Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
American conservative arguments for tax resistance →
Rose Wilder Lane
I didn’t know that Rose Wilder Lane, best-known probably for collaborating with her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder on the Little House on the Prairie books (although she was an accomplished writer in her own right), was a tax resister.
The best way to gain economic freedom is to cut expenses.
People who squander their prime years on excessive work to pay unnecessary expenses, and then spend the remainder of their lives working just to stay sheltered and fed, can’t enjoy much freedom.
As part of her exercise in subversion, in Rose Wilder Lane began an attempt to reduce her income below taxable levels.
My own implementation of this has been a great success.
As of , the base (federal) taxable level of income in the USA is above $5000 per year.
This represents over twice the amount necessary for me to live comfortably.
For the final 14 years of my working life I worked two 8-hour shifts per week at or near the minimum wage (as dishwasher/janitor in local restaurants).
My standard of living rose continually during that time, mainly because almost the entirety of my income was “disposable income.”
I had followed Ms Lane’s example and reduced my living expenses to just about nil.
My standard of living has been rising continually since , when I had fully implemented my lifestyle.
Whether I consider the amount of material wealth that I possess or the amount of leisure time available to me or the amount of time I must devote to earning my living or the amount of economic security I have.
In all these respects I am better off now than I have been at any previous time of my life.
An interesting thing about all this is that I believe anybody could do what I have done.
Anybody in America could work 10 years at minimum wage and then retire for life.
As screwed up as it is, this is still the richest society the world has ever seen.
I’ve been meaning for some time to track down more information about the tax resistance of Rose Wilder Lane.
Lane was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame and an accomplished writer herself.
She is also an influence on the American libertarian movement.
She is a rare example of an American conscientious tax resister coming from the libertarian / paleoconservative tradition.
That tradition tends to breed either people who merely complain about or disparage taxes, people who try to work within the system to reduce taxes (a la Howard Jarvis or Grover Norquist), or people who come up with tortured legal arguments for why the existing tax laws are illegal or inapplicable.
Conscientious tax resistance is, in contrast, very rare.
Lane began her tax resistance in the middle of World War Ⅱ.
The New York Times covered her protest in :
Rose Wilder Lane, novelist and individualist, has gone into retirement until the American scene produces “a politician who’ll stand up and tell the truth.”
Mrs. Lane, without capital, with two sons in the Army, 600 pounds of pork and 800 jars of home-preserved vegetables and fruit in the cellar, has settled down to a farm life and oblivion until the New Deal has been succeeded by a new national administration.
Living on a three-acre farm just outside Danbury [Connecticut], Mrs. Lane said she had decided “to resist regimentation.”
She has given up her New York apartment, ceased all fiction writing to reduce her taxes and is receiving only $60 a month income — from a newspaper column.
She lives on $50 a month and has refused to register for a ration book.
Mrs. Lane makes her own butter — she owns an interest in a cow — and she raises chickens.
She uses honey instead of sugar and from her own garden she has preserved corn, peas, peppers, beets, berries and other fruits and vegetables.
Mrs. Lane denies bitterness over the national administration.
She terms current national [illegible] as “nonsense” and cites the income tax law as “the last straw.”
“I don’t see why I should work to support the Writers War Board, the Office of War Information and all such New Deal piffle while men are dying and there is work to be done at home,” she said.
“The thing to do, if you believe such practices are wrong,” Mrs. Lane declared, “is to resist them.
The American people did it with prohibition.
The Colonists did it when King George Ⅲ tried to overtax them.
The New Deal is only going back to King George’s economy and scarcity.
I feel that very, very hard times are coming, but I also feel that the people will pull through.
“We’ve got to resist.
The vote will have no effect until we have a politician who will stand up and tell the truth.”
Lane also steadfastly refused to accept a Social Security number or to apply for Social Security payments, and liked to tweak the nose of government any way she could — using democracy (rallying her neighbors to abolish local zoning codes) or civil disobedience (working a late-night shift at Vivien Kellems’s cable grip factory to protest laws that prohibited women from working night shifts).
The Freewayblogger answers that frequently asked question in activist circles: “What can I do (that’s easy, safe, quick, and makes me feel all special without committing me to anything)?”
Anti-war activist and war tax resister Cindy Sheehan announced that she plans to go up against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the elections.
News reports suggest that rather than challenging Pelosi in the primary, Sheehan will launch a third-party or independent challenge for the House seat.
She writes Mr. [Jasper] Crane in no uncertain terms that he is mistaken in believing that one owes the government something in return for services rendered; and she is equally eloquent against Robert LeFevre’s “no action” attitude toward government:
“Mr. LeFevre and I have engaged in heated, though amiable, controversy, about his attitude to Government.
When the students in his Basic course (the one I attended) asked him, what should we do? his reply was negative.
He said: Do not depend on Government; do not ask Government for favors and subsidies and support.
I think that a negative is not enough; I say that if they do not know the right action they are too apt to take a wrong one; I think that the thing to do is to resist any further extensions and encroachments and usurpations by the Federal Government, by every peaceful legal means while such means exist.”
“I do not think that any honesty is involved in paying taxes.
Taxation is plain armed robbery; tax-collectors are armed robbers.
I will save my property from them in any way that I think I can get away with.
If you wake in the night with a flashlight shining in your face and a masked man with a gun ordering you to tell him where your money is, do you feel that you’re morally obliged to tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
I think you might.
I don’t. I will try to get out of that predicament with as little loss as possible.
In regard to taxes, this means taking advantage of every legality that any attorney can find in the tax ‘laws’ so called, and regulations.
I have no scruples about this whatever, anything that I want to do with my money, and that I can in any way slip under any legality so that the robbers won’t find it and rob me of some of it, I do.
They make the legalities, trying to be smart about who gets how much of my property; and to keep as much as possible of my own, I’ll outsmart them if I can.”
“I am ‘law-abiding’ purely for expediency, for self-defense, in the main against my conscientious principles, so at bottom I am ashamed of not being a conscientious objector practicing Gandhi’s or Thoreau’s civil disobedience.
I did refuse to be rationed; I do absolutely refuse to be Social-Secured; but I should refuse to pay taxes and be in jail, only what would become of my little Maltese puppies? and my own little area of freedom? and my books and my friends and correspondents?
I shall be reluctantly a martyr, only when backed into the last corner of the last resort.
No heroine, alas.”
