How you can resist funding the government → other tax resistance strategies → frugality / simple living / self-sufficiency

And now to give an overdue “thanks” to my dad. My pop is the youngest child of a divorced mother, and he grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression. I, as his son, growing up in a two-income, two-child family in the more affluent 70s and 80s, had little patience for the well-learned frugal instincts of my father. His “leftover surprise” combinations were (and sometimes still are) jokes between me and my brother; his willingness to find the edible core of the furry remains of some former food in the fridge alarmed and disgusted us; the way he would save and reuse things that were so clearly disposable was embarrassing for reasons I didn’t identify until much later as class self-consciousness.

Now I’m learning for myself that frugality is a virtue and I’m happily learning also that in all those years of embarrassment and amusement I was yet learning by my father’s example — at least some of his instincts have passed down from father to son. Thanks, Dad!

“How can you possibly live on $15,000 a year,” says someone who lives on $40,000 a year. “How can you possibly ask that question,” says someone who lives on $800 a year.

Why do people have such a wide range of values for how much money they think is necessary to get by on? A couple of days ago, PNC Bank released some results from a survey they’d done of “America’s wealthiest individuals” (“792 affluent American adults, including nearly 500 high net worth individuals with more than $1 million in investable assets”):

• Fewer than half (46 percent) of survey respondents say that they have become happier as they have accumulated more money. Nearly one third (29 percent) of respondents with more than $10 million in investable assets agree that having a lot of money brings more problems than it solves, and 33 percent agree that having enough money is a constant worry in their life.…
• While having money today makes life less stressful, increased longevity has created new anxieties about financial security in the future. Approximately one in five (19 percent) respondents with $10 million in investable assets and 21 percent of those with assets from $1 million to $4.9 million worry that they will not have enough money to support the lifestyle they want to have in retirement.
• When asked how much they needed to feel financially secure in the future, respondents consistently cited a need to approximately double their current level of assets. Those with $10 million or more felt they needed a median of $18.1 million; those with $5 million or more needed $10.4 million, and those with a half million to $1 million said they needed $2.4 million.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The Washington Post has a rare article on common-sense frugality: “Javanomics 101”

It features a student, Kirsten Daniels, who is putting herself through school on student loans “that left her $115,000 in debt… which she will take a decade to repay with interest.” Daniels is studying hard, in Starbucks, with a three-dollar coffee.

According to the helpful Save and Surf when you stop buying Coffee! calculator, Kirsten’s three-dollar-a-day Starbucks-on-credit habit is going to end up costing thousands of dollars by the time she pays it off (compared to what she would have spent making her own coffee at home).

Oxford grad Hugh Sawyer gets up at six in the morning to get suited-up and ready for his job at Sotheby’s in London. After work, he heads off to the gym or for drinks with some of his chums. Then he heads home, under a tarp in a ditch in the woods.

The 32-year-old has given up every luxury to spend a year living outdoors. He hopes to prove he can lead a full and fun life with a fraction of his normal comforts.

“I want to make people think about how much they consume that is not necessary,” said Sawyer, who has been living in the woods near the village of Lewknor, Oxfordshire, since June. “I am trying to prove it is possible to do everything you normally do, maintaining a full existence, while cutting back. I have realised I can lead my life without television, carpets, sofa, electricity, chairs, tables, a fridge and a freezer.”

Also like Thoreau, Sawyer has a blog.

Here are a couple of new links for the frugality set:

• Oolsi: “We believe everything should be free! This site will keep track of websites and tools that share this philosophy and look at freeware in other aspects of life — i.e. saving money, living cheaply, making things yourself, and self learning.”
• Wendy McElroy’s new discussion forum has a section on economy, business, personal finance, and frugality.

I followed a fortunate link a couple of days back and found myself at a hypertext version of the book Possum Living: How to live well without a job and with (almost) no money. Dolly Freed was 19 when she wrote the book, based on her and her father’s experiences living on the cheap. It’s some unusually wise reasoning on the front-end, and some good practical advice on ways to make ends meet on the other.

We can afford to be lazy because we satisfy our material needs with little effort and little money. Of course, you know that money doesn’t buy only goods and services, it also buys prestige and status. Being somewhat egocentric, we don’t feel the need to buy prestige or status. The neat trick that Diogenes pulled was to turn the tables on those of his contemporaries who believed that “Life is a game and money is how you keep score.” He didn’t keep score. We don’t keep score. You needn’t keep score either if you don’t want to. It’s entirely up to you.

A group calling itself “Free Range Activism” has put on-line some good, practical guides on everything from using rechargeable batteries and low-energy light bulbs, to setting up bulk purchasing co-ops, to growing your own food and baking your own bread, to the legal ramifications of protesting in the United Kingdom.

Donna Freedman, whose “poor like me” journalism I mentioned last weekend has another article on Living “poor” and loving it.

Being poor is what my dad would call a “useful life skill.” (He used this phrase when he wanted us to carry cinder blocks or weed the tomato patch.) And I happen to believe it’s a life skill that plenty of Americans could use, saddled as they are with credit card debt, college loan debt and mortgage debt. Being “poor” for a while — that is, making a conscious choice to manage money differently — would be good for them.

A garden of miscellany:

• Christina Cowger of “North Carolina Stop Torture Now” talks about the various ways her group is fighting at the grass-roots level to expose and fight the domestic enablers of the “extraordinary rendition” program — from Air America-like front companies like “Aero Contractors” to subsidiaries of Boeing.
• Reuters reports that the Democrats in the House of Representatives plan to see Dubya’s $93 billion supplemental request for war funding, and then raise him $5 billion in additional military spending. And then, they’ll get to put frosting on top.
• Speaking of pork… where do you think all that “Homeland Security” spending has been going?
• Thanks to MetaFilter: Some links on “Possum Living”: “How To Live Well Without a Job… building a $100 Log Cabin… a geodesic dome out of cardboard… handbook for cob building… cheap solar power system… stocking up on food…” and more.
• A “white powdery substance” in an envelope shut down the IRS mail room in Fresno last month. And a Connecticut tax collector was run over by a vehicle he was trying to impound.
• The Coalition to Get the Stop Funding the War Coalition to Stop Funding the War put out a press release: “We have had enough of waiting around for politicians to take action. If those of us in the peace movement use our own power instead of begging officials to use theirs, we might actually stop this war and prevent the next one too. It’s way past time for those of us who say we stand for peace to put our money where our mouths are. Don’t pretend you can oppose the war with your rhetoric while you’re paying for it with every paycheck. The power of the purse begins with us — let’s cut the war funding at the source.”
• And, surprise, surprise, many of the people who don’t pay their taxes in the United States are the same people who get their paychecks from the federal government. “Nearly half a million current and former U.S. federal employees have not filed tax returns. Collectively, they owe almost $3 billion.”
• The New York Times has seen the new BBC America series Robin Hood and declares it Tax Policy Decreed by Merry Men in Tights.

I’m a sucker for stories of people who try to take their radical convictions to their logical conclusions. Here are some folks who are walking the talk, and in doing so, marking off paths that the rest of us may find useful:

• No Impact Man — A Guilty Liberal Finally Snaps, Swears Off Plastic, Goes Organic, Becomes A Bicycle Nut, Turns Off His Power, Composts His Poop and, While Living In New York City, Generally Turns Into a Tree-Hugging Lunatic Who Tries to Save the Polar Bears and The Rest of the Planet from Environmental Catastrophe While Dragging His Baby Daughter and Prada-Wearing, Four Seasons-Loving Wife Along for the Ride.
• 100 Mile Diet — Local Eating For Global Change (see also today’s review in Reason of the book associated with this site.)

I wrote a guest article for the Frugal For Life blog on Frugal Living as a Form of Tax Resistance:

Since I adopted a frugal lifestyle five years ago, of all the dumb, harmful, and worthless things I don’t miss wasting my money on, I don’t miss the war in Iraq the most.

When the invasion of Iraq started, I quit my job and deliberately reduced my income to the point where I no longer owe federal income tax. I transformed my life, concentrating on what really matters, so that I can live within my means without paying this tax — honestly, peacefully, and legally.

American households have, on average, spent more than $4,500 apiece on the Iraq war so far — that doesn’t count the expenses we’ll continue to be racking up for veterans’ care and the cost of the ongoing occupation. And that’s just the extra costs of that war above and beyond what we spend to keep the world’s most gargantuan military going year after year (another $6,800 per year per household).

By and large, these households spend this money whether they want to or not because they don’t think we have a choice. At most, they grumble about “death and taxes” and wish the politicians were nobler and wiser while they watch their paychecks get whittled down by the IRS.

The times call for more than complaining and wishful thinking. We have to put as much of our effort as we can on the side of our values, instead of allowing so much of our effort to be stolen by the tax collector and used to promote the values of politicians and the military/industrial complex.

As it says in Your Money Or Your Life, “when we go to our jobs we are trading our life energy for money.” When we pay taxes, the government takes our life energy from us. If you live frugally on a low income, the IRS takes less from you — so you can dedicate more to your own priorities.

About two-in-five American households already live “under the tax line” and pay no federal income tax at all. Opponents of the Iraq war, and other people who know they can spend their money more wisely and justly than the government does, would be wise to ask if they should endeavor to become part of this two-in-five.

There’s a long history of frugality being used by groups opposed to government policy — including the American “Founding Fathers.” During the first Continental Congress in 1774, John Adams wrote home to his wife, “Frugality, my Dear, Frugality, Œconomy, Parsimony must be our Refuge. I hope the Ladies are every day diminishing their ornaments, and the Gentlemen too. Let us Eat Potatoes and drink Water. Let us wear Canvass, and undressed Sheepskins, rather than submit to the unrighteous, and ignominious Domination that is prepared for Us.”

Even if it’s not time for another American Revolution just yet, it’s certainly time for more Americans to put their money, and their life energy, where their hearts are.

Comments to the post have ranged from interested to indignant, which is a good sign that my argument reached beyond the choir.

Some bits and pieces from here and there…

• They’re still trying to refine the Milgram Experiment after all these years, and they’re still teasing new insights out of it, including this unsurprising nugget: “the author interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped [administering the shocks as they were told to] generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable.”
• The question is not “why do you obey” but “why do you support” says Arthur Silber at Once Upon a Time…. He’s trying to untangle the tangled concepts of obedience and support when it comes to adults and political matters. He quotes Hannah Arendt on this topic as writing:

  In our context, all that matters is the insight that no man, however strong, can ever accomplish anything, good or bad, without the help of others. What you have here is the notion of an equality which accounts for a “leader” who is never more than primus inter pares, the first among his peers. Those who seem to obey him actually support him and his enterprise; without such “obedience” he would be helpless, whereas in the nursery or under conditions of slavery — the two spheres in which the notion of obedience made sense and from which it was then transposed into political matters — it is the child or the slave who becomes helpless if he refuses to “cooperate.” Even in a strictly bureaucratic organization, with its fixed hierarchical order, it would make much more sense to look upon the functioning of the “cogs” and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors. If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionaries and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent.

  In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life under a dictatorship are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of “responsibility” where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act “irresponsibly” and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance — for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience — which are being discovered in our century. The reason, however, that we can hold these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child.

  Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, “Why did you obey?” but “Why did you support?” This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere “words” have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word “obedience” from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.

• Philip Brewer at Wise Bread puts it all together in a blog post that summarizes what he’s been trying to get across with his many writings on simplified, deliberate, meaningful, abundant living. If you don’t find something fantastic there, I’ll be surprised.
• Francois Tremblay writes about a society based on love at Check Your Premises. It’s hard to summarize, so I’ll just invite you to take a look. Though the title sounds like it ought to be on the cover of some flimsy tract over a kitschy painting of lions and lambs frolicking with children in tunics, the contents are thought-provoking.

People who want to get a better handle on their financial well-being often find that the lessons you can pick up in the book Your Money or Your Life are just what they need.

There are a couple of new (or new to me anyway) on-line resources associated with the book and its program:

• Financial Integrity — a wiki at which people can share their experiences and insights
• Your Money or Your Life the blog

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov, who drafted the Vyborg Manifesto in which the exiled Russian Duma urged Russians to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.

In other news… Boing Boing shares a short video documentary about urban foragers in Chicago and the sorts of wildish plants they find growing where the asphalt has yet to reach.

And Charles Hugh Smith suggests “voluntary poverty” as a hot upcoming trend. By this he means merely deciding to work less and earn less — not actual poverty poverty.

And Don Bacon continues his series on the coming Democrat-led beefing-up of the U.S. military, this time looking at how counter-recruitment might interfere with these plans.

Some bits-and-pieces from here-and-there:

• My talk at The Abundance League on “Discovering An Abundant Life” has been reprinted in the latest issue of Simple Living News.
• “Anarch.me is a community of individuals who volunteer their time and talent to promote a voluntary society. We invite you to join us.” It seems to be quickly attracting some of the better talent in the on-line voluntaryist / left libertarian / agorist circles.
• The Marina-Huerta Educational Foundation caught my eye. It “is dedicated to exploring various aspects of a sustainable lifestyle. This encompasses affordable, appropriate, intermediate technologies in a number of areas, such as housing, energy, wastes, foods, and education, in both the developed and less developed world.” According to William Marina, the project takes inspiration from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and hopes to plant the seeds of little self-sufficient “Galt’s Gulch”es all around the world. They’re currently working on a prototype in Guatemala:

  We would suggest that the State has the means today, and did at the time that Atlas Shrugged was written, to seek out and destroy any “secret” community such as Galt’s Gulch. What the State cannot do however, either in this country or in other nations such as Guatemala, where we recently completed a community center which will be at the center of a new village eventually housing 800 families, is to prevent individuals from building the kind of houses we suggest, along with new sources of decentralized energy, using the Sun and wind to develop Electricity, as well as utilizing rainwater and reusing gray water, along with more efficient kinds of waste disposal, all of which can contribute to growing one’s own food supplies. Thus, many people can openly, but without fanfare, begin to withdraw from essential cooperation with the State.

I don’t often get too personal around here. But it occurred to me that some of you might be interested in what a typical day in the life of this low-income/simple-living tax resister is like. People sometimes have strange ideas about how I live (“Gross’ ascetic lifestyle”).

On a typical morning I’ll get up around 8:30 or so, depending on when my cat goes off. First thing, I’ll grind up some beans and brew a pot of coffee, then get on-line for a spell.

When my sweetie finishes up her morning routine and heads out to the office, I shower & shave (or not, if I’m having a grubby day), brush my teeth, and hunt up some breakfast: often microwaved leftovers from last night’s dinner, but sometimes an omelet (we’ve started buying eggs from a friend who raises chickens) or just some toasted home-baked bread (a second-hand bread machine takes the drudgery out of kneading, so I make bread often).

Then it’s back to the computer. Lately I’ve been trying to finish off one technical writing contract while hunting up others, helping NWTRCC set up their upcoming new web site design, keeping this blog up-to-date, ripping some library audiobooks to my MP3 player (a hand-me-down gift), doing some freelance writing, reading various blogs and news sites and such, and engaging in plenty of that aimless eDithering that keeps us all so busy these days.

Over the course of the day, I may visit our local library branch to pick up or drop off books and DVDs, or I might go to the YMCA to exercise or do a yoga class. I’d been considering dropping my YMCA membership ($40/month) but so far that strikes me as a penny-wise, pound-foolish sort of move, and I’m sticking with it in spite of the cost. Maybe one day I’ll be disciplined enough to stick to an exercise regimen outside of the gym, but I’m not there yet.

I may also wander down to San Francisco Brewcraft to pick up some brewing supplies. I currently have five and a half gallons of hard cider fermenting in my large carboy — I started it on the already-yeast-ridden dregs from an earlier batch to save money on wine yeast. When that’s ready to bottle, maybe this weekend, I’m going to start the first of two west-coast-style (hoppy) pale ales, then, when I move the first one to the secondary fermenter (a somewhat smaller carboy), I’m going to pitch the second batch onto the yeast-ridden sediment from the first (just as I did with the cider). The apple juice for five gallons of cider costs me maybe $20–$25; a five gallon batch of beer runs maybe $35–$40, depending on the style. One of my carboys was a hand-me-down, another I got from Freecycle, the larger one I bought new.

The library, the YMCA, and San Francisco Brewcraft are all within walking distance of my front door. If I have to go further afield, for instance to my Spanish tutor, I usually take the bus. This costs $2.00, which includes a transfer that’s good for an hour and a half (though often the drivers are generous and tear you off a transfer that’s good for two hours or more). When I moved up to San Francisco a decade ago, bus fare was less than half that (you could get a pack of ten tokens for $9).

Lunch is usually leftovers again, though sometimes I’ll carve up some fruit or slice up some cheese or something. Once in a while I’ll go out and pick up a sandwich from one of the Vietnamese places in the neighborhood. These run about $3–$4.

There’s always something to do around the apartment: cleaning the kitchen, tidying up, keeping the cat happy, weeding the herb bed, bottling beer, and what have you. We keep a list of household projects that need doing, and, when we have some weekend time and feel the inspiration, we try to knock an item or two off the list. We do our laundry at the laundromat, which usually takes a hunk out of a couple of our Sundays each month.

At some point during the day I’ll start thinking about what to do for dinner. I’ve saved a lot of recipes I like the look of on a wiki that my sweetie & I use to keep track of household stuff. But lately, I’ve been using an on-line recipe planner called SuperCook with which you keep track of the ingredients you have on hand and it tells you recipes you can make with the fewest additional ingredients. This helps me use the food we have more efficiently, and also means that many days I don’t need to do any additional food shopping (we often have ingredients on-hand because of our vegetable garden and because we get food in bulk from two CSA programs: one for veggies and one for meat).

It being January, there isn’t much in our vegetable garden yet, but most of the herbs have weathered the winter well, and I can go down our back stairs to harvest lavender, marjoram, chives, mint, parsley, rosemary, sage, oregano, and thyme. We’ve also still got a lot of garlic braided up from last year’s harvest.

If I do need to shop for dinner, most of what I need is close. There are four vegetable markets and a fishmonger in walking distance, and a large but quirky grocery across the street. My sweetie has sworn off CAFO meat, so if I need something we didn’t get from our meat CSA, I have to go a little further afield, as our local butchers can’t help us here. (For fish, we just stick to the Monterey Bay Aquarium guidelines for responsible consumption.)

In the evening, unless I have a yoga class or Spanish tutoring (for the last few years, I’ve been swapping Spanish tutoring for English tutoring with someone for an hour and half once a week), I’m usually working with food. I enjoy cooking and trying out new recipes, and, thanks to being able to work from home, I’ve got the time it takes to tackle even recipes that require a lot of prep. The trick is timing things so they’ll be ready around the time my sweetie gets off work, finishes her peninsula commute, and finds parking; every night is a little different. For this reason, I tend to do a lot of mise en place stuff, just like in the cooking shows on TV. I often make big portions so there will be leftovers to eat during the next day (my sweetie will pack some in a lunch bag the night before and take it to work).

My sweetie is our green-thumb, and she’s set up a compost bin and a worm bin in the yard that turn our kitchen waste into plant nutrients. But some of our kitchen scraps I divert before they hit the compost bucket. I use onion skins, carrot peels, chicken carcasses, and the like to make stock, which I put in mason jars and freeze. I use stock all the time in recipes, or use it instead of water when cooking something like rice to make the meal more rich-tasting and nutrient-filled.

After dinner, it’s all about relaxing. From time to time we’ll go out and visit friends, but more often we stay in: reading, wasting time on-line, or watching a movie from Netflix or the library. That, a glass or two of home-brew, and a lap full of cat, make for a very comfortable end of the day.

I’ve got an article in this month’s Simple Living News on your favorite topic and mine.

The article aims to pitch tax resistance through the low-income, simple-living lifestyle to people who already see the merits of that lifestyle and who might want another arrow in their salespitch quiver when trying to talk it up to others, or who might think “well, I’m almost a tax resister already, might as well go the extra yard and pick up that merit badge too.”

I deliberately tried to cast a wide net, including lots of information on war tax resistance (since there’s lots more information to be had there), but also trying to be welcoming to potential resisters of other stripes. The impression I have is that the Simple Living News has a pretty ideologically diverse readership.

The latest issue of New Escapologist includes an article I wrote to introduce the practical technique of tax resistance. Regular Picket Line readers won’t likely be surprised by anything therein, as I’ve covered the same themes in similar terms hereabouts.

Buying My Life Back by Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

When Dubya’s “Coalition of the Willing” invaded Iraq in 2003, I quit my job in order to get under the income tax line so that I would no longer be paying for such things.

Like many people, in the days before the invasion I was horrified at the thought of the suffering we were about to inflict with our “shock and awe” campaign, and at the increasingly blind, ignorant, and bloodthirsty belligerence that dominated my country. But I knew that as a taxpayer I was a small but vital part of the machine we were unleashing. I knew that no matter how much I complained or voiced my moral opposition, as long as I continued to pay taxes I was — in a practical, bottom-line sense — a war supporter.

I decided to put my money where my mouth is. Today I’m under the income tax line. I’ve learned how to live within my means without paying federal income tax — honestly, peacefully, and legally. I resist other taxes, like excise taxes or the “social-security tax,” in other ways (honestly and peacefully, but not always legally).

I’m through with symbolic, feel-good, bumper-sticker activism; I’ve taken Phil Ochs’s “I ain’t a-marchin’ anymore” to heart and I’ve left the “peace parade” marches and rallies with their tired chants and terrible speakers behind. I take a practical approach, learning about the tax laws and about how to live well by being down-to-earth and sensibly frugal.

Here are some of the techniques I’ve adopted to lower my budget:

• I cook my own meals from scratch rather than eating out or eating expensive packaged food (I’ve found that now that I have the time, I really enjoy cooking).
• I brew my own beer, because I like the good stuff (and because I want to avoid the federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages).
• I trade English tutoring for Spanish tutoring rather than paying for classes.
• I use the public library for research & recreational reading instead of buying books.
• I don’t own a car — which is such an expensive thing, especially in San Francisco where I live — but I buy in to a short-term car rental co-op for rare occasions when I need a car, and use public transit, bicycling, and such otherwise.
• I try to find used stuff on freecycle or craigslist rather than buying new — for instance, off the top of my head: a pot rack, a Foreman grill, our vacuum cleaner, a back door that I could cut a cat door in without risking our security deposit, a bread machine, speakers for our DVD player, our living room couch, some sets of lectures on tape, our food processor and blender, and a carboy I use for brewing.
• I’ve joined a community of tax resisters in the United States who meet periodically to share stories and ideas for resisting in better ways.

How do I feel about my life now that I’ve gone from a $100,000-a-year urban playboy lifestyle to living on around $12,000? Money Magazine profiled me briefly a while back for an article they put out on how to avoid paying taxes. They concluded that their readers probably wouldn’t enjoy what they called the “ascetic lifestyle” that comes along with my technique.

If this is “asceticism,” asceticism is very underrated. The life I’m leading now is fuller and more enjoyable than ever, I have less anxiety (and less guilt about my taxes) and feel more integrity, and I’m genuinely living a life of abundance.

For one thing, by being willing to take in less income, I am able to work fewer hours. It turns out that, to me, those free hours are much more valuable than the money I’d been trading them for — and the more practice I get in living vigorously, the more valuable my free time becomes to me. Now, more of what I do with my life is for goals I think are valuable, useful, and interesting; much less is what I have to put up with for a paycheck.

It seems that many of the things people commonly give up, in order to pursue careers and more money, are more valuable than the money we gain in the trade. Not only are they more valuable, but many are not for sale at any price! — our health, our youth, and the time we need to pursue our dreams, to learn new skills, to strengthen relationships with our family and friends and communities, or just to read those books we’ve been meaning to get around to.

One measure of abundance is this: what percentage of your time and energy — what percentage of your life — are you able to devote to your passions, and what percentage are you forced to spend on priorities that contradict and oppose them? By “your passions” I don’t just mean “your own selfish whims” but your values, the things you think are worthwhile and important.

If a percentage of your paycheck is being sucked up by the government, you’re spending that percent of every working day using your energy and your time — spending your life — to promote the government’s priorities. It may very well be that, instead, you can live more and promote your own priorities more by working less, earning less, and spending less.

What worked for me won’t necessarily work for everyone. Some people, for very good reasons, have higher expenses than I do — children, for instance, though they are good tax deductions, can be something of an expensive hobby; I don’t have kids. And not everyone has job skills that translate well to a part-time, contract-based, work-from-home style job. Many people have to work full-time jobs, all-year-round to earn what I earn.

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy for abundance and fulfillment. But what I’ve learned is that by taking more direct responsibility for your life and your effect on the world, by radically reassessing how your activities relate to your priorities, and by backing away from the consumer and job cultures, you can make your own life better and reduce your complicity in making other peoples’ lives suck.

So I urge you to take stock of your own vision of an abundant life, to look closely at which components of it are best-served by earning money and which components are best-served in more direct ways, and to look also for ways in which your career may be interfering with a more abundant life.

And I urge you to look also at how the government, by means of the tax system, is forcing you to expend your time and energy on priorities that contradict your own. Consider the possibility that the best life you could be living may be one in which you are earning and spending less but living more.

Since I wrote this article, we’ve given up our City Car Share co-op membership. My sweetie’s job moved down the peninsula and now she has her own car for the commute that we also now use for whatever occasional car trips we used to use City Car Share for.

A few bits and pieces from here and there:

• Here’s another case of someone trying to pay his tax bill with tens of thousands of pennies.
• Freelancers in Bucharest have organized a tax strike in protest against a new law that makes self-employed people liable for social insurance taxes. Romania’s government-run insurance and pension plan is bankrupt, of shoddy quality, and is overpriced, so freelancers — who up to now have been exempt from mandatory contributions and have not been covered by its benefits — have gotten used to finding better deals in the private sector.
• Liz Pulliam at MSN Money takes a look at people who are living on $18,000 a year — by choice.
• Official, licensed public transit drivers in Barinas, Venezuela are getting undercut by unlicensed, unofficial ones. Reasoning that if they can’t have a government-enforced monopoly they shouldn’t have to pay for one, they’ve launched a tax strike.

I recently finished a selection of Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus. The lyrical essays were way too lyrical for my tastes, and the critical ones were kind of a grab bag, much of which didn’t much grab my attention. But I did pick out a quote or two that I thought were worth holding on to.

Here’s one, for instance, that reminded me of Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue:

For the Greeks, values existed a priori and marked out the exact limits of every action. Modern philosophy places its values at the completion of action. They are not, but they become, and we shall know them completely only at the end of history. When they disappear, limits vanish as well, and since ideas differ as to what these values will be, since there is no struggle which, unhindered by these same values, does not extend indefinitely, we are now witnessing the Messianic forces confronting one another, their clamors merging in the shock of empires. Excess is a fire, according to Heraclitus. The fire is gaining ground; Nietzsche has been overtaken. It is no longer with hammer blows but with cannon shots that Europe philosophizes.

And here’s Camus on the joys of voluntary simplicity:

From time to time I meet people who live among riches I cannot even imagine. I still have to make an effort to realize that others can feel envious of such wealth. A long time ago, I once lived a whole week luxuriating in all the goods of this world: we slept without a roof, on a beach, I lived on fruit, and spent half my days alone in the water. I learned something then that has always made me react to the signs of comfort or of a well-appointed house with irony, impatience, and sometimes anger. Although I live without worrying about tomorrow now, and therefore count myself among the privileged, I don’t know how to own things. What I do have, which always comes to me without my asking for it, I can’t seem to keep. Less from extravagance, I think, than from another kind of parsimony: I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.

And here’s a moment of Zen:

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

“The invisible hand” is a key metaphor underlying the defense of free-market economics. In this defense, the free market, without being guided to do so by any central authority but merely evolving naturally by means of the interactions of self-interested individuals, nonetheless ends up efficiently supplying the needs and wants of the multitude and contributing to the prosperity of society.

This phrase has been so identified with capitalism, both by its critics and its supporters, that I was amused to find it embedded in a passage of Smith’s work that sounded as though it were written by an 18^th century version of a voluntary simplicity movement downsizer. Check this out:

How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? … All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew’s-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.

…

The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich. He finds the cottage of his father too small for his accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at his ease in a palace. He is displeased with being obliged to walk a-foot, or to endure the fatigue of riding on horseback. He sees his superiors carried about in machines, and imagines that in one of these he could travel with less inconveniency. He feels himself naturally indolent, and willing to serve himself with his own hands as little as possible; and judges, that a numerous retinue of servants would save him from a great deal of trouble. He thinks if he had attained all these, he would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation. He is enchanted with the distant idea of this felicity. It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings, and, in order to arrive at it, he devotes himself for ever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness. To obtain the conveniencies which these afford, he submits in the first year, nay in the first month of his application, to more fatigue of body and more uneasiness of mind than he could have suffered through the whole of his life from the want of them. He studies to distinguish himself in some laborious profession. With the most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to acquire talents superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments which he imagines he has met with from the injustice of his enemies, or from the perfidy and ingratitude of his friends, that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys; and like them too, more troublesome to the person who carries them about with him than all the advantages they can afford him are commodious. There is no other real difference between them, except that the conveniencies of the one are somewhat more observable than those of the other. … To one who was to live alone in a desolate island it might be a matter of doubt, perhaps, whether a palace, or a collection of such small conveniencies as are commonly contained in a tweezer-case, would contribute most to his happiness and enjoyment. If he is to live in society, indeed, there can be no comparison, because in this, as in all other cases, we constantly pay more regard to the sentiments of the spectator, than to those of the person principally concerned, and consider rather how his situation will appear to other people, than how it will appear to himself. If we examine, however, why the spectator distinguishes with such admiration the condition of the rich and the great, we shall find that it is not so much upon account of the superior ease or pleasure which they are supposed to enjoy, as of the numberless artificial and elegant contrivances for promoting this ease or pleasure. He does not even imagine that they are really happier than other people: but he imagines that they possess more means of happiness. And it is the ingenious and artful adjustment of those means to the end for which they were intended, that is the principal source of his admiration. But in the languor of disease and the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness disappear. To one, in this situation, they are no longer capable of recommending those toilsome pursuits in which they had formerly engaged him. In his heart he curses ambition, and vainly regrets the ease and the indolence of youth, pleasures which are fled for ever, and which he has foolishly sacrificed for what, when he has got it, can afford him no real satisfaction. In this miserable aspect does greatness appear to every man when reduced either by spleen or disease to observe with attention his own situation, and to consider what it is that is really wanting to his happiness. Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. They are immense fabrics, which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which while they stand, though they may save him from some smaller inconveniencies, can protect him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death.

But though this splenetic philosophy, which in time of sickness or low spirits is familiar to every man, thus entirely depreciates those great objects of human desire, when in better health and in better humour, we never fail to regard them under a more agreeable aspect. Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and œconomy of the great; and admire how every thing is adapted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or œconomy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.

And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth by these labours of mankind has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants. It is to no purpose, that the proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb, that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the œconomy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

Early Retirement Extreme is a blog by Jacob Lund Fisker, a man who decided to radically reduce his expenses so that he could retire — even on his ordinary salary and without any freakish windfalls — in his early thirties.

He’s spending about ⅓–½ of what I do, and living in roughly the same area, so I might be able to learn some frugality tips from him. At first glance, his rent is much lower (he lives in an RV), his health insurance is much lower (I’m going to look into a better plan, though I already do the HDHP/HSA thing, so this might just be because of my more-expensive age cohort), and he pays about ¼ what I do for food (I’m sure I could do better here, but this is also an area where I very deliberately indulge).

Much of his story sounds very familiar to me, though Jacob got into this lifestyle through a finely-tuned sense of rational self-interest, rather than backing in to it accidentally via conscientious objection to taxpaying like I did. Here’s some of his thinking on the subject:

There are essentially two premises to ERE.

The first premise is that financial independence is much more easily obtained by finding ways to reduce monetary expenditure than by finding ways to increase monetary income. For 80% of all people it is much easier to reduce their expenses by a factor 10 compared to increasing their income by a factor 10. Only the poorest and the richest can easily increase their income.

The second premise is one can easily live a happy life on much less than is commonly assumed. In fact the difference is sometimes extreme. In a consumer society, the standard measure of utility is money. If it’s twice as expensive, it must be twice as good, right? Wrong! This misconception originates from consumerism where on the poor end of the scale you eat $3 mashed potato powder bought at a quickie-mart, and at the high end of the scale you buy one small scoop of superbly crafted mashed potatoes on a large plate for $25 at a classy restaurant. However, if you make your own mashed potatoes, you can buy a 10lbs sack of potatoes for $1 at the farmer’s market during potato season — or grow them yourself — and make a meal that is only limited by your own skill level; after a few months of practice that is probably at least 80% as good as the chef and easily much better than the pre-processed powder. And, yes, out of potato season, you either clamp them or don’t eat potatoes and eat something else that’s in season and therefore inexpensive.

What follows from these premises is that for those who are willing and able, it is often possible to reduce expenses significantly by doing things differently, more in tune with the natural flows of resources so to speak, rather than doing more or less of the normal way and expecting instant gratification without considering the short- and long-term costs.

If you put these together: Spend less, save more, then you can reach the point where your investment income covers your expenses much much faster than what is commonly assumed.

Following those ideas it is possible to retire in 3–8 years on a normal income, hence this is why this blog is named early retirement extreme.

I’ve got a guest post up at Early Retirement Extreme about how by living frugally, you can spend less on government and more on priorities that better match your values. That blog is full of good information on frugality and sensible personal financial planning, but doesn’t have much of a political/activist focus, so I’ll be interested to see how this strikes the readership there. Excerpts:

As it says in Your Money Or Your Life, “when we go to our jobs we are trading our life energy for money.” When you pay taxes, the government is taking your life energy from you and using it for its own purposes, as much as if it had conscripted you and forced you to work for it directly.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend any of my life energy helping the government to commit aggressive war, torture prisoners, or threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction. I think I can be more useful to my neighbors (and better able to sleep at night) if I instead put all of my effort into more beneficial activities.

In order to make our country one we can be proud of, complaining and wishful thinking are not going to be enough. We have to put as much of our effort as we can on the side of our values, instead of allowing so much to be stolen by the tax collector and used to promote the values of politicians and the military/industrial complex.

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

—Robert Frost
from Build Soil

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

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

This idea is that, contrary to what the organizers of the world are always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to organize at all. You don’t need a majority, or a critical mass, or a disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Just get your own house in order and commit yourself to your own personal revolution — that’s the most crucial and practical thing you can do.

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

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

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

These reasons can be roughly divided into five categories:

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

You can win the one-man revolution

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

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

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

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

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

You can start now, with full integrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He quotes Brown as saying:

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

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

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

This is for two related reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Define success and failure carefully

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One-in-a-million can move the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It only takes a little leavening to leaven the loaf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The One-Man Revolution

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

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

Accept responsibility, and act responsibly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones

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

Hennacy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In conclusion

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

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

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

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• In some countries, a value added tax is a major source of government revenue, and there are periodic calls (for instance the so-called FairTax) for something similar in the U.S. For this reason, I like to keep my eyes peeled for news about value added tax evasion and resistance strategies. The Telegraph reports that VAT evasion “has exploded” in Great Britain in recent years. It attributes half of this to “professional fraudsters” and half to “general non-compliance and deliberate evasion by legitimate businesses.” Organized evaders use a technique known as “missing trader” to avoid paying this tax to the government, or, in the case of the “carousel” variety of the scheme, to double the gains by applying for tax refunds on taxes that were never paid in the first place.
• All of the thunder and lightning about taxes and the “fiscal cliff” recently resulted in a major tax bill that ended up being so much about reestablishing the status quo that I’ve had little to say about it here. The major effect on folks like me who are trying to stay below the income tax line is that our payroll and/or self-employment taxes are going back up to where they were a couple of years ago. If you’d like to investigate further and see if there have been any tweaks to your favorite deductions or credits, take a look at the report Tax Provisions in the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 from the Tax Policy Center.
• The Mackinac Center for Public Policy compares the reported tobacco smoking rate in various states with tobacco sales in those states, and how this comparison changes as the tobacco tax rates change in those states and in neighboring states, to estimate how tobacco taxes contribute to tobacco smuggling. Some states, the Center says, have raised their tobacco taxes to levels that amount to a policy of “prohibition by price,” and smuggling has risen to match — New York’s huge $4.35/pack cigarette tax is matched by the Center’s estimate that fully 60.9% of the cigarettes smoked there are smuggled in from other states.
• When the IRS tries to crack down on tax evasion, their gains from increased revenue from enforcement can be offset by the loss of goodwill from innocent taxpayers who get caught in the net or who have to endure more paperwork or encounters with a suspicious bureaucracy. For a good example of how the IRS turned a loyal taxpayer into an enemy, read David Hanger’s letter It Is Not Ineptness of Incompetence, the IRS Is Stealing from You. The government relies on voluntary taxpayer compliance much more than on IRS enforcement and threats to fill its coffers, and so stories like this may represent a big threat.
• The Early Retirement Extreme blog now has a wiki that will capture in a more encyclopedic fashion the wisdom of folks who are using voluntary simplicity principles to escape the rat race in style.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• In a couple of weeks, you can attend an on-line “google hangout” on the subject of “War Resistance: Beyond the Rally,” sponsored by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, the Center on Conscience and War, and the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
• Boris Yakubchik, an activist in the “effective altruism” movement has published some of his recommendations on frugal living — things he puts into practice so that he’ll have more money to be able to give away to good causes.
• In the U.S., a person who pays alimony can take it as a tax deduction; a person who receives alimony must declare it as income; and to take the deduction, the payer must include the taxpayer identification number of the recipient on their tax return. You’d think this would make it easy for the IRS to make sure that the numbers match up, and that people aren’t taking phony deductions for fictitious alimony, or failing to report alimony received as income. But according to a new TIGTA report, fully 47% of the alimony deductions do not have corresponding alimony income shown on the recipients return — amounting to “more than $2.3 billion in deductions claimed without corresponding income reported”. Peter J. Reilly dug a little deeper and found that the IRS only bothered to audit 4% of the pairs of returns showing discrepancies — that is to say, “you and your ex collectively have a 96% chance of getting away with something that is in your face blatantly wrong even though you are, in effect, ratting yourselves out.” He calls this “a scandal of epic proportions” and suggests that it’s going to encourage divorcing couples and tax advisors to game the system.
• How can the current U.S. tax system cope with bitcoins and other aspects of the emerging virtual economy? That’s the subject of a new paper: A Whole New World: Income Tax Considerations of the Bitcoin Economy. Excerpt:

  Because these bitcoins can, in some circumstances, be used to purchase goods or services with a monetary value or where they can be converted to legal tender, the proper income tax treatment of bitcoin transactions presents both compliance and substantive questions for the IRS. …This article explores the current state of the law as it relates to bitcoins as well as proposed methods for applying existing federal income tax laws to the virtual economy.

• Hey, look: another IRS building temporarily evacuated when a worker opens a package containing a suspicious substance.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The radical personal finance podcast has been broadcasting some very interesting material lately, including
  • an extensive interview with Jacob Lund Fisker of Early Retirement Extreme
  • what can we learn about finance from dumpster divers, freegans, vagabonds, and hobos?
• Leanne Brown has published Good and Cheap: A SNAP Cookbook — a handsome guide to cooking tasty, nutritious meals on a budget — that’s available for free on-line.
• Contrepoints has an interesting recap of the original bonnets rouges of Brittany, from 1675 (in French).
• Cindy Sheehan puts in another good word for war tax resistance at her blog: “Petitions, Marches, and Rallies, Oh My!” — “I had a showdown with the IRS and the IRS was the one that blinked. I am not a legal expert or expert on WTR, but it’s lucky that I know some people who are and I also know that they would be happy to answer any questions you have. I think the time has long passed that we just give lip service, or shoe leather to what we believe in. It’s time to take a stand. If you oppose war, why do you pay for it?”
• At his Forbes blog, Peter J. Reilly reminds people to consider whether their heirs have tax debts before designating them as beneficiaries (“Don’t Leave Money To Children Buried Under IRS Liens”).
• American conservative radio show host Jason Lewis walked off the air a few days back after announcing that he would be “going Galt” to avoid paying taxes (or, I suspect, mostly to publicize his new project: galt.io).

Today I’ll share some links about tax policy and tax resistance in the United States that have caught my attention recently.

First, though: I’ve started a Wikipedia page on Tax resistance in the United States that covers how theories about tax resistance have shaped (and been shaped in) the U.S., and how tax resistance in practice has played out in the country. Wikipedia is an open, collaborative project that anyone can help to edit, so I encourage you to learn what it’s all about and how to help make it better.

Now on to the links:

Tax Evasion

• The New York Times got its hands on a trove of financial documents concerning the real estate empire of Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump’s father, and published a well-done exposé on what they found. From the point of view of today’s political squabbles and tomorrow’s history lessons, the takeaway is that Donald Trump’s brand, in which he is represented as a self-made business prodigy, is a laughable con job. From our vantage, however, what’s interesting is the extent to which the Trump family used legal, effectively-legal, and illegal methods to evade taxes. They paid a fraction of what they owed, again and again. This may help bolster the widespread feeling that rich people commonly get away with tax evasion, sticking it to the little guy. This in turn erodes “tax morale” which causes voluntary tax compliance to fall.
• Another bit of journalism hammering on this theme (though more free-wheeling and not as methodically precise) comes from GQ: “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich”. Apparently if you can convince the IRS that you’ve become a permanent resident of the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico, you’ll find yourself in “the only place on U.S. soil where personal income from capital gains, interest, and dividends are untaxed.”

General Government Failure

• “The federal government could soon pay more in interest on its debt than it spends on the military, Medicaid or children’s programs.” Thus begins a New York Times article on the growing federal government debt. “Within a decade, more than $900 billion in interest payments will be due annually, easily outpacing spending on myriad other programs. Already the fastest-growing major government expense, the cost of interest is on track to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.” The more the federal government is reduced to being a collection agency for bondholders, the less mischief it can get up to elsewhere. Far from addressing this problem, today’s policymakers are exacerbating it, so we have more such headlines to look forward to.
• Alex Tabarrok and Michael Makowsky used some clever data mining to unveil that when governments make it profitable for police to arrest black and Hispanic people (through property forfeiture laws that allow police to profit from the booty they seize), such arrests increase. They conclude: “The prospects for justice are dimmed when the probability an individual is arrested varies not only by the character of their transgression but also by the potential windfall they present to the public coffer.”
• It’s hard to tell your cops from your robbers, that’s for sure. Take for instance Officer Ebony Nesbitt of the Miami-Dade police force… recently arrested for her part in raking in half a million dollars by filing false tax returns in an identity theft scam.

IRS Follies

• The National Taxpayer Advocate says that the IRS is cooking the books when they report their numbers on how their phone “customer” service is doing just fine. For one thing, they don’t measure the phone numbers with the worst service. For another, they don’t count getting tangled up in an unhelpful “press X for Y” phone menu and then hanging up in frustration as an unsuccessful call. For another, they count merely talking to an IRS operator as a successful call, whether the operator was able to resolve the problem or not.
• The Tax-Expatriation blog has gotten its hands on a letter from the U.S. State Department refusing to issue a passport to a person with what the IRS categorizes as “a seriously delinquent tax debt”.

Miscellaneous

• Republicans are prone to complain about the percentage of U.S. households who are so poor they don’t have to pay income tax (remember Mitt Romney’s revealing “47%” comments way back when? Or the Wall Street Journal’s “lucky duckies” editorials?). But that didn’t stop them from crafting their major tax legislation (the recent “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) in such a way that it will increase the percentage of American households who pay no federal income tax. The Tax Policy Center estimates that fully 44% of American households will pay no federal income taxes at all this year (2% more than last year). About 25% will pay no payroll tax either, or their payroll tax will be offset by a refundable income tax credit.
• “Millennials” (says the New York Times) are joining together to swap techniques for quitting the rat race and retiring early, in something called “the FIRE movement.” They begin to live more frugally, squirrel things away, take greater care of their investment decisions, and eye an early modest retirement or semi-retirement. Most of the examples in the article are of pretty well-off people who really just needed to stop living at or above the lifestyle they could afford. But it’s people like them who pay the taxes, and by stepping off the treadmill, they stop doing so or at least stop doing so much. So if you know anyone in that category, send them a link.
• About ten years ago the number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship began to shoot up, from what had been a normal range of two to eight hundred people a year to a high of 5,409 people in 2016. But things seem to have leveled off since then. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.