellion.
Tax resistance is another thing, as Hugo Alcade and Jorge Güemes know, two Valencian antimilitarists whom the Treasury has prosecuted for having withheld from their tax returns a percentage equivalent to the defense budget, which is approximately 12%.
In Spain, sources from the Conscientious Objection Movement (MOC) calculate that there are some thousand people each year who protest against military spending in this way and who redirect to humanitarian organizations the money deducted from the tax agency.
“It’s a tool of civil disobedience, as was insubordination in the military in its time,” said Carlos Pérez, former resister and spokesperson for MOC from Valencia.
Beyond the moral arguments that may be behind this form of protest, it is a difficult matter to defend legally, for to the Treasury it is a fraud like any other.
Also, it raises other problems when justifying this practice.
What is the difference between this action and resisting taxes for health spending if you pay for your own health insurance?
Or for education if you enroll your children in private schools?
Where is the limit of this practice?
Some professors of the philosophy of law believe that the answer is in the difference in defending something related to the common good from protecting an individual interest.
The first approach, they argue, would have a moral justification.
The second would not.
“Tax resistance is a nonviolent way to remove the shame in the system,” said Jorge Güemes, 32. The surveyor got in contact with the antimilitarist campaign during conflict resolution workshops he attended as a member of the Boy Scouts of Valencia.
“They seemed to me to be just and easy claims to make.”
He started during the tax season.
“In the tax return, I crossed out one of them and scribbled in ‘for objection to military spending’ ” he says.
And the resulting share from the self-made deduction subtracted 12%, equivalent to the military spending in the Budget, which in this case showed a result of 210.43 euros that he redirected to Per L’Horta, an organization that defends the traditional rural landscape in the outskirts of Valencia.
A key part of the campaign consists in making the protest totally open.
So the motive for this particular deduction is not only reflected in the way the tax return is formulated.
In the documents sent to the tax agency, he also sent a letter in which he explained his reasons for objecting, and even sent a receipt for his payment to the NGOs to which the money was sent, “to make it clear that I don’t want to defraud.”
The probability that the Treasury notices the objection is very low.
There are those who have spent years practicing tax resistance and have never met with the government.
However, Jorge was caught immediately.
“They sent me a letter saying that I was wrong, and I replied to them that there was no error, that I had done exactly as I intended.”
There are some who receive notices from the Treasury refunding money.
Jorge who currently works with youth, began a long bureaucratic battle that is still on-going.
First in the arena of the tax administration, which ended with a defeat in the Regional Administrative Economic Tribunal of the Valencian Ministry of Economy and Finance, which dismissed his claims. After this defeat, the taxes, claims and judgments against, a seizure for 263 euros (the 210 original plus a fine of 53 euros), Jorge has not given up the fight.
Now, he is finalizing an appeal to the High Court of Justice of Valencia.
“I have been able to speak out,” he said.
“I continue to object.”
Hugo Alcalde, 38, joined active antimilitarism after the war in Iraq.
“I felt incredibly powerless to see how aggression was carried out so clearly in opposition to civil society,” and therefore came to the conclusion that, “it is more effective to fight against militarization than to stop an ongoing war.”
Hugo began to resist in his tax return, but got no notices from the tax agency until .
Then he received a notice that demanded 450.98 euros from his return.
As with Jorge, he decided to appeal and filed a claim.
The response that the Treasury had was to demand the outstanding amounts corresponding to the taxes for .
“It appears that with my claim they revisited all of my records and my returns that had not yet been audited.”
But the problems don’t end there.
Recently he received notice for the taxes from , “and I suppose that those from will not be far behind.”
From a professor from the institute of Valencia they have seized 276.73 euros by now, and between seizure orders and payments due, interest, and penalties, the Treasury has asks for another 1,713.99 euros.
In total, the debt reaches 1,990.72 euros.
And despite this, he has decided to stand firm until the end.
He has drawn on the five counter-arguments that he has sent to the Treasury: “More than anything I do it for the symbolic character of the protest,” he said.
“Yet I hope to unify all of the processes into one, because otherwise it will be a mess.”
“In the worst case, there will be no choice but to pay the money and charges.
But, despite the fines or the inconvenience of the taxes it is much more comfortable than to spend two years, four months, and a day in jail, as did those condemned for insubordination who abandoned the barracks,” he explained.
Among the arguments put forward to reject the devices of the tax resisters, the Treasury refers to the military and tax obligations of the Spanish.
Alongside conscientious objection, “is also a fundamental right to the defense of the state, which is not only a right but also a duty.”
On the other hand, it points out that the tax obligations are drawn up by “principles of equality and progressivity, according to the economic capacity” of citizens, “not the state of the social conscience of an individual at some particular moment.”
For this reason, to the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the attitude of Jorge, Hugo, and the rest of the war tax resisters is the same as that of any other person who engages in tax fraud.
“There do not exist any mitigating factors in the law to argue for ideological or conscientious reasons that justify a waiver from the tax agency,” the department pointed out.
In any case, it is not considered tax fraud.
For this, it would be necessary that the money not declared would be more than 120,000 euros.
Additionally, there must be bad intent, “for example, to create a structure designed to hide assets,” the same sources said.
Javier de Lucas, professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Valencia, warned a few years ago of the difficulty of justifying this behavior before the Treasury.
De Lucas, who collaborated with the Conscientious Objection Movement, analyzed together with tax experts the possible mechanisms that could be used to support this form of defense, and did not find any.
“Taxes are considered as a whole, and cannot be separated by personal criteria,” he insists.
“It is not clear that a person has the power to decide in what way to make an exception and up to what point one can take this behavior, for example, to health or education.”
Because of all of this, he came to the conclusion that the approach was “technically indefensible.”
The arguments of the Treasury
Defense of the State: In a filing against the resisters, the Ministry of Finance argued that conscientious objection “appears as a fundamental individual right alongside the defense of the State, which is not only a right but also a duty of Spaniards, in Article 30 of the Constitution.”
It also argues that [legal] objection “relates only to the personal obligation of rendering military service (given the extraordinary nature of the armed forces).
Tax Reasons: “Like the obligations of the Spanish in relation to Defense established in Article 30 of the Constitution, taxes are according to the principles of equality and progressivity and according to one’s economic capacity, and not according to the state of the social conscience of the individual at any particular moment, in Article 31.” In the written report of the General Secretary of the Treasury, was added that this Article “in no way authorized deduction, with a claim of a supposed personal conviction, however respectable, a particular quantity of Personal Income Tax or any other tax.”
“I think that the difference is the moral attitude,” suggested Francisco Fernández Buey, professor of ethics and political philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University.
Fernández Buey was one of the first tax resisters in Spain, back in the 1980s, and also then suffered persecution on the part of the Treasury.
“I came to empty the account before they seized it.
I kept the money at home, among the pages of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Kapital,” he recalled gleefully.
The distinguishing feature, according to Fernández Buey, is that it is not comparable to defend approaches “considered acceptable for achieving a more just and beneficial society for the collective good, that would have a moral justification,” with others that only seek “personal interest.”
For example, to stop paying for a public service with the excuse that one has no use for it.
Aside from this problem, Javier de Lucas does consider that there exists a safeguard that serves to differentiate the practice of the resisters from the tax evaders.
“To demonstrate that the money is not withheld from the public interest, it was redirected to other general purposes.
Therefore it is important to account for the percentage of income that is redirected to NGOs.”
There is another, more fundamental question that consists of presenting an idea of defense that is separate from the military.
It is that which Hugo Alcade defines as “human security,” one of the ideas promotes the UN focus on protection and the basic necessities of human beings, contrasted with the conventional meaning of military security.
In the face of this, the Treasury refers to the basic concept of the “military obligations of the Spanish.”
For José Antonio Estévez Araujo, also a professor of the philosophy of law, the legal case against the Treasury is not a significant part of the conduct that is situated centrally in the context of civil disobedience and that, essentially, involves breaking the law.
This type of “symbolic” protest is that which fundamentally intends to “generate controversy.”
And here is, according to this professor at the University of Barcelona, the characteristic that distinguishes tax resistance from acts of crime or of mere convenience.
In contrast with tax evasion, for example, in which the objective is to hide the fraud, tax resisters above all want to publicize their acts: “They seek publicity, controversy, and to open a public debate.”
Therefore, to Estévez Araújo, the behavior of these young antimilitarists is not a case of conscientious objection but of civil disobedience.
“It is not intended to have the right not to comply with an obligation [in this case to entirely pay the taxes], but to debate the issues they raise.”
This professor of philosophy emphasizes the importance of civil disobedience as a means of vindication.
“In Spain we would have the example of the squatters, who are considered civil disobedients, or the more recent Palestinian activist Aminetu Haidar, in the protest campaign she carried out in Lanzarote.”
This formula, which has actively supported the World Social Forum, perhaps has its greatest exponent in the movement of landless workers in Brazil.
“The Constitution of provides that for a land reform that has not been carried out,” he says.
“There are groups of peasants who occupy land, which is an illegal activity,” although fundamentally they count on the approval of the constitutional spirit.
“For this reason, there are even judges who have ruled in their favor.”
Tax resistance is not a method exploited only by left-leaning groups.
The professor Francisco Fernández Buey notes the campaign that was carried out for decades in Sweeden as a form of protest against the country’s high tax burden.
Or more recently, in Venezuela, by the opposition to Hugo Chávez.
In Spain, the most clear example is the campaign that anti-abortion movements encourage.
The proposal consists in withholding taxes equivalent to the percentage of public spending destined to the practice of abortion and to redirect this money to organizations that call themselves pro-life.
“This would have been very striking at other times,” reflected Fernández Buey.
This professor of ethics and political philosophy stresses the paradox that supposes that these right wing positions have migrated from “defending law and order, to advocating behavior of this sort,” with, for example, the anti-abortion campaign.
Some attitudes that could be defined, this time certainly, as a clear invitation to rebellion, in this case tax rebellion.
I get bent when I see the attitude of “tax resistance is conscientious and good when I do it, but when those uncouth people over there do it, there’s something wrong with it.”
That said, it’s an interesting article, and shows that there are strong similarities between the war tax resistance movement (and its critics) in the United States and in Spain.
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.
Copperhead Refuses To Help Pay Harry’s Traveling Expenses
I have a letter from a typical Copperhead, in the late Roosevelt’s meaning of
the term, who reveals a determination quite un-American, according to the
same lexicon, not to pay her just share of President Truman’s $50,000,
tax-free increase in pay disguised as an expense account, nor her fair
portion of the cost of his recent nonpolitical visit to the far-flung haunts
of the Faceless Man. I trust that the treasury and department of justice will
send her to prison that the majesty of law and justice shall not be mocked.
“Faceless Man” was a favorite Peglerism, though it’s not always clear to me
what he meant by it. It may have just meant how an individual person looks
faceless when seen merely as a unit in a mass — a member of a demographic, or
a voting bloc, or “the workers,” or some such. In the context of taxation, it
may have been something similar to
“The Forgotten Man” of William Graham Sumner.
Pegler goes on to quote from the letter, in which the writer complains of
how her husband was treated. Her husband worked for the telephone company for
30 years, dying in after a long and
expensive battle with cancer. She received one year of his salary from his
company as a death benefit, and was outraged when the commissioner of internal
revenue later decreed this benefit to be taxable income. By this time, the
money had been spent on medical and funeral bills, and she was living on (and
supporting her elderly mother on) her husband’s life insurance.
Asked of her reaction to the commissioner’s ruling, she writes: “I said: ‘You
can tell them I will never pay. I will take the whole matter to Mr. Pegler.’ ”
Pegler’s sarcastic response:
Let me hasten to wash my hands of this sordid cause. I do not know this
Fascist-minded evangel of greed and civic anarchy. I do not endorse her
reluctance to contribute to Mr. Truman’s $50,000 tax-free raise and the cost
of his barnstorming trip in the interests of the Democratic party. I don’t
want no trouble with no tax collectors.
“On , I filed the income tax form.
I will never pay the tax. I will go to jail before I will pay.”
I shall try to learn the outcome of this rash defiance of our laws and report
this offender’s progress toward prison.
Pegler brought up this new $50,000 travel allowance for the president many
times in his breathlessly outraged columns, though today this outrage sounds
quaint. For example, a single trip that President Bush took “to mix with
ordinary folk, sample traditional fish and chips, and enjoy a kitchen-table
chat at the constituency home of his friend and ally, Tony Blair” cost $2.3
million — or, in 1950 dollars, over six times Truman’s extravagant new annual
travel allowance.
Here are some items of note that have come to my attention in recent weeks:
I wondered if this might happen: One of the weirder aspects of Obamacare is that the individual health insurance mandate is to be enforced by adding a penalty to the income tax of any individual who fails to get health insurance — but for public relations reasons the IRS is forbidden to use its usual methods of liens, levies, seizures, and the like to chase down this penalty if the taxpayer refuses to pay it.
So now, Obamacare foes are starting to whisper about this cheap-and-easy civil disobedience opportunity.
Though “whisper” isn’t really the right word when you’re talking about Rush Limbaugh.
Are Cryptocurrencies [like Bitcoin] “Super” Tax Havens? asks Omri Y. Marian of the University of Florida.
Marian concludes: “Significantly, cryptocurrencies possess all the traditional characteristics that tax havens do; Earnings are not subject to taxation, and taxpayers’ anonymity is maintained.… Thus, cryptocurrencies have the potential of defeating the recent successes of governments in battling offshore tax evasion.… while governments have paid some attention to this issue, they have so far failed to identify the acuteness of the potential problem.”
Among the things the so-called government “shutdown” brought us was a halt in almost all IRS levies and liens for the duration.
The agency had plenty on its plate before the shutdown, and now it’s already behind in regearing for tax season.
France enacted a populist measure to throw a 75% marginal tax on incomes above €1 million.
Professional soccer teams, whose players may earn large annual incomes but usually over a short viable career, have decided to protest by going on temporary strike, effectively eliminating a round of matches this year — the first time teams have done anything of this sort .
Although American Conservatives are more likely to complain about taxes than the leftish sorts, it’s pretty rare to see them go beyond complaining and on to resisting.
(Unless you count the sovereign-citizen True Constitutionalist types, but to me they seem a whole other kettle of fish.)
But here’s an example from :
YAF Refuses to Pay Tax
Little Rock (AP) — Alan Leveritt, state chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom, said the YAF would refuse to pay a city privilege tax for publishing its newspaper, Essence, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Leveritt said the annual $70 privilege tax on weekly and monthly newspaper publishers would force Essence and other small independent newspapers out of business.
He said he thought the tax also infringed on the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
“We feel it is necessary for the financially weak, independent presses, left and right, to stand together in resistance to this repressive tax or face inevitable extinction,” Leveritt said in a prepared statement.
Leveritt called the constitutionality of the privilege tax system itself highly questionable.
The YAF was pretty much a red-white-and-blue right-wing outfit by this time.
They had a libertarian wing at one point, but it was largely purged in .
A prominent U.S. conservative author is coming out with a new book that calls for civil disobedience.
The author, Charles Murray, says that the trend in government is always to make ever more regulations, and only rarely do these rules get loosened or revoked.
The result is that our lives are choking on red tape.
We’re restrained from innovation and entrepreneurship by the justified fear that we’ll stumble over some overlooked law and get taken down by some zealous bureaucrat.
The answer, Murray suggests, is for citizens to effectively nullify these regulations through mass non-compliance backed by mutual insurance plans to protect us against targeted government reprisals.
This, he says, would soon make those regulations null and void.
The civil disobedience + mutual insurance combination resembles what some
U.S. war tax
resisters do with their tax refusal + the
War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
It is nice to see civil disobedience getting a respectful hearing in
conservative circles, and I look forward to a time when the incessant gripes
about taxation on the right start getting accompanied by some actual refusal.
“I’m not talking about inciting violence. I’m saying, ‘If Trump loses, man,
game on, grab your musket. We’re going to protest. We’re going to boycott.
We’re going to picket. We’re going to march on Washington. We’re going to stop
paying taxes. We’re going to practice civil disobedience.’ Whatever it takes.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of brave social media pledges of tax resistance from
both Clinton & Trump supporters, conditioned of course on the defeat of
their chosen candidate. Most of it is just people worked up to a lather and
saying any old thing that comes into their heads. But it may be planting seeds
in some other minds, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if something comes of it.
Some recent links of note:
NWTRCC kicked off this year’s federal tax filing season with a panel consisting of the experienced war tax resisters Kathy Kelly, Sam Yerger, Erica Leigh, Charlie Hurst, and Maria Smith, who explained their approaches to resistance and took questions from a live audience.
You can view a video of the panel and the Q&A here.
[S]uppose… that the governor of a state like Texas or Florida were to say: Citizens of this state should not pay federal taxes this year, and our state will indemnify its citizens against federal prosecution. In other words, the state would assume the federal tax bill for its own citizens, and declare it null and void.
Meanwhile, one of the more unhinged Trumperists decided it would be a good idea to publicly tweet an increasingly violent series of fantasies including threatening the life of a traffic cop, killing Nancy Pelosi, running over “a million people” in a speeding car, and… bombing the IRS headquarters.
That last bit got him indicted on federal charges.
TIGTA has released another report on the federal government’s use of private debt collection companies to pursue unpaid taxes.
The report says that the companies recovered a mere 1.79% of the unpaid taxes they were assigned, and that more than a third of the money collected went to cover costs and profit for the private companies, with the remainder going to the Treasury.
The National Taxpayer Advocate also released its report recently.
It highlights some of the many problems the IRS had to cope with and/or exacerbate during the year of pandemic shutdowns and greater-than-usual government dysfunction.
For example:
Taxpayers got misleading tax notices that included deadlines to respond that had already passed by the time the notice was sent.
People who tried to call the IRS were able to get through to an agency employee less than 25% of the time.
Taxpayer records are processed on “the oldest major IT systems in the federal government,” but Congress has appropriated only about 8¼% of the estimated cost of updating them.
Hey, what do you know?
Another tax strike is brewing in South Kivu.
This strike, which is scheduled to start in , is meant to pressure the government to repair roads and bridges in the region.
