How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → manufacture & sell alternatives to taxed goods → homegrown, home-brew, & moonshine

A few weeks ago a friend of mine loaned me his home-brewing kit and showed me how to use it. We cooked up my first batch of Homespun Brew — a pale ale that, remarkably enough, tastes just like beer.

The federal excise tax on beer comes to about a nickle per bottle (that doesn’t count state excise taxes, sales taxes and state-mandated bottle deposit fees). If you were to drink a six pack every day, you’d contribute a little more than a hundred dollars to the feds over the course of the year. So this is small change compared to the income tax or the payroll tax.

Still, I like the symbolism of home brewing tax-free beer. It reminds me a bit of the American colonists’ switch from tea to coffee in order to foil the British tax on tea, or of Gandhi’s campaign to encourage people to spin their own cloth and harvest their own salt rather than pay the British monopoly. Gandhi’s campaign had a value that went beyond its bottom-line pounds-and-pence figure. Spending the time spinning cloth was a way of consciously participating on a daily basis in the resistance — wearing the homespun cloth was a way of broadcasting your commitment to those around you.

And besides, brewing beer is fun and when you’re done you’ve got beer!

Since it’s 4/20, there must be some way I can sneak a reference to marijuana on to The Picket Line. Well, thank you Milton Friedman! The quasi-libertarian economist gives with one hand and takes away with the other, circulating a petition endorsing a report on The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition. The report suggests that among the benefits of eliminating marijuana prohibition would be a $7.7 billion decrease in government spending on the cruel and hopeless project — and, if the government decided to tax the wicked weed (and of course it would), they could pull in between $2.4 and $6.2 billion by doing so.

So after prohibition falls, kids, don’t neglect your home-growing skills. A tax stamp on your stash is bound to harsh your mellow.

Want to start brewing your own beer (and thereby avoiding the federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages?). Instructables has some well-illustrated step-by-step instructions for brewing your first batch.

Chris O’Brien, author of Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World, tells us How Microbrew Can Save the World.

His arguments don’t even touch on the federal excise tax. He’s more interested in how home brewing, world-wide, promotes small-scale industry (and household industry), and the economic power of women. It’s a side of home-brewing I’d never really examined before.

I’ve recently put the finishing touches on a first draft of the new edition of NWTRCC’s pamphlet on “Low Income / Simple Living as War Tax Resistance” — here’s our sidebar on home-brewing:

The Indian independence movement boycotted goods that the British colonial occupation monopolized and taxed, such as alcohol. Gandhi’s independence campaign encouraged Indians to produce their own salt and cloth, both to withdraw financial support from the British monopolies and to encourage the development of domestic industry.

Rebellious British colonists used a similar tactic during the American Revolution — making homespun cloth in patriotic “spinning bees” and boycotting British monopoly tea.

What would be a good equivalent of the patriotic spinning bee for today’s anti-imperialists? What commercial transactions does the government tax that it would have a harder time taxing if they were the fruits of household industry rather than the marketplace?

One good candidate is home-brewed beer. The federal excise tax on beer comes to about a nickle per bottle. By home-brewing, you can resist this tax, learn a craft, and drink good beer — all legally! It is a winning proposition any way you look at it. Imagine “brewing bees” or “drinking bees” at which tax resisters belt out songs of liberty with gusto!

Wrote one home-brewer: “I like the symbolism of home brewing tax-free beer. Gandhi’s campaign had a value that went beyond its bottom-line pounds-and-pence figure. Spending time spinning cloth was a way of consciously participating on a daily basis in the resistance, and wearing the homespun cloth was a way of broadcasting your commitment to those around you. Besides, brewing beer is fun and when you’re done you’ve got beer!”

Most of the examples in today’s Picket Line can be found in greater detail in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation. In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.

Here are some of the examples I found:

1. Tax resister “insurance”

   For instance, the Breton Association in 19^th century France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”

   Another example was the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in 1930s Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal battle against the tax.

   American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the IRS. The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal amount.

   The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up [the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any confinement.”

2. Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.

   Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities. Whiteway Colony was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the Bijou and Agape communities live below a taxable income so as to avoid paying taxes.

3. Supporting resisters as an employer

   Some members of the Restored Israel of Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were resisting taxes.

   Vivien Kellems refused to withhold taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”

   Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several months.”

4. Disrupting auctions of seized property

   Earlier this year I recounted a dramatic and successful example of the American group “Peacemakers” blocking the sale of Ernest & Marion Bromley’s seized home.

   British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized for tax refusal.

   Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown in’ by the auctioneer.”

5. Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail

   Jessica Ramer and a Claire Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether or not to declare the income.

   Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.

   (100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)

   You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but still give the nice server what they have earned.

6. Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions

   Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging IRS seizures:

   The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington, D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation. He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop, to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason barter has become such an integral part of my life.

7. Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products

   Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth, alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition, and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed, non-foreign-monopoly salt.

   An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on alcoholic beverages).

8. Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses

   One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:

   Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty Loan.

   These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan. The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.

   Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda, reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.

9. Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
   • Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,

     The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherers and sinners,” “tax-gatherers and Gentiles,” “tax-gatherers and harlots,” “tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.

   • A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before the American revolution. John Adams wrote:

     At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.

   • Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:

     [W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:

     Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.

10. Violently resist tax collectors, disrupt trials/auctions, intimidate collaborators

    Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this, governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently, percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which only increases the resentment of those being collected from.

    During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.

    The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.

    The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers who complied in paying the excise tax.

11. Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters

    If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of taxed British imports by declaring that

    …we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public, shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer: and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence, with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer; and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country, and infamous, who shall break this agreement.

12. Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics

    In mid-19^th century Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:

    The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.

13. Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters

    The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings, you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which tax collector.

14. Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests

    When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.

    During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax resisters. In early 1968, for instance, 448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.

    This year’s 2008 War Tax Boycott, Don’t Buy Bush’s War, and Pledge for Peace campaigns also have a public-signing component.

    Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many large-scale tax resistance campaigns.

15. Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee

    Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister alternative funds function partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.

    When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs as he was picketing the IRS office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”

16. Keep in contact with resisters and express support

    After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the IRS as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across the country.

17. Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making

    Here there are too many examples to list.

18. Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers

    When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that “The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry to its knees.”

19. Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters

    The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”

    Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:

    Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed? They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the clothes in a taxicab.

    They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I had started.

    And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe. You look, well, dignified.”

    That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.

20. Support the families of imprisoned resisters

    When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”

21. Study the law, give legal support

    When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”

22. Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways

    Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable television on United States involvement in Central America, and a people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community, however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”

Can you think of any I’ve missed?

Last week, I helped my next-door neighbors whip up their first batch of home-brew. They started off with a very simple recipe: hard apple cider. It really is easy — the yeast does all the heavy lifting.

They borrowed one of my carboys and filled it with a blend of two varieties of store-bought apple juice (the kind that’s made with real juice, not apple-flavored corn syrup, and that’s pasteurized rather than having any yeast-murdering chemical preservatives). Then they dropped in a package of wine yeast that we picked up at the local brew supply store, and capped the carboy with an airlock.

That’s the extent of the recipe: apple juice and yeast. It really is that simple.

Then came a week of waiting as the carboy bubbled and the airlock released the sweet smell of cider in their kitchen. Yesterday was bottling day. The carboy was still bubbling pretty strongly. If they’d waited longer to bottle they would have had a stronger, drier cider. But they were aiming for something more on the sweet side, so we bottled early.

They sterilized some bottles in their dishwasher, washing without soap and using the “heated dry” feature. And they sterilized some bottlecaps (also purchased at the brew supply store) by boiling them briefly.

They added a little more sugar to the mix by boiling a cup of powdered dextrose in a cup of water, cooling this, and then adding it to the carboy. This gives the yeast a little more to feed on while the cider is in the bottles, to make sure that the end product winds up well-carbonated (though given that it was still bubbling fiercely in the carboy, this may not have been necessary).

Then they used a tube with a racking cane and bottle filling attachment (sounds complicated, but it amounts to seven or eight dollars worth of plastic parts) to fill the bottles, and a hand-cranked capper to cap them. They left a few bottles uncapped and passed them around so we could all taste the cider as it is today. Unlike home-brewed beer, which really needs to sit in the bottle and ferment and become carbonated before it tastes right, this young hard cider was very drinkable.

They ended up with about 35 or so capped bottles worth of cider from their original five gallons of apple juice. Over the coming weeks, the cider will continue to ferment in the bottles, becoming stronger and drier and more carbonated until the yeast is overwhelmed by the alcohol or the pressure and gives up the ghost.

There’s a tax angle here, of course. Last I checked, the federal excise tax on hard cider was somewhere in the neighborhood of 25¢ per gallon, and in my state at least there’s a significant state excise tax too (and one the government is aiming to raise soon). When you brew your own, you don’t have to pay the government for the privilege of sipping a cold one.

But even without the tax angle, the frugality, self-sufficiency, and craft angles make home-brewing attractive.

My neighbors were so enthused by the project that they ran out to buy more apple juice to try again. And they’re eager to try a more complex recipe like beer.

Last month, I noted the release on-line of an old, silent docudrama film about the Whiskey Rebellion. The Prelinger Archives have just released another old silent film of some interest, this time a comedy: The Moonshiner.

A note: “There’s Revenue Officers in the mountains, look-out — A Friend.”

“We swear to kill every Revenue dog in the mountains.”

Our bumbling protagonist stumbles on the bootleggers’ still

And is stumbled on himself: “Up with your mitts, you moonshiner.”

I thought I was pretty clever, brewing my own beer to beat the federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages. But Don Carey is the first pioneer I know of in the tax resisting tobacco growing field:

When the federal tax on tobacco went up earlier this year, one man from Portage County decided “enough is enough”. He then decided to grow his own tobacco.

Don Carey says the decision was part protest and part economics.

He bought 33 variet[ies] of seeds to determine which ones grew the best in northeast Ohio.

His tobacco field was planted with the help of 15 volunteers.

The planting was the easy part.

Tobacco is a labor intensive crop that requires constant attention to keep pests from destroying it.

Carey, a pack a day smoker, needs about 17 pounds of tobacco a year for himself. The yield from his tobacco field could bring 200 pounds.

He says he’s willing to share his experience to help others. “Planning on selling plants and seeds and instruction manuals. I want to help anyone that wants to grow tobacco,” said Carey.

His daughter, a non-smoker, is helping her father because of the principle involved. “I think he’s doing a good thing showing people there are other options besides spending so much money,” said Lisa Carey.

At $5.56 a pack, smokers are spending about $120 per pound of tobacco.

It will take a big investment in time before Carey finds out if his plan worked out. It takes about a year to dry and cure the tobacco leaf.

Some this-and-that, in brief:

• I’ve added the section on “The Sufferings of many, for Refuſing to pay the wicked Exactions of the Ceſs, Locality, Fynes &c. Vindicated” from Alexander Shields’s 1687 book A Hind let looſe, or An Hiſtorical Repreſentation of the Testimonies, of the Church of Scotland, for the Intereſt of Chriſt, vvith the true State thereof in all its Periods, &c as a stand-alone page. I dropped the long “s”es for readability’s sake, and did some reformatting and breaking up of the multi-page paragraphs, but otherwise kept it pretty much as-was. It’s tough reading, but represents an early and unusually methodical defense of tax resistance, and I hope to spend some time distilling its more interesting arguments into more modern English at some point.
• Here are the details, the schedule, and a registration form for the upcoming NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland this November.
• Part of the new CIA Inspector General’s report that jumped out at me was this excerpt, found in an appendix, from the CIA Office of Medical Services [sic] guide on how to torture captives by waterboarding without inadvertently killing them: “In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks. Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excess filling of the airways and loss of consciousness. An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the interrogator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required.”
• Here’s a more thorough article about Scott Byars and others like him who are beginning to grow their own tobacco as a way to beat the increasing taxes. The article also has links to seed companies and on-line instructions.
• Lets say you send an envelope full of powdered sugar to the IRS with a cover letter saying its anthrax and they’re all gonna die. Furthermore lets say you’re none too bright, and you sent the envelope from “an automated postal center where [you] paid postage with [your] credit card” and they trace the envelope back to you and successfully prosecute you. What sentence will you face? A year and a day, apparently.

Salon takes a look at the growing practice of home distilling (a.k.a. “moonshine”).

While home-brewing beer and wine is legal, within generous limits, all home distillation of hard liquor is illegal in the United States. But that isn’t stopping some folks, who, for fun or to avoid the taxes, rig up a cheap kettle still and make their own fire-water.

The laws against moonshine might be a vestige of Prohibition, but the most likely explanation for the government’s recalcitrance is taxes: It collects $2.14 per 750 milliliter bottle of 80 proof alcohol, versus only 21 cents for the same size bottle of standard wine and a paltry 5 cents per can of beer. Getting a distilling license can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and requires so much hassle and paperwork that few individual distillers find it worth the effort — after all, they just want to drink the stuff, not sell it (which would turn them into bootleggers). So instead, they just make ’shine.

Home distillation information is easy to find on-line, and enforcement seems to be very lax. I’ve seen above-ground brew supply stores openly selling home distillation equipment, and you can also order working stills on-line (“sold as art decor only” of course).

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• One thing I didn’t mention in my earlier linkdump about expatriatism and renunciation of citizenship as a tax resistance strategy, is that the U.S. government has an “exit tax” that it applies to people who renounce their citizenship. William Thomas Worster of The Hague University has written a paper for Florida Tax Review arguing that this tax is unconstitutional.
• Another brief note about the war tax resistance movement in Spain, this time from the Antimilitarist Assembly of Gran Canaria (one of the Canary Islands). Complaining of Spanish arms sales to Morocco and of the government’s use of the economic crisis to force cuts in social spending (while military spending is “the only thing that has not been cut”), and eager not to be complicit in military spending, the assembly called for war tax resistance.
• Circle of 13 turned me on to Joan Baez’s rendition of the song “Copper Kettle” — an anthem for whiskey rebels and moonshiners.
• Mark your calendars for the November, 2010 NWTRCC national gathering in Boston, Massachusetts. This one looks to be particularly good, as it will be held in conjunction with the 25^th Annual New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters.

And now we’re off for a few weeks in Mexico. I’ve got a few pages of archival material pre-written and I may stumble in to an internet cafe from time to time and slap them up on-site, but other than that you shouldn’t expect to see much here until August.

As I mentioned several days back, I have been working on a series of pages, originally intended to supplement NWTRCC’s website or literature, on the subject of “Where Else Does the Government Get Money to Make War, and What Can We Do About It?” (Where else other than the personal income tax, that is.)

Unfortunately, it seems that the defenders of the NWTRCC faith are not happy with the direction this project has taken so far, fearing that it would distract from the orthodox war tax resistance message the group has already established, or something like that.

So I’ve dropped the project, and will just go ahead and publish the pages I’ve assembled so far here instead. Here’s the first, along with some introductory material:

Sources of Federal Revenue in a Typical Year

The United States government gets the majority of its revenue for conducting wars from two sources: the personal income tax and social insurance taxes (the “payroll” tax that ostensibly funds such programs as Social Security and Medicare). In addition, the government usually borrows a great deal of money to cover expenses that exceed its revenues. Another large source of revenue is the corporate income tax. A number of other taxes and fees and other sources of income make up the rest.

The receipts from some taxes and fees go into the federal government’s “general fund” from which it pays for most of its budget items, including most military spending. Receipts from other taxes and fees go into specific trust funds. For example, there is a tax on fuel that goes into the “Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund” that is used to fund the agency that oversees the cleanup of sites where fuel has seeped into the ground from leaking underground fuel storage tanks.

Some war tax resisters only want to resist taxes that go into the general fund but do not mind paying taxes that are at least nominally destined for such non-military-related trust funds.

However, Congress has a history of “borrowing” from trust funds to pay for general fund spending (including military spending). For example, it borrowed heavily from money paid into Social Security when more money was being collected by the payroll tax than was being paid out in Social Security benefits. Now that benefits paid are starting to exceed payroll tax receipts, Congress is balking at paying back this borrowed money and is instead talking of a Social Security “crisis” that will necessitate raising taxes or cutting benefits. What this amounts to is that all along, Congress treated the payroll tax as if it were money in the general fund that it could spend on war.

For this, and other reasons, some war tax resisters want to resist even those taxes that are ostensibly levied for non-military purposes.

The Excise Tax on Tobacco

Description

Every time someone buys a pack of cigarettes, they pay $1.01 in federal excise tax, and an average of $1.20 in state taxes (different states have different tobacco excise tax rates). Other tobacco products are also taxed.

Amount of the Tax

The federal excise tax on tobacco products rose sharply in 2009, and has risen 321% since 1995. As of 2009, the federal tax rates on tobacco products are:

In addition, every premises at which tobacco product manufacturing takes place is required to pay $1,000 per year in federal tax (some smaller manufacturers may pay a $500 tax instead).

How Much the Government Collects

In fiscal year 2009, the federal government reported collecting over $950 million in tobacco-related excise taxes.

How This Tax Is Collected

The manufacturer or importer of the tobacco product is liable for the federal tax. Tobacco products may be transferred from one licensed manufacturer or importer to another without tax being paid, but the final such entity who sells the product on its way to the end-consumer must pay the tax.

Are the Tax Receipts Earmarked?

These taxes go into the federal government’s general fund.

How Can You Resist This Tax?

Obviously, you can avoid contributing to tobacco taxes by not purchasing, manufacturing, selling, or using tobacco products.

In cases where the tax on tobacco products is considerably different in neighboring jurisdictions, some people evade the higher of the taxes by smuggling tobacco products from the low-tax jurisdiction to the higher-tax one and then selling (or using) the products there.

One can support the tax resistance of others by participating in the production and distribution of counterfeit tax stamps (such as are attached to cigarette packaging to indicate that the tax has been paid).

Another option is to “grow your own.” The process of growing and curing tobacco is complex but not completely out of reach of the small-scale producer. Don Carey of Freedom Township, Ohio, responded to a 2,153% increase in the excise taxes on roll-your-own tobacco by doing just that (see: “Smoker decides to grow his own tobacco” Ohio Beacon 28 June 2009).

See Also

• Lovenheim, Michael F. “How Far to the Border?: The Extent and Impact of Cross-Border Casual Cigarette Smuggling” 61 National Tax Journal 7–33 (March 2008)

This is from a series of pages on sources of federal war spending other than the federal income tax and strategies that war tax resisters can use to reduce their support of the government in these areas.

The Excise Tax on Alcoholic Beverages

Description

All alcoholic beverages sold in the United States, except home-brewed beer and wine or bootlegged liquor, have federal excise taxes applied to their manufacture.

Amount of the Tax

Small wineries (fewer than 250,000 gallons per year) have lower tax rates, with the smallest (fewer than 150,000 gallons per year) at the lowest end of the scale.

In addition, the federal government applies “occupational taxes” to wineries, bottlers, distillers, breweries, wholesalers, retailers, and other premises associated with alcoholic beverages.

How Much the Government Collects

In 2008, the federal government collected $9.5 billion from federal excise taxes on alcoholic beverages.

How This Tax Is Collected

The manufacturer or importer is responsible for paying the tax.

Are the Tax Receipts Earmarked?

These taxes go into the federal government’s general fund.

How Can You Resist This Tax?

Obviously, you can avoid contributing to taxes on alcoholic beverages by not purchasing, manufacturing, selling, or drinking them.

It is also legal under federal law and most state laws to brew your own wine, beer, or cider, so long as you stay under 100 gallons per year (200 gallons if there is more than one adult in your household). You are not required to pay federal excise tax on such home brew that you consume yourself.

You can also bring a small quantity of alcoholic beverages back from a foreign country without being required to pay an import duty.

You can also distill your own spirits at home (moonshine, “bathtub gin”), but this is not legal.

See Also

• How to brew your own beer, a photographic walk-through from The Picket Line
• How to brew your own hard cider, a photographic walk-through from The Picket Line

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Grow your own tobacco? In Brooklyn? When taxes mean homegrown tobacco costs less than 25% of what you’d pay at the store, you betcha.
• The IRS says that it’s implementing new processes that ease up on the liens it files against people who haven’t paid their federal taxes. This includes raising the tax-debt threshold at which the agency decides to file a lien, making it easier for newly-recompliant taxpayers to have their liens lifted, and making it easier to enter into installment agreements and “offers in compromise.” This was partially in response to complaints from the Taxpayer Advocate’s office about the agency’s heavy-handed and counterproductive enforcement methods.

Back on the fourth I mentioned boycotts of government-produced or -taxed goods and services as a variety of tax resistance or a tactic that has accompanied tax resistance campaigns. Today I’m going to cover a related tactic: the manufacture and sale of untaxed alternatives to taxed goods.

• This tactic was put to good use in the American Revolution. Boycotts of British products like tea, paint, cloth, were supplemented by expansion of local industry to make alternative products:

  Members of Boston’s Whig Party demonstrated their patriotism by nursing tea leaves and mulberry trees in their gardens. New England farmers were exhorted to convert their oak plains into sheep pastures and produce enough wool to clothe every American. Colonists were urged to abstain from eating lamb or mutton in order to encourage American woolen manufactures.

  In less than a year the boycott had so disrupted Transatlantic trade that thousands of British workers lost their jobs.

  Gatherings at which dozens of people would card and spin yarn, weave fabric, or sew clothing, were simultaneously acts of resistance and patriotic rallies. Towns competed with each other over how many yards of cloth they could produce, with results breathlessly reported in the newspapers. At society balls, a woman who turned up in anything but a homespun cloth dress would be shunned.

  …at the first commencement exercises of Rhode Island College (later Brown University), the president proud-spiritedly wore wholly homespun clothing. At Harvard, the faculty and students had all taken to homespun in support of their women spinners, of whom the Boston Chronicle had bragged “[T]hey exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country, rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience.”

  American tea drinkers switched to “balsamic hyperion” — dried raspberry leaves — which could be produced domestically.
• Homespun cloth, or khādī, was a signature part of the Indian independence movement (which also, famously, promoted the domestic production of salt to break Britain’s taxed monopoly). Gandhi insisted that everyone in the resistance movement should participate in producing, and of course should exclusively wear, domestic cloth.
• I’ve tried to promote home-brewing beer and cider as a way of avoiding the federal excise tax on those products. Home distilling is another option, though it’s not legal in the United States. When Britain increased the excise tax on distilled spirits in Ireland in the 1840s, “the only effect was to increase illicit distillation. The decrease in the duty was £7,361 4s. The number of persons in confinement for breach of the revenue laws had increased from 84 to 368.” A few people have started growing their own tobacco as a way of combating the increasingly prohibitive tobacco excise taxes. Audrey Silk grew and cured enough tobacco at her Brooklyn home in 2009 to roll nine cartons worth of cigarettes, which would have cost more than $1,000 at taxed rates at the time.
• The “Addiopizzo” movement in Italy founded a supermarket, the shelves of which were stocked exclusively with goods from producers who had vowed not to pay any more protection money to the mafia. They also maintain a buycott list of such companies to help consumers make pizzo-free shopping choices.
• When Greece tacked new taxes onto electric bills as a way of combating tax evasion, the sales of gas-powered electric generators shot up.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The Household Tax resistance movement in Ireland has adopted a new tactic. Two Cork city council members, among others, were arrested for demonstrating inside a Bank of Ireland branch. The bank was targeted in part to protest that the government has been using tax money to bail out banks while raising taxes and imposing austerity budgets on citizens.
• Enric Durán had another plan to strike back at the banks: he visited 39 banks, and took out 68 loans for a total of €492,000, which he donated “to various social movements that are building alternatives to capitalism.” Then he went underground and left the banks holding the (empty) bag. Waging Nonviolence recently interviewed Enric Durán in hiding, and published an article about his actions. Apparently he’s at the core of the group that is promoting “Desobediència Integral” (Comprehensive Disobedience) that I mentioned last month.
• The Washington Post published a nice long-form piece about the Transform Now Plowshares activists who boldly broke into and vandalized the Y-12 (Oak Ridge) nuclear weapons facility last summer.
• Bill Buppert, at Zero Gov, has written a nice profile of incorrigible moonshiner Popcorn Sutton.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Irish protesters are continuing their campaign to block the installation of water meters, including recently at the Ardmore Estate neighborhood in Cork.
• While home-brewing is legal in the United States, home distilling is not. Distillation of drinkable alcohol is highly regulated (and taxed). But nonetheless, home distilling has become a popular hobby, and the federales have been largely looking the other way and not harassing hobbyist-level distillers (as opposed to commercial moonshiners). That sadly appears to be changing.
• The Other Eye, a Catalan journal, recently published Carles Valentí’s essay on tax resistance, which is another example of the Spanish tax resistance movement expanding beyond war tax resistance to a broader critique of corrupt, wasteful, and harmful government spending.
• Italy’s “Northern League” likes to talk about tax resistance a whole bunch, but I don’t see as much evidence of them moving from talk to action as I’d like. The latest example of this big talk comes from party Secretary Matteo Salvini, who called for a tax strike to begin on 14 November. We shall see.

Here’s a tax resistance campaign I can really sympathize with, as a home brewer. If the tax collector ever comes after me and wants to put a tax stamp on my booze, there’s gonna be a fight.

From the 17 September 1904 Dundee Evening Telegraph:

French “Passive Resisters.”

The Taxing of Privately Distilled Spirits.

Paris, Friday. France, Like England, has her “passive resisters,” but the resistance has nothing whatever to do with an Education Act or denominational teaching.

The law passed a year or two ago making the privately distilled spirit (for home use) of peasants and wine growers subject to a tax has never been really accepted by those against whom it was directed, and the resisters have had the connivance and co-operation of the local authorities.

Two days since the tax gatherers in the village of Auxon, near Vesoul, attempted to penetrate into the houses of private distillers for the purpose of assessment. For this they demanded the co-operation of the Mayor. The Mayor categorically refused to give it. The men of the law then applied to the Deputy-Mayor, who replied—“I am here to act in the Mayor’s absence. He is not absent. I see him on his doorstep. I refuse to act.”

A crowd, of course, had collected, and the Mayor, of course, made a speech. He appealed to the tax gatherers, in their own interest, not to excite the hostility of his (the Mayor’s) gallant townsmen. The chief tax gatherer then replied in these terms–“It is well. We go. But the last word will remain with the law. We shall return.”

And without doubt they will, and trouble is likely to ensue. –“Morning Leader.”

Foxfire was a student-run magazine that focused on learning about and writing about the skills and traditions of Appalachian people.

They created a series of books that compiled some of their stories. The first of these, published in 1972, includes a story on “Moonshining as a Fine Art.” Today I’m going to share a few brief excerpts that touch on the tax resistance aspects of Appalachian moonshining.

In the first mention, the story quotes from Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. I’ll just go to the source and quote it directly and more extensively:

The people of Great Britain, irrespective of race, have always been ardent haters of excise laws. As Blackstone has curtly said, “From its original to the present time, the very name of excise has been odious to the people of England.” Dr. Johnson, in his dictionary, defined excise as “A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.” In 1659, when the town of Edinburgh placed an additional impost on ale, the Covenanter Nicoll proclaimed it an act so impious that immediately “God frae the heavens declared his anger by sending thunder and unheard tempests and storms.” And we still recall Burns’ fiery invective:

  Thae curst horse-leeches o’ the Excise
  Wha mak the whisky stills their prize!
Haud up thy han’, Deil! ance, twice, thrice!
   There, seize the blinkers! [wretches]
An bake them up in brunstane pies
   For poor d⸺n’d drinkers.

Perhaps the chief reason, in England, for this outspoken detestation of the exciseman lay in the fact that the law empowered him to enter private houses and to search at his own discretion. In Scotland and Ireland there was another objection, even more valid in the eyes of the common people; excise struck heaviest at their national drink. Englishmen, at the time of which we are speaking, were content with their ale, not yet having contracted the habit of drinking gin; but Scotchmen and Irishmen preferred distilled spirits, manufactured, as a rule, out of their own barley, in small pot-stills (poteen means, literally, a little pot), the process being a common household art frequently practiced “every man for himself and his neighbor.” A tax, then, upon whiskey was as odious as a tax upon bread baked on the domestic hearth — if not, indeed, more so.

Now, there came a time when the taxes laid upon spirituous liquors had increased almost to the point of prohibition. This was done, not so much for the sake of revenue, as for the sake of the public health and morals. Englishmen had suddenly taken to drinking gin… Parliament, alarmed at the outlook, then passed an excise law of extreme severity. As always happens in such cases, the law promptly defeated its own purpose by breeding a spirit of defiance and resistance among the great body of the people.

The heavier the tax, the more widespread became the custom of illicit distilling. The law was evaded in two different ways, the method depending somewhat upon the relative loyalty of the people toward the Crown, and somewhat upon the character of the country, as to whether it was thickly or thinly settled.

In rich and populous districts, as around London and Edinburgh and Dublin, the common practice was to bribe government officials. A historian of that time declares that “Not infrequently the gauger could have laid his hands upon a dozen stills within as many hours; but he had cogent reasons for avoiding discoveries unless absolutely forced to make them. Where informations were laid, it was by no means uncommon for a trusty messenger to be dispatched from the residence of the gauger to give due notice, so that by daybreak next morning ‘the boys,’ with all their utensils, might disappear. Now and then they were required to leave an old and worn-out still in place of that which they were to remove, so that a report of actual seizure might be made. A good understanding was thus often kept up between the gaugers and the distillers; the former not infrequently received a ‘duty’ upon every still within his jurisdiction, and his cellars were never without ‘a sup of the best.’ …” Another writer says that “The amount of spirits produced by distillation avowedly illicit vastly exceeded that produced by the licensed distilleries. According to Wakefield, stills were erected even in the kitchens of baronets and in the stables of clergymen.”

Moonshining proper was confined to the poorer class of people, especially in Ireland, who lived in wild and sparsely settled regions, who were governed by a clan feeling stronger than their loyalty to the central Government, and who either could not afford to share their profits with the gaugers, or disdained to do so. Such people hid their little pot-stills in inaccessible places, as in the savage mountains of Connemara, where it was impossible, or at least hazardous, for the law to reach them. With arms in hand they defied the officers. “The hatred of the people toward the gauger was for a very long period intense. The very name invariably aroused the worst passions. To kill a gauger was considered anything but a crime; wherever it could be done with comparative safety, he was hunted to the death.”

Kephart goes on to draw the parallels here to what happened in the Whiskey Rebellion, when Scotch-Irish Americans in poor, rural areas rebelled against an excise tax imposed by an urban, English-descended elite. I’ve covered the Whiskey Rebellion in other posts, so I won’t reproduce his full summary here. He starts up his tale of excise tax resistance again at the Civil War:

In 1862 a tax of 20 cents a gallon was levied. Early in 1864 it rose to 60 cents. This cut off the industrial use of spirits, but did not affect its use as a beverage. In the latter part of 1864 the tax leaped to $1.50 a gallon, and the next year it reached the prohibitive figure of $2. The result of such excessive taxation was just what it had been in the old times, in Great Britain. In and around the centers of population there was wholesale fraud and collusion. “Efforts made to repress and punish frauds were of absolutely no account whatever… The current price at which distilled spirits were sold in the markets was everywhere recognized and commented on by the press as less than the amount of the tax, allowing nothing whatever for the cost of manufacture.”

Seeing that the outcome was disastrous from a fiscal point of view — the revenue from this source was falling to the vanishing point — Congress, in 1868, cut down the tax to 50 cents a gallon. “Illicit distillation practically ceased the very hour that the new law came into operation; …the Government collected during the second year of the continuance of the act $3 for every one that was obtained during the last year of the $2 rate.”

But temptation proved too much for the government to resist, and it raised the tax to 70 and then to 90 cents by 1875. This made moonshining attractive again. According to one report soon after “Investigations showed that the persons mainly concerned in the work of fraud were the Government officials rather than the distillers; and that a so-called ‘Whiskey Ring’… extended to Washington, and embraced within its sphere of influence and participation, not only local supervisors, collectors, inspectors, and storekeepers of the revenue, but even officers of the Internal Revenue Bureau, and probably, also, persons occupying confidential relations with the Executive of the Nation.”

In the Commissioner of Internal Revenue’s report for 1875–76, he wrote, of the moonshiners:

The extent of these frauds would startle belief. I can safely say that during the past year not less than 3,000 illicit stills have been operated in the districts named. Those stills are of a producing capacity of 10 to 50 gallons a day. They are usually located at inaccessible points in the mountains, away from the ordinary lines of travel, and are generally owned by unlettered men of desperate character, armed and ready to resist the officers of the law. Where occasion requires, they come together in companies of from ten to fifty persons, gun in hand, to drive the officers out of the country. They resist as long as resistance is possible, and when their stills are seized, and they themselves are arrested, they plead ignorance and poverty and at once crave the pardon of the Government.

In certain portions of the country many citizens not guilty of violating the law themselves were in strong sympathy with those who did violate, and the officers in many instances found themselves unsupported in the execution of the laws by a healthy state of public opinion. The distillers — ever ready to forcibly resist the officers — were, I have no doubt, at times treated with harshness. This occasioned much indignation on the part of those who sympathized with the lawbreakers…

At this time not only is the United States defrauded of its revenues, and its officers openly resisted, but when arrests are made it often occurs that prisoners are rescued by mob violence, and officers and witnesses are often at night dragged from their homes and cruelly beaten, or waylaid and assassinated.

Kephart later relates this conversation:

One day I asked a mountain man, “How about the revenue officers? What sort of men are they?”

“Torn down scoundrels every one.”

“Oh come, now!”

“Yes, they are; plumb ornery — lock, stock, barrel, and gun stick.”

“Consider what they have to go through,” I remarked. “Like other detectives, they cannot secure evidence without practicing deception. Their occupation is hard and dangerous. Here in the mountains every man’s hand is against them.”

“Why is it agin them? We ain’t all blockaders; yet you can search these mountains through with a fine-tooth comb and you wunt find ary critter as has a good word to say for the revenue. The reason is ’t we know them men from ’way back; we know whut they uster do afore they jined the sarvice, and why they did it. Most of them were blockaders their own selves, till they saw how they could make more money turncoatin’. They use their authority to abuse people who ain’t never done nothin’ no-how. Dangerous business? Shucks! There’s Jim Cody, for a sample [I suppress the real name]; he was principally raised in this county, and I’ve knowed him from a boy. He’s been eight years in the government sarvice, and hain’t never been shot at once. But he’s killed a blockader–oh, yes! He arrested Tom Hayward, a chunk of a boy, that was scared most fitified and never resisted more’n a mouse. Cody, who was half drunk his-self, handcuffed tom, quarreled with him, and shot the boy dead while the handcuffs was on him! Tom’s relations sued Cody in the county court, but he carried the case to the federal court, and they were too poor to follow it up. I tell you, though, thar’s a settlement less ’n a thousand mile from the river whar Jim Cody ain’t never showed his nose sence. He knows there’d be another revenue ‘murdered.’ ”

“It must be ticklish business for an officer to prowl about the headwaters of these mountain streams, looking for ‘sign.’ ”

“Hell’s banjer! they don’t go prodjectin’ around looking for stills. They set at home on their hunkers till some feller comes and informs.”

“What class of people does the informing?”

“Oh sometimes hit’s some pizen old bum who’s been refused credit. Sometimes hit’s the wife or mother of some feller who’s drinkin’ too much. Then, agin, hit may be some rival blockader who aims to cut off the other feller’s trade, and, same time, divert suspicion from his own self. But ginerally hit’s jest somebody who has a gredge agin the blockader fer family reasons, or business reasons, and turns informer to git even.”

Kephart adds:

It is only fair to present this side of the case, because there is much truth in it, and because it goes far to explain the bitter feeling against revenue agents personally that is almost universal in the mountains, and is shared even by the mountain preachers.… There is no denying that there have been officers in the revenue service who, stung by the contempt in which they were held as renegades from their own people, have used their authority in settling private scores, and have inflicted grievous wrongs upon innocent people. This is matter of official record. In his report for 1882, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue himself declared that “instances have been brought to my attention where numerous prosecutions have been instituted for the most trivial violations of law, and the arrested parties taken long distances and subjected to great inconveniences and expense, not in the interest of the government, but apparently for no other reason than to make costs.”

An ex-united states commissioner told me that, in the darkest days of this struggle, when he himself was obliged to buckle on a revolver every time he put his head out of doors, he had more trouble with his own deputies than with the moonshiners. “As a rule, none but desperadoes could could be hired for the service,” he declared. “For example one time my deputy in your county wanted some liquor for himself. He and two of his cronies crossed the line into South Carolina, raided a still, and got beastly drunk. The blockaders bushwhacked them, riddled a mule and its rider with buckshot, and shot my deputy through the brain with a squirrel rifle. We went over there and buried the victims a few day later, during a snow storm, working with our holster flaps unbuttoned. I had all that work and worry simply because that rascal was bent on getting drunk without paying for it. However it cost him his life.”

Kephart then quotes from the 1877–78 report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Excerpts:

In the mountain regions of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, and in some portions of Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, the illicit manufacture of spirits has been carried on for a number of years, and I am satisfied that the annual loss to the government from this source has been very nearly, if not quite, equal to the annual appropriation for the collection of the internal revenue tax throughout the whole country.…

This nefarious business has been carried on, as a rule, by a determined set of men, who in their various neighborhoods league together for defense against the officers of the law, and at a given signal are ready to come together with arms in their hands to drive the officers of internal revenue out of the country.

As illustrating the extraordinary resistance which the officers have had on some occasions to encounter, I refer to occurrences in Overton County, Tennessee, in August last, where a posse of eleven internal revenue officers, who had stopped at a farmer’s house for the night, were attacked by a band of armed illicit distillers, who kept up a constant fusillade during the whole night, and whose force was augmented during the following day till it numbered nearly two hundred men. The officers took shelter in a log house, which served them as a fort, returning the fire as best they could, and were there besieged for forty-two hours, three of their party being shot — one through the body, one through the arm, and one in the face. I directed a strong force to go to their relief, but in the meantime, through the intervention of citizens, the besieged officers were permitted to retire, taking their wounded with them, and without surrendering their arms.

“The real trouble,” Kephart notes, “was that public sentiment in the mountains was almost unanimously in the moonshiners’ favor.”

Leading citizens were either directly interested in the traffic, or were in active sympathy with the distillers. “In some cases,” said the Commissioner, “State officers including judges on the bench have sided with the illicit distillers and have encouraged the use of the State courts for the prosecution of the officers of the United States upon all sorts of charges, with the evident purpose of obstructing the enforcement of the laws of the United States… I regret to have to record the fact that when the officers of the United States have been shot down from ambuscade, in cold blood, as a rule no efforts have been made on the part of the State officers to arrest the murderers; but in cases where the officers of the United States have been engaged in enforcement of the laws, and have unfortunately come in conflict with the violators of the law, and homicides have occurred, active steps have been at once taken for the arrest of such officers, and nothing would be left undone by the State authorities to bring them to trial and punishment.”

Increased enforcement efforts followed, which showed signs of success until the government got greedy and raised the tax rate again. Then the Baptists & Bootleggers alliance began: the Baptists began to prohibit legal alcohol in the South, and the Bootleggers absorbed the profits from the illegal trade. And there things stood at the time of the publication of Kephart’s book.

Back to Foxfire:

It’s different now? Clearly not, as seen in an article in the May 3, 1968 Atlanta Constitution on the interim report of the Governor’s Crime Commission. In October, 1967, there were around 750 illicit stills in Georgia, operating at a mash capacity of over 750,000 gallons. This amounts to approximately $52 million in annual federal excise tax fraud, and almost $19 million in state fraud. The article quotes the Commission, placing the blame for Georgia’s ranking as the leading producer of moonshine in the United States on “corrupt officials, a misinformed and sometimes uninterested public, and the climate created by Georgia’s 129 dry counties.”

Moonshiners tended to despise the “Feds” or “Revenuers,” but to have more of a friendly rivalry with the local sheriffs. This was in part due to familiarity and to a shared culture, and to a mutual sense that they were each just doing their jobs and trying to get by. One moonshiner recalls:

[T]here was another sheriff whom he often encountered on the streets of a little town in North Carolina. The sheriff would always come up to him, greet him, and ask him what he was up to down in Georgia. The other would usually reply, “Oh, not much goin’ on down there.” If, however, the sheriff had gotten a report about one of his stills, he would follow that reply with, “I hear you’re farmin’ in th’ woods.” The moonshiner would know that that was a warning for him to watch his step. Despite the warning, the sheriff was able to catch him and cut down his stills on three separate occasions, but they remained fast friends.

We talked to several retired sheriffs… and they agreed completely. Most of the blockaders that they had encountered ran small operations, and the whiskey they made was in the best traditions of cleanliness. Besides, times were hard, and a man had to eat. Despite the fact that the sheriffs at that time were paid on the “fee system,” and thus their entire salary depended on the number of arrests they made, they did not go out looking for stills. They made arrests only after reports had been turned in voluntarily by informers…

Foxfire gives more details on this “fee system:”

[T]he local officials got $10 just for a still. If they were able to catch the operator also, they received between $40 and $60. Extra money was given them if they brought in witnesses who could help convict. For the blockader’s car, they received approximately half the price the blockader had to pay to get it back which was usually the cash value of the car. And they were allowed to keep any money they could get from selling the copper out of which the still had been made.

The number of stills actually uncovered varied drastically from month to month. Some months, twenty or thirty would be caught and “cut down,” but other months, none at all would be discovered. Hardest of all was catching the men actually making a run. In almost all cases they had lookouts who were armed with bells, horns, or rifles, and who invariably sounded the alarm at the first sign of danger. By the time the sheriff could get to the still, the men would have all fled into the surrounding hills. We were told about one man who was paid a hundred dollars a week just as sentry. Another still was guarded by the operator’s wife who simply sat in her home with a walkie-talkie that connected her with her husband while he was working. The still, which sat against a cliff behind the house, could only be reached by one route, and that route passed directly in front of the house. The operator was never caught at work.

Foxfire then goes on to relate various techniques for keeping a still well-hidden, and the countermeasures the revenuers took to find the hidden stills, with some interesting anecdotes along the way. The magazine then describes how stills are constructed (with some useful illustrations), and gives a recipe of the process from beginning to end, including distribution and sales.

Links have been piling up in my bookmarks as I spent the last several weeks poring through back issues of The Mennonite.

International Tax Resistance News

• A new law in Samoa requires previously untaxed church ministers to pay income tax. Many, including those from the country’s largest church, are refusing to pay.
• Manoj Viswanathan has sounded the alarm: technology capable of decentralizing the economy is on the way, and since the current system of taxation depends on monitoring certain chokepoints of centralization, “these technologies pose a critical threat to the reporting system underlying domestic and international tax compliance.”
• The United States government has begun denying passports to people with large tax debts. If you’re one of the 362,000 or so Americans who owe more than $51,000 and you haven’t entered into an installment payment plan (I’m one of those), you will likely soon find that you cannot successfully apply for or renew your passport. While the government also has the legal authority to revoke existing passports from such people, it is not yet exercising that power.
• Guerrilla electricians in Greece continue to reestablish electric power to households who have had their power cut off for inability or unwillingness to pay the state utility monopoly’s bills which have been inflated to support the state’s austerity budget policies.
• Veterans of the successful campaign to abolish the “écotaxe” in Brittany held a celebratory picnic on the anniversary of the destruction of one of the highway portals that would have enforced the hated tax. In part the picnic was meant to show solidarity with those who had been convicted of criminal charges for the parts they played in destroying such portals, and in part it was meant as a show of strength to let the government know they would not tolerate any attempts to reestablish the tax.
• The increasing use of traffic-ticket-issuing cameras world­wide as a government revenue booster has led to a rash of direct action by the victim population. This usually takes the form of destroying, disabling, or blocking the cameras. Here are several recent examples:
  • from Saudi Arabia, France, and Italy
  • from France, Italy, and Zambia
  • from Saudi Arabia, France, and Italy again
  • from Italy and France
  • from France ×400 (last month alone)
  • from France and Italy
  • from France and Italy again
• In Maharashtra, India, the Maratha Kranti Morcha protest movement has launched a tax boycott.
• Another “white powder” incident shut down an IRS office for a couple of hours.
• A new report sponsored by an above-ground alcohol industry interest group says moonshine is very popular in low- and middle-income countries as a response to the higher price of taxed above-ground liquor.
• Cigarette smuggling in the United States is disappointing those state governments that hoped for a big revenue boost from increased tobacco taxes.

The Crisis in Nicaragua

Protests against the Ortega/Murillo regime in Nicaragua have been brutally repressed by murderous government and paramilitary forces. Some parts of the protest movement have been engaging in tax resistance, but they have so far been unable to convince COSEP, a Nicaraguan business confederation that nominally supports the protests, to take such a strong action. In addition, an organizer of tax resistance in the Mercado Oriental was arrested and swiftly sentenced to a prison term.

• Tax attorney Theo Báez has been advising businesses of their legal right to delay paying taxes to the government until it comes into compliance with its legal duties.
• La Prensa reports that while tax collections in Managua plummeted in May and June, they have begun to recover.
• Iván Olivares, at Confidencial, examines the prospects for a tax resistance campaign and concludes: “A tax strike would be effective only if it is total.” (translation mine):

  Launched on 31 May as another variety of civic struggle against the dictatorship, the proposal to carry the thesis of civil disobedience to the extreme of applying a “tax strike” is still in force, but has not yet switched on, except in the Mercado Oriental.

  On that date, the Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Legal and Political Sciences, called for “civil disobedience as a national imperative to be put into operation immediately,” inviting employers, workers, students, and taxpayers to immediately suspend the payment of taxes to DGI, DGA, and city hall, in particular “withholding of Income Tax from salaries.”

  Although the call for tax resistance enters the popular imagination as a civil form — and for that reason a legitimate one — of resisting the regime of Daniel Ortega, neither businesses nor individuals have responded with determination to the proposal, from fear or from caution.

  Caution as demonstrated by the sources consulted for this article, who requested anonymity as they explained that people, business-owners and managers in particular, are afraid that the tax administration will fine them or, worse yet, temporarily take over operation of their companies or shutter their business.

  Not all of the sanctions are catastrophic. There are cases in which the fine applied is equivalent to 2.5% of the amount not paid in the case of the monthly advance payment of the business income tax, or 5% in the case of the value-added tax or of income tax withheld from the salaries of employees.

  “Technically, it’s an invalid appropriation of withholdings, and can be criminally sanctioned,” in addition to being shut down, fined, or temporarily put under government management, explained a source with extensive experience in tax matters.

  That said, this source sees a variety of reasons to doubt that they would decide to take such extreme measures, beginning with “as far as I know, they have never applied them to anyone.” Another is that to close a business means sending its workers into unemployment, which implies that they will not receive taxes from the business or from those consumers.

  But beyond believing in the mercy that any of these reasons implicitly assumes, the source points out fact that is easier to accept: “If the resolution is massive, the tax administration simply does not have the capacity to audit and penalize everyone at once.”

  Larger Companies Have More Fear

  If it is decided to penalize only some in order to set a precedent that strikes fear into the others, surely one of the larger ones will be chosen, which not only has more ability to defend itself in the courts, but also to negotiate, precisely because of its size.

  Another source asserts that “although it may seem obvious, the businesses that take the least risk are the most powerful ones, for the simple reason that they are not big taxpayers but big tax collectors.

  “The DGI, does not want to be bothered with them, because if they weaken them, this affects tax revenues, principally value-added tax withholding.” When the big companies that could take such measures don’t apply them, despite their intrinsic power, they are demonstrating “the cowardly face of big capital. If they would decide, the blow to DGI would be immense,” s/he says.

  Róger Arteaga, former director general of Revenue, agrees, saying that “big capital has not wanted to go all-in. It is true that it gave its approval to the strike, but did so with fear and only temporarily.”

  There is at least one group that risks more in a tax strike: import and export companies, which require clearances that can only be obtained once they have paid the corresponding taxes.

  “If one of these business doesn’t make its monthly statement, or makes it but doesn’t pay, it falls into insolvency, and can neither import nor export. The only importers who could afford that ‘luxury’ would be those that have sufficient product already on hand, especially at times like these, when there is little movement of inventory,” explained one of our sources.

  Small- and medium-sized businesses — both fixed-quota and general regime — can stop paying taxes as long as the situation does not normalize, and while this makes them vulnerable to penalties, it is not likely that this will occur, especially, again, if a critical mass applies this measure of fiscal chastisement.

  How long can the government last without taxes?

  Our sources note that before making tax payments, the employer must guarantee the salary of its employees, and that the decision not to pay taxes is “protected by the higher legal concept, legally enshrined in the national legislation, as the Act of God and the Force Majeure. Nobody is obligated to do the impossible, and the reason for this impossibility lies outside the control of the employer or employee.”

  Citizens, on their part, could put pressure on big and medium-sized business, offering to act together if the Treasury moves against them.

  “In this context, big capital must play a consistent role, acting firmly in the face of a Treasury that has granted them such special privileges. It would be their most authentic repentance for the eleven years of tax advantages they have taken in the shadow of power. That stain should be washed out right away,” they say.

  As an expert, Arteaga proposes “that the businesses do not charge value-added tax, and the citizens not pay it. Income tax also. There are penalties, but the penalties and decisions of this government must be ignored, as they have no legitimacy. How long can the government last without taxes?” he asked.

  “Tax resistance aims to respond to Ortega’s claim that he will stay on through 2021: we must find a solution, and one of these is for the private sector finally to decide on civil disobedience of a monetary and tax nature,” he explained.

• Pedro Muñoz Fonseca, president of the executive committee of Costa Rica’s Social Christian Unity Party, urged Nicaraguans to use tax resistance against their government:
  

Social Media Tax Protest in Uganda

The government of Uganda has imposed a 5¢-per-day tax on using social media and other services. This was designed as both a revenue measure and a way of reducing what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls lugambo (“fake news”). Amnesty International has been among those to see through the government’s rhetoric and cast the tax as “a clear attempt to undermine the right to freedom of expression.”

• Some people are circumventing the tax by using virtual private networks, “a trick learned during elections two years ago when the government tried to shut down social media.”
• Robert Kyagulanyi, a Member of Parliament better known by his musician stage name Bobi Wine, whose election is in part credited to his success on social media, has been at the forefront of protests against the tax. He was arrested, along with three reporters when a march protesting the tax was attacked by police with tear gas and rubber projectiles, but they managed to escape.
  • “My brother, I am not fighting you; I am fighting for you,” he said to the officers as he was being dragged into a police van.
  • Summoned back to police headquarters for questioning, Bobi Wine was accompanied by several other Members of Parliament among others who came with him to show solidarity.
  • Some of those who thwarted the arrests during the protest march have since been arrested themselves, charged with unlawful assembly, and banned by the government from participating in any such future protests.
• Students were arrested on charges of being “a nuisance” during a protest at Parliament; and human rights activist Stella Nyanzi had to be hospitalized after attempting to visit the students in jail.

War Tax Resistance Around the World

• ABC reports on war tax resisters in Valencia — “the new refuseniks”. War tax resisters there typically refuse to pay some percentage of their taxes, often basing this on the percentage of the federal budget that is spent on the military and similar items, and redirect this money to more worthy charities. They declare this deduction on their tax forms in such a way that the tax agency typically does not treat it as illegal tax evasion but as an error or mistake.
• The Global Day of Action on Military Spending 2018 Final Report has been released. It gives a summary of the various events that took place around the world, including several by war tax resisters and groups promoting war tax resistance.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
  • Anne Baron reports on the Poor People’s Campaign
  • Notes about private debt collection agencies pursuing tax resisters, and IRS impersonation scams
  • Larry Bassett on the sung and unsung heroes of war tax resistance
  • Ideas & Actions concerning weapons-free investing, responding to arguments against war tax resistance, a fast for nuclear disarmament, and more
• You can now listen to audio excerpts from the upcoming documentary The Pacifist, about war tax resister Larry Bassett, on Spotify.
• Erica Leigh pores through back issues of Conscience, the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, an American war tax redirection group that slightly predates the founding of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
• I shared the story of my triumph over the IRS via the statute of limitations at NWTRCC’s blog.

Obituaries

• Raymond Hunthausen has died. As Catholic archbishop of Seattle, he took a remarkably strong stand on nuclear weapons — famously calling the Trident nuclear submarine program being developed nearby “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” — and began practicing war tax resistance in response. This earned him enemies in Washington and in the Catholic hierarchy. Here are some of the obits and remembrances:
  • Raymond Hunthausen, retired archbishop of Seattle, dies at age 96 (National Catholic Reporter)
  • Archbishop Hunthausen was a man of prayer, a man of God (National Catholic Reporter)
  • He relied on God, not weapons of war (Catholic Sentinel)
  A biography of Hunthausen, A Disarming Spirit, will be released soon.
• David McReynolds has died. He was a long-time War Resisters League and Socialist Party activist and was also on the staff of the Committee for Nonviolent Action which helped to spearhead war tax resistance as a tactic during the campaigns opposing the American war in Vietnam. He was among the signers of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” in 1967 and of a similar public pledge the year before.
  • New York Times obituary
  • Washington Post obituary
  • Ed Hedemann on Democracy Now
• David Paul Irish has died. He was active with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Peace Brigades International, and Witness for Peace. He was an advocate for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends, drafting a minute in favor of of war tax resistance that the Twin Cities and Minneapolis Meetings approved in 1983.