Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → New Zealand → Dog Tax War

From the 7 May 1898 New Zealand Observer and Free Lance:

Police Hysterics.

A Mountain out of a Molehill

If that Maori difficulty up North does not lead to the effusion of blood and develop into a first-class sensation it won’t be from any lack of determination on the part of the authorities to put the fat in the fire. A few Maoris up in the neighbourhood of Hokianga refuse to pay the dog-tax, and a bounceable fellow named Hone Toia makes use of some vague threats, and forthwith there is a devil of a pother in the country. One would almost imagine there never had been a native difficulty in the colony before, and that there are enough Maoris up North to drive the settlers into the sea.

No overt act has been committed, and yet we have Inspector Hickson, up at Hokianga with a detachment of police and Permanent Force men at his heels, pouring sensational telegrams into the Government at Wellington, and stirring them up into such a condition of excitement and alarm that the Hinemoa has been despatched in eager haste from Cook Strait with a hundred or so of Permanent Artillery and Torpedo Corps men equipped with a field battery of Nordenfeldt and Maxim guns. And, in order that no possible precaution may be neglected, Dr Erson has been summoned from Onehunga to look after the wounded in posse — that is to say, they expect to have some wounded for him to attend to.

Still not a blow nas been struck, and the only foe there is to face is a couple of score of discontented natives who feel a bit pouri because summonses are out against them for that obnoxious dog-tax. All that was wanted was a level-headed, tactful man of resource to cope with this trouble at its inception, and all this fuss and worry and farfarronade would never have been heard of. Inspector Hickson is not built that way. He started out with the idea in his head that he had to suppress a rebellion, and he lost no time in making a tremendous hullaballoo over the job he had in hand.

How strikingly in contrast was the action of Inspector Pardy at that hot-bed of native disaffection — Parihaka — when Te Whiti had but to give the signal and there were hundreds of Maori braves ready to take the field. Yet when several bounceable natives made trouble there some years ago, Inspector Pardy went boldly out with a couple of policemen, arrested the ringleaders, and quelled the trouble in a single act.

All that was needed at Hokianga was an Inspector Pardy to act in a similar way. But what do we find? While Mr Clendon, Stipendiary Magistrate, who has spent a lifetime among the Northern Natives, is wiring to Wellington that he has visited the settlement of these few dissatisfied Maoris at Waima, and is of opinion there is no immediate cause for alarm, we have Inspector Hickson, in a great state of fluster, telegraphing to Ministers in Wellington about those “rebellious natives,” and describing them in absurdly inflated language which smacks of the sixpenny shocker, as “fanatics who fear not death.”

What does Inspector Hickson know about them? He does not appear to have seen any one of them yet, or to have got within coo-ee of them, although he is at the head of a pretty strong and well armed force — strong enough, in fact, to overawe all the Maoris between Hokianga and the Bay of Islands. He is calmly waiting for the Government war steamer, with our standing army on board and those Maxim and Nordenfeldt guns.

We earnestly hope that there will be someone with a cool head up there to stay the outbreak of hostilities. Are we seriously going to start mowing down with Maxims and Nordonfeldts a mere handful of defenceless Maoris? One shot fired in anger may provoke a dreadful slaughter. And supposing Inspector Hickson, with the fever of war galloping through his veins, opens fire on these alleged fanatics and their women and little children, do the people who are concerned in this business reflect that they will have to answer for it to an indignant country whose martial ardour is not usurping its judgment?

There is still the hope that the Maoris themselves — fanatics though Inspector Hickson calls them — may set us the example of prudence and self-restraint that seem to be so sadly lacking on our side. Such an hysterical ebullition of excitement and warlike display it would be difficult to match outside a nigger minstrel show. So far as it has gone, it reflects no credit upon the authorities, and we trust to the good sense of the Maori malcontents that it may go no further. If it does, then the colony will assuredly demand to know the reason why.

From the 21 May 1898 Nelson Evening Mail:

The Maori Disturbance.

United Press Association.

Auckland, May 20. — Hone Toia and fifteen other Maori prisoners, arrested at Waima in connection with the recent disturbance, were brought before the Court to-day, charged with a conspiracy to levy war on the Queen to evade the dog tax and with assaulting John Wellsford, mail carrier. Mr Tole, Crown prosecutor, prosecuted. Messrs Earl and Cooper represented the accused.

W. Hone, the Native interpreted, deposed to visiting Hone Toia and other principal natives at Pukemiro, on April 28. They declared they would not pay the dog tax, would not stop shooting pigeons, would have nothing to do with European laws, and they announced their intention of going to Rawene next day with their guns to fight the law.

The [Wellington] Evening Post also published a substantially similar article on the case the same day.

From the 4 August 1901 Bridgeport Herald:

Martyr For His Dog.

William Worden Working Out His Canine’s License in Jail.

William Worden of Greenwich owns a dog of the feminine gender. William is of the opinion that if a dog stays close at home and bothers no one a license should not be collected for harboring such a dog. The selectmen of Greenwich think in another direction and day before yesterday William was served, along with about 200 other Greenwich citizens who own dogs, with warrants to pay their dog tax. While the majority of the 200 held opinions close in relationship to those of William, they were not sufficiently firm in their opinions to refuse to pay up and work out the fine and tax in jail.

But William Worden is a man of his word and he believes in acting as his conscience dictates. It appears that William’s conscience dictated that he ought to refuse to pay the dog tax and he obeyed his conscience (naughty conscience) and the result was that the learned judge down in Greenwich, which is filled with millionaires and other bric-a-brac of the human species, fined William $7 and costs for not pay the tax of his dog of feminine gender.

William refused to pay the $7 and costs and Friday night he came up to Bridgeport to spend a vacation at the jail with Sheriff Hawley. Saturday morning William was handed an adult sized pick and given a guide to show him the way to the stone quarry where he began to work out his dog tax.

William’s dog ought to appreciate her master’s martyrdom but the chances are that when William goes home and the canine of feminine gender sets up a wail of joy at his return and rushes out the gate to meet him he will hand her a kick in the short ribs that will set all the dogs in Grenewich [sic] to yelping anthems of sympathy for the abused canine.

Some folks get really upset when you try to bring a tax between them and their canine companion. Here’s another example, from the 11 August 1894 New York Times:

Will Not Pay a Dog Tax.

The question as to whether a law requiring the payment of a tax on dogs in Brooklyn is constitutionally proper has never been decided in a court. The Corporation Counsel, however, now has an excellent opportunity of testing the question which is so interesting to so many persons. William H. Vanderbilt, a coal merchant who lives in the new Twenty-ninth Ward, was notified by the City Clerk to take out a license for his dog. Mr. Vanderbilt called at the Mayor’s office yesterday, acknowledged that he had a dog, and said he did not propose to pay any license for it. The city, he declared, could go ahead and sue just as soon as it was ready. He characterized the tax on dogs as a legalized steal.

Here’s another example, from the Times the year before:

Refuse to Pay Dog Taxes.

Citizens of Elizabethport Will Test the Legality of a City Ordinance

Elizabeth, N.J., July 11. — The Citizens and Taxpayers’ Association of Elizabethport is resolved to test the legality of the dog ordinance passed last year by the Elizabeth City Council.

The ordinance imposes a tax of $1 on every male and $5 on every female dog, and 50 cents of each payment is to go to the Police Mutual Aid Fund. The association claims that the ordinance is illegal because the Court of Chancery has decided that no moneys raised by taxation can be appropriated to a private purpose. It is claimed that the Police Mutual Aid Society is a private organization.

The members of the association having refused to pay any dog tax, warrants were issued to-day by Justice Hetfield summoning them to appear at the Police Court on Saturday. The dog ordinance imposes a fine of $20 on persons refusing to comply with its provisions.

The police fund received over $1,100 last year from the dog taxes.

In more than one case, a dog tax imposed by colonial occupiers led to an armed rebellion. Here’s a dispatch from the Dog Tax War:

Tawhiao Levying a Dog Tax.

Prospect of Trouble with the Government.

Tauranga, This Day [11 July 1894]. Some trouble is brewing here with reference to dog tax amongst the natives. The Tauranga Maoris are under Tawhaio’s mana, and his representative, Te Mete Raukawa, a well-educated half-caste of high standing, tells the natives that all dogs must be registered with him, he having receipt books, and he will have collars ready on Saturday, the fee being below the European one. Should any dog belonging to natives worry sheep or do any other damage, the case must be tried before Te Mete, who will assess the damages. He says the matter was thoroughly threshed out by the Maori Parliament, and under the Treaty of Waitangi the natives are allowed to deal with all matters affecting themselves. The local natives agree to adhere to Tawhiao, and refuse to pay dog tax to the County Council, determining to go to gaol first.

Some tax resistance campaigns have tried to partially or completely secede from the government that is taxing them, or to set up alternative parallel governmental or quasi-governmental institutions to compete with or crowd out those of the established government.

• When white supremacists in Louisiana lost the gubernatorial election to a reconstructionist candidate in 1872, they formed their own parallel government led by the losing candidate, with their own separate legislature and their own separate militia (with which they briefly occupied the statehouse). They insisted that they were the legitimate government of Louisiana and recommended that people pay taxes to them and not to the usurpers in the statehouse. They asserted:

  Public opinion throughout the Union is against the usurpation, and our only danger, if there be any, will come from ourselves. If the people of Louisiana will sanction, by obedience and acquiescence, this Government, they will give it the only validity it can ever acquire. It is only by our own submission that our cause can be defeated. We recommend the people of the several parishes, for the purpose of most effectual resistance to this usurpation, and of mutual aid and defense, to join the People’s League of Louisiana by the formation of Parish councils in correspondence with the Central Council at New-Orleans. We must remember that there can be no de facto government as against a de jure government in a State, and that the only way by which the [governor] Kellogg usurpation can become established as a government is by acquiescence of the people… The people of New-Orleans are not to pay taxes, can not, in fact, pay them, nor are they giving any recognition to the usurpers.

  The existence of this shadow government was not only a direct threat to the Kellogg government, but also indirectly made it difficult for it to raise funds because of the uncertainty. One editorialist explained:

  [Kellogg] can borrow no money, for his government is so notoriously illegal that no lender would expect payment. If he should undertake to sell property for taxes, there would be no buyers, because an illegal Government could not give a valid title. Hence he is reduced to the necessity of resorting to bluster and threats.

• The Rebecca Rioters, confident from their success in destroying tollbooths, started to step in and adjudicate disputes in a quasi-governmental fashion. For instance, they would visit the homes of fathers of illegitimate children and exact promises from them that they would provide support for the mothers.
• During the 1907 tax strike that erupted in the French wine-growing region, local government officials resigned en masse and “local Separatist committees professed to take the Government’s place and set up a sort of provincial government.”
• The decentralist Liberal Democratic Movement of Carabobo, Venezuela hinted at a tax resistance campaign in 2010. Upset at deteriorating public safety and infrastructure, and alleging that local taxes were being siphoned off to wasteful federal spending and a bloated local bureaucracy, Enio Daza, autonomism director of the Carabobo branch of the party, suggested that locals organize their own, independent tax office, and pay their taxes there where they could exercise local control over the spending.
• The Zapatista movement in Mexico established municipios autónomos (autonomous towns) in regions where they were active:

  The Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, and Chol Indians (among others) who lived in the autonomous townships called their political philosophy resistencia: civil resistance to government authority. In the late 1990s there were thirty-eight Zapatista townships in Chiapas, including less than 10 percent of the 700,000 Indians in the state, but with a political impact in the indigenous communities that far outweighed their size.

  The Zapatistas sought not to found a new Indian nation but to make a place for Indian self-determination within the Mexican state. In their townships they kept their own birth and death records, discouraging followers from registering with official bureaucracies. They stopped paying taxes to any government and refused to allow social workers from government health and welfare agencies to set foot inside what they considered their boundaries. They opened their own health clinics staffed by volunteer Mexican and foreign doctors and local herbal healers and organized agricultural and crafts cooperatives that operated mainly through regional barter. In some townships they held trials and set up jails.

• Some people in the present-day Catalan independence movement have started paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain.
• An ongoing Spanish tax resistance movement is urging people to create a new, bottom-up, autonomous government of their own, and encourages them to redirect their taxes from the existing government into these new government-like projects:

  [T]he construction of autonomy will require a lot of resources. This process should be based on the ability to work and the generosity of many people, but needs to rely on these resources to make it possible.

  By fiscal autonomy we mean all the pathways of redistribution that will make the tax system support initiatives that will really benefit people. That is to say that the portion that each person is responsible of providing for the common good must be destined for new public services that really place the basic needs of people higher on the scale of priorities. Therefore it becomes a priority, and all but essential, to generate dynamics of ever more massive civil disobedience against the pilfering of our resources on the part of the state, and to reclaim them for popular self-government.

• In 1894 the Māori government in New Zealand instructed its subjects there to begin paying a dog tax directly to it, rather than to the New Zealand government-approved County Council.
• When the Czar dissolved the Russian Duma in 1906, the Duma refused to dissolve, meeting in Finland and declaring that they were the only government body with the authority to collect and spend taxes, and that therefore so long as they were abolished — so were taxes.
• Something similar happened in Germany in 1848, when the military and executive tried to break up the parliament. The parliament then called on the people to refuse to pay any more taxes to the government. When the government responded by trying to cut off funds for parliament, “the people insisted on making the payment, in spite of this prohibition.”

Māori resistance to dog taxes goes back to at least 1894, but as these dispatches show, the resistance stubbornly continued for decades thereafter.

From the 16 January 1924 Vancouver Daily World:

Maoris Refuse To Pay Tax On Dogs

Auckland, New Zealand, Jan. 11. — When the Maoris of the Chatham Islands, a dependency of New Zealand, were ordered to pay the dog-tax they did not refuse. They did not do anything else either.

Then they were summoned, they attended in a crowd at the native police court and they sat around and said nothing. The magistrate inflicted the usual small fines and looked surprised that no native came forward to explain.

Then the court tried to collect the tax. The Maoris said nothing, but moved off in a body 200 strong to the gaol. Outside it they insisted they should be imprisoned, but as the gaol would be crowded by a dozen — the Chathams being well-behaved and altogether peaceable Islanders — there was nothing to do but send them all home.

In future there will be no dog-tax in the Chathams. Passive resistance has won a complete victory.

It must not have been as complete as all that, as here’s another example from the 31 May 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Naoris [sic] Resist Tax on Their Dogs

Auckland (AP) — Passive resistance to taxation, one of Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics in India, is being tested by Maori tribesmen.

The New Zealand aborigines literally are “trying it on the dog,” refusing to pay the annual licenses for their canines.

Chiefs have been traveling among the tribes arguing that the treaty which ended the Maori war with England exempts the natives from this tax.

Some links from here and there:

• Logan Marie Glitterbomb, at the Center for a Stateless Society, advocates a campaign of gradually transitioning to cryptocurrency as a way of facilitating war tax resistance. Such a campaign would “allow for us to take direct action against the war machine, by refusing to fund it. The campaign encourages people to move at least $1 of fiat per day into their choice of cryptocurrency. The goal is to aid individuals in a gradual transition away from fiat and into using crypto as their primary currency without asking people to dive in all at once.”
• The Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, a movement opposing the Ortega regime in Nicaragua, is trying to gather support for a civil disobedience campaign that would feature tax resistance as a key tactic: “Tax resistance to withhold economic oxygen from the regime for repression.” The “Blue and White National Unity” group has signed on to the call. They hope to pressure the regime to release political prisoners and to fulfill agreements it made in negotiations during previous strikes. The Ortega regime released 100 political prisoners to try to lure the opposition back to the negotiating table (not including tax resistance leader Irlanda Jerez, who has been tortured in prison, and is still being held).
• Arief Poyuono, deputy chair of the opposition Indonesian party Gerindra, called the 2019 presidential election in Indonesia a fraud: “Among the steps that the people who don’t recognize the government that resulted from the 2019 presidential election can take is to stop paying taxes to said government,” he said in a press release.
• The IRS is redesigning its W-4 form. This is the form that employees fill out when they start a new job, or when they want to change how much tax is withheld from their paychecks. The new form, though still in the drafting process, looks like it’s going to be much more complicated. This may also, alas, complicate the process for people wanting to get started with tax resistance by reducing the amount withheld from their paychecks.
• Some new photos from the 1898 Dog Tax War in New Zealand have emerged.
• Fed up drivers continue to disable and destroy traffic-ticket cameras. TheNewspaper.com cites several recent examples from France and Germany.
• Another potential contributor to worsening “taxpayer morale” in the United States: the word has gotten out that the poorest taxpayers are about as likely to be audited as the richest 1%.
• I thought this was interesting: I’d heard that the IRS could step in and claim top priority in a bankruptcy — pushing other creditors aside as it helps itself to what’s left of your assets. But what I didn’t realize is that this apparently only applies to the tax part of your tax debt: not to any interest & penalties the IRS has applied. For those, the agency has to get in line like everyone else.