Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual local or state tax resisters → Edward Koryto

Howard Roark was reincarnated as Edward Koryto of Plainfield, Michigan (from the 25 May 1971 The Day).

House Torn Down In Protest of Taxes

by Piet Bennett

Grand Rapids, Mich. (AP) — “I’ll never have another house again,” says a factory worker who protested his tax assessment by razing the home it took him seven years to build from scrap lumber.

Edward Koryto standing in the rubble that used to be his home

“I will not pay for something I do not have,” Edward Koryto, 50, said as he sat amid the rubble of his home in Plainfield Township just north of Grand Rapids.

Koryto said he decided to level his house on the Grand River after its assessed value was raised by $6,800 this year.

The house was 85 per cent completed, Koryto said, but township officials fixed its market value at $11,200. An appeal lowered the evaluation by $900 but Koryto contended that meant taxes of about $250 per year, a 150 per cent increase.

Bernie Dice, the township’s tax assessor, insisted that he believed Koryto’s home was worth more than $10,000 under Michigan law. Taxes are paid on half the assessed value of property. Plainfield Township’s tax rate is $50 per thousand.

Dice said Koryto’s home had been valued at $4,400 since 1964 under a partial assessment.

“He’s just incensed that we caught up with him and put a valid assessment on it,” Dice contended.

But Koryto, who reported his assessed value had been increased by small amounts in the past, insisted his house was not worth $10,000. He claimed it was assessed for “more than the house ever thought of being worth.”

Koryto, a molder at Michigan Wheel Co. in Grand Rapids, had a friend help him raze the four-room house he had created by working nights and weekends. During the month of demolition, Koryto has lived with friends and searched for an apartment.

Koryto has other complaints about the township. He mentioned the annual spring floods, the untouched rubble of a burned out home down the road and junked cars.

“They must think I’m in a beautiful neighborhood the way they’re trying to charge me top dollar,” he complained. “You work hard and everything else and the rest of the neighborhood is just left untouched, and you just give up.”

Complaints to township officials were “just ignored,” the workman contended.

Koryto died in 1982.

One way to resist taxes — or to resist the sort of property seizure that governments sometimes inflict on tax resisters — is to hide assets so as to remove them from the reach of the tax collector or assessor. Here are a few examples:

• Charles Merrill, who resisted his taxes as a way of protesting for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States, had an appropriately flamboyant asset-hiding strategy. “I have buried $2 million worth of gold coins in the desert…” he said. “My partner doesn’t even know where it is at. If the IRS allows me to file a joint federal income tax form like any other married couple, the money is there to pay.”
• Lately, wealthy Italians have taken to avoiding the prying eye of the revenue agent by parking their yachts in foreign Mediterranean ports. As of earlier this year, some 30,000 berths had gone empty in Italian ports, which not only foiled the tax collector but “cost the Italian economy some $350 million this year in lost revenues from marina fees and services, and fuel sales.”
• When Doukhobor refugees in Canada refused to pay school taxes on their farmland, reasoning that since they refused to send their children to wicked Canadian schools, they shouldn’t have to pay for them, they anticipated that the government might resort to seizure and “very thoughtfully lost no time in taking their crops from the land within the Langham school district.”



• Another, more drastic way of keeping the tax collector from your door is to demolish your house. Michigan factory worker Edward Koryto did that in 1971 to a home he had spent seven years building from scrap lumber when the tax assessors nearly tripled its assessed value, which raised the property taxes due on it by 150%.
• Earlier this month I covered the strategy of holding resisters’ property in someone else’s name.
• Later in this series, I’ll also cover taxpatriatism and mass-migration as a way of fleeing the tax collector, which is a similar strategy, and barricades as a means of keeping assets safe from the tax collector, which is another.