Miscellaneous tax resisters →
individual anarchist or libertarian tax resisters →
Karl Hess
You may remember these words:
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America establishes a bill of particulars in regard to intolerable infringements, abuses, and denials of political power which belongs to the people.
The Federal government of the United States of America today is guilty of exactly every sort of infringement, abuse, and denial stated as intolerable by the Declaration of Independence.
I cannot, in conscience, sanction that government by the payment of taxes.
Further, the Federal government of the United States of America has established as a principle, and ruthlessly by the power of its officials enforces as a practice, that it can demand the primary loyalty of the people, that it can exercise all political power on their behalf, that it can wage war without their approval, and that it can and should establish the standards of their behavior and the goals of their lives.
I could not in conscience sanction such a government by the payment of taxes.
Finally, the Declaration of Independence, in the clearest possible language, tells Americans that when a government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that it is the right and the duty of the people to abolish such government, to “throw off such government.”
It is in the spirit of that Declaration, and in comradeship with men everywhere who seek freedom and to throw off such governments, that I now refuse to pay the taxes demanded by the government in the attached form.
The American colonial rebels anticipated Gandhi’s homespun cloth campaign by over a century.
Here’s part of a poem — “American Daughters of Liberty” — written in by Milcah Martha Moore, a Quaker from Philadelphia who was advocating nonviolent resistance techniques against the British:
Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise; And though we’ve no voice but a negative here, The use of the taxables, let us forbear:— (Then merchants import till your stores are all full, May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)
Stand firmly resolv’d, and bid Grenville to see, That rather than freedom we part with our tea, And well as we love the dear draught when a-dry, As American Patriots our taste we deny— Pennsylvania’s gay meadows can richly afford To pamper our fancy or furnish our board; And paper sufficient at home still we have, To assure the wiseacre, we will not sign slave; When this homespun shall fail, to remonstrate our grief, We can speak viva voce, or scratch on a leaf; Refuse all their colors, though richest of dye, When the juice of a berry our paint can supply, To humor our fancy — and as for our houses, They’ll do without painting as well as our spouses; While to keep out the cold of a keen winter morn, We can screen the north-west with a well polished horn; And trust me a woman, by honest invention, Might give this state-doctor a dose of prevention.
Join mutual in this — and but small as it seems, We may jostle a Grenville, and puzzle his schemes; But a motive more worthy our patriot pen, Thus acting — we point out their duty to men; And should the bound-pensioners tell us to hush, We can throw back the satire, by biding them blush.
After increasingly punitive restraints climaxed with the Stamp Act, women ardently supported the boycott of British goods by alleging that “naught but homespun” would cloak their bodies and that spinning wheels and knitting needles would doom “foreign manufactures.”
Formation of the Daughters of Liberty, the female “auxiliary” to the more radical Stamp Tax resisters, the Sons of Liberty, presaged an effective instrument for hardening resistance to British measures.…
New Englanders, eager to confirm their boldness in dressing only in domestic threads rather than anticipating arrival of modish bolts and bales from England, restructured the social form of the “spinning bee” into a public outcry against British goods.…
…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.”
Fierce competition between congregations, between married and unmarried women, between towns and cities and between old and young converted proceedings into such festive social occasions that hundreds of merry spectators milled around the grounds, augmented in the evening by men who joined the spinners and knitters for picnics and boisterous Sons of Liberty ballads.
The bees’ bountiful harvest of thread and yarn inspired others to imitate their fervor, and newspapers identified patriots by airing individual production records…
With the passage of England’s increasingly obstructive measures (such as the Coercive Acts in retaliation to the climactic Boston Tea Party), calls for boycotting tea and wearing homespun and handknit were even more strident.
Since women were the purchasers of what was served and worn in their homes, speakers, writers and preachers insisted that the “ultimate power” of saving the country reposed in their hands.
Even discounting the hyperbolic prose, women whose previous job descriptions had included little outside the family circle must have been astonished at the new perimeters of their responsibility.
Since noncompliance fell on their shoulders, their consequent focus on home production laid the groundwork for clothing their men when war actually came.
What would be a good equivalent of the patriotic knitting bee for today’s sons and daughters of liberty?
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?
I’ve already discussed home-brewed beer as one good candidate.
Avoid the federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages, learn a craft, and drink good beer!
It’s a winning proposition any way you look at it.
I can easily imagine tax resister “brewing bees” or better yet “drinking bees” at which songs of liberty are sung with gusto.
But excise taxes are a minor portion of most people’s tax bill, and of the money the government takes in each year.
Most of the government’s revenue comes from taxing income and profit.
What are the homespun, untaxed equivalents of income and profit?
Enter Karl Hess, the Goldwaterite Republican Students-for-a-Democratic-Society anarchist libertarian, who published a provocative essay on barter .
Excerpts:
… constant harassment by the Internal Revenue Service caused me to snap my twig and just stop paying taxes altogether.… [M]y tax collector informed me that a lien would be placed against all my property — that they would take every cent, literally 100 percent, of every penny I might earn and that they could discern.
I asked, then, how they would handle it if I decided to just barter for a living.
They had a ready answer: “If you get some turnips for your work, we’ll take the turnips.”
Fortunately for me, either the IRS is surfeited with vegetables, or turnips are a good deal more difficult to track down than cold cash.
And so I survive.
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.
The War Tax Protesters from Time, .
Prompted by the war tax resistance of Jane Hart, wife of Senator Philip Hart of Michigan, this article gives a short summary of the Vietnam-era movement and notest that “their harassment has forced the IRS to assign someone at each major center to the task of ‘Viet Nam Protest Coordinator.’ ”
This movie, which won a Best Documentary Oscar in , lets Hess informally narrate his own evolution from being Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter in his presidential campaign, to his fleeing the corridors of power for life on a farm advocating small-scale “appropriate technology” — and there’s a brief stop along the way to visit his tax resistance:
Right after the campaign the Internal Revenue Service went into its quadrennial song-and-dance of auditing and otherwise harassing everybody who lost.
One of the worst things about losing a presidential campaign is: they get ya!
I went through an experience with them that I found sort of unbelievable.
And I got to thinking, and I got angry, and I read the Declaration of Independence while I was angry.
And I sent them a copy and I said “this document calls to my attention the fact that when you guys exceed all of your authority, begin acting like a bunch of colonial troops, that I should abolish you.”
And so I said “I hereby abolish you — I won’t pay your taxes anymore.”
Well, they don’t think that’s very funny. And they certainly have no interest in the historic significance of the statement.
One thing about being dispossessed of income and possessions is that you begin to understand that there’s a difference between money and the economy, or an economy.
Money may be part of an economy, but it’s not the whole thing.
An economy involves exchanges of goods and services, and that means barter.
For more on Karl Hess’s tax resistance, see The Picket Line for:
Back in , Karl Hess was a true believer of the right.
As a speechwriter, aide and ideologue to Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, he packaged the slogan that may have helped lose the campaign: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” , at 51, Hess is a welder.
He now opposes war, government in general and most U.S. Government activities.
He has become, in fact, an anarchist and a tax resister.
As much out of sheer angry cussedness as conviction, he admits, he refused to pay the Internal Revenue Service a penny in ; nor has he given them any money since then.
The IRS, in response, slapped a 100% lien on any money Hess earns and any property or savings he may have.
So Hess lives mainly by barter, trading his welding skill directly for food, clothing and shelter.
…and further along…
As Time Correspondent Arthur White learned when he visited Hess recently, the man seems to be practicing the classical, nonviolent anarchism he advocates.
Hess owns little more than welding tools and the blue denim clothes on his back. “I had a bicycle,” he admits, “but it was stolen.”
He owes the
IRS
some $15,000, and to outwit them he has even sold the rights to
Dear America to a community organization for which
he works. “I can’t own anything,” he explains in a soft voice. “Those
IRS
people are like a gang of thugs.” … He exudes what a friend has described as
“the ethereal, inexplicable cheerfulness of a nun scrubbing floors.”
I checked out the documentary Anarchism in America from the library and gave it a watch last night.
As an overview of American anarchism, it’s pretty superficial, and too deferential to the halloween-costume anarchism of punk rock.
But the movie has its moments, and includes good interviews with a couple of tax resisting anarchists: Karl Hess and Ed Hedemann.
As it turns out, I could have spared myself a trip to the bookmobile.
The documentary is on-line:
This is not to say, of course, that totalitarianism is right around the
corner or that we have already passed the corner. That particular corner is
one of the most difficult of all political landmarks to recognize. History
strongly suggests, as a matter of fact, that the time when most persons
recognize it is precisely the time when it is too late to do anything about
avoiding it.
For that reason, among others, it strikes some that it would be better to
stand up and appear even ridiculous and alarmist right here and now than to
be calm, cool, and collected, properly docile, and politically acceptable — while it became too late to do anything else!
The Tax Rebellion
Direct resistance may be the course others will select. Taking every
available legal course to harass or even halt government programs is one
avenue. Forcing the government to take, in its turn, legal action to compel
the individual to comply with a government rule, rather than just voluntarily
going along, is another course. Along such lines, of course, for those able
to afford it, may lie many useful tests of the legality of government
actions, particularly in the high-handed area of executive orders and
regulatory law.
Ultimately, of course, every American holds in his hands the most explosive
weapon that possibly could be turned against such a government as that of the
United States as it has developed. That weapon is the sword of tax refusal.
It is clearly illegal, of course, to defy the government in regard to the
payment of taxes. But prior to the clearly illegal areas of tax refusal there
are many steps close to the borderline.
In this area, the unbounded imagination of Americans already has given the
revenuers a massive migraine headache. Tax resistance is a fact. It is a
growing reality. It worries the government. Their concern shows most
evidently, as they take harsher and hastier action to dampen the flames of
this honest, grassroots revolt.
Many will be frightened off by the toughness and the ruthlessness of the
revenuers. Understandably. Yet, there is ample evidence to show that the
spirit of resistance overall is rising, despite the repressive and
retaliatory lashings of the revenuers.
Part of that spirit may feed on the earthy American feeling that “they can’t
put everybody in jail!” Or, in short, there is safety in numbers when it
comes to fighting City Hall, or the White House itself.
The “Radical Libertarian Alliance” was founded in and lasted until — making it one of the earlier organizations in the modern libertarian movement.
It was small, decentralized, and part of the left/libertarian outreach of that period — with free-market anarchists Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess among the more prominent members.
It for a time issued a publication called The Abolitionist.
The issue featured an article by Jerome Tuccille titled “What Happens Now: Some Thoughts on the Movement” that tried to anticipate the future of libertarian influence in the counterculture, the anti-war movement, and the loose coalition of groups who had given up on the centrist strong-central-government consensus.
Among his predictions of how libertarians would change society for the better:
The major changes will come about through the use of revolutionary strategy, and this is the most valuable tactic of all as far as immediate change is concerned.
Libertarians will continue their efforts in the realm of non-violent revolution, concentrating most of their energies on the anti-draft and anti-tax issues, the two bête noires of Right Wing libertarians.
Potentially, tax resistance is the most effective means available to reduce the power of government, and the one feared the most by political authority.
It is the one tactic which is likely to attract the interest of middle-class Americans, over [a] sustained period, and it is valuable from that standpoint alone.
It is also vitally important since it deprives government of the capital it needs to finance its own institutions.
While it is true that government does have the capability of printing more paper currency as long as it maintains a monopoly on our money supply, this would inevitably lead to the destruction of the state money system and the state’s credit standing in the international marketplace.
It would also bring about the destruction of the state-controlled and state-regulated economic structure.
People would be forced to find a new medium of exchange as the state currency plummeted in value; in short, it would lead to the creation of a more stable and viable form of “people’s money,” probably gold and silver-backed certificates, which would be more acceptable in world markets.
A challenge that many successful tax resistance campaigns have confronted has to do with divisions in the movement.
Sometimes these are deliberate divide-and-conquer tactics by those who oppose the campaign.
Other times, these are just the result of fractures in an unstable coalition, where most of the dividing pressure comes from within the campaign.
It can be important to the success of such a campaign that it maintain and demonstrate solidarity in the face of such challenges.
Here are some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns have tried to cope.
German constitutionalists
In 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 and counseled people to disregard it:
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.
Rebeccaites
The Rebeccaite movement in Wales was very successful in its bold campaign of destroying toll booths.
But its diffuse, non-hierarchical, anonymous structure made it easy for people to hijack it for their own ends, and it wasn’t long before people and groups calling themselves “Rebecca” began issuing threats and enacting vigilante justice in a variety of causes, or sometimes in what seemed like merely personal grievances.
For example, having come to the help of the farmers by reducing the tolls they were charged when bringing their goods to market, a meeting of Rebeccaites decided they were justified in now demanding that these newly-liberated farmers and merchants lower the prices of their goods.
Butter and beer would now be cheaper in Wales, and the Rebeccaites would make it so by force if necessary.
Things like this made the message of the movement confused, made it less sympathetic to potential supporters, and helped the authorities to recruit spies and people willing to testify against the rioters among those who otherwise might have been their allies.
Irish Land League
The Irish, suffering from famine and under the thumb of government-backed English absentee landlords, began a rent strike under the leadership of the Irish Land League.
The English encouraged the Irish to respond to their sad lot by emigrating to America and elsewhere.
They would have been happy to depopulate the island and make it England’s livestock grazing pasture, and they were eager to diminish by attrition the political power of the native population.
But, as Charles Stewart Parnell put it:
The Land League saw through this design, and defeated it by their advice to the people to resist being compelled to emigrate.
It told them to refuse to pay extortionate rents — that is, rents they could not pay and at the same time feed their families; it told them to refuse to leave their homes unless forcibly ejected, so that winter might not find them without a shelter to their heads; and it told them to refuse to rent farms from which other tenants had been evicted.
British women’s suffrage movement
At the time the Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations were trying to win the vote for women, most men couldn’t vote in Britain either.
The vote at the time was largely restricted to propertied men, though there were ongoing campaigns for universal male suffrage.
By trying to get women to be treated equally as voters under the law, the women’s movement of the time was, thereby, fighting merely for the voting rights of propertied women, not for women in general.
Dora Montefiore reflected on this, and the divisions it threatened to provoke, when she reviewed her time in the movement in her autobiography, From a Victorian to a Modern:
The members of the I.L.P., of which there was a good branch in Hammersmith, were very helpful, both as speakers and organisers during these meetings, but the Members of the Social Democratic Federation, of which I was a member, were very scornful because they said we should have been asking at that moment for Adult Suffrage and not Votes for Women; but although I have always been a staunch adult suffragist, I felt that at that moment the question of the enfranchisement of women was paramount, as we had to educate the public in our demands and in the reasons for our demands, and as we found that with many people the words “Adult Suffrage” connoted only manhood suffrage, our urgent duty was at that moment to gain Press publicity up and down the country and to popularise the idea of the political enfranchisement of women.
I explained in all my speeches and writings that though it looked as if I were only asking for Suffrage for Women on a property qualification, I was doing this because the mass of non-qualified women could not demonstrate in the same way, and I was to that extent their spokeswoman.
… The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house and understood this point and never swerved in their allegiance to our organisation
Poll Tax rebellion in the U.K.
In Danny Burns’s reminiscences of the Poll Tax Rebellion, he reflects that there were constant tensions in the campaign between the locally-organized grassroots groups that were the real engine of the revolt, and the professional left/labor radical groups and politicians who kept trying to put themselves at the front of the parade.
When a number of people were arrested in a police riot during an anti Poll Tax demonstration at Trafalgar Square, some of the movement leadership distanced themselves from those who had been arrested in the riot — wanting to distinguish nonviolent tax resisters from those charged with resisting arrest or other such charges, and talking about holding “an internal inquiry” to “root out the troublemakers.”
But when the defendants organized their own collective defense committee, the leaders of the All-Britain Federation tried to usurp them by launching their own defense fund and soliciting donations (the attempt failed).
Anti-war, anti-tax coalition building in U.S.
There have been some attempts at coalition building between the left and right in the United States, where the folks at the top keep the folks at the bottom facing off against each other that way so their pockets face outwards and are easier to pick.
One example of such coalition building in the tax resistance movement was a “tea party” held in by the right-leaning group called the National Taxpayers Union, at which left-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess, and leftish war tax resisters like Bradford Lyttle spoke.
The following year, leftist scholar and war tax resister Noam Chomsky, and conservative publisher Robert Kephart spoke at a National Taxpayers Union event.
A typical government gambit in its battle against tax resisters is to say, “okay, if you won’t pay us taxes, we’ll seize your property instead.”
Some tax resisters have responded to this by taunting back: “you’ll have to find it first.”
And one way they have made good on this is by arranging to have other people hold their property in their names.
Here are some examples:
Some war tax resistance “alternative funds,” into which resisters pay their taxes into rather than submitting them to the government, have a dual purpose: they serve as ways to redirect tax money to causes the resisters find more palatable than government expenses, and they serve as a holding tank for funds that the resisters can later reclaim if back taxes are ever seized from them.
The tax collector was so frustrated trying to seize anything at all from tax resister Ammon Hennacy that, when Hennacy was picketing the IRS office one day, the agent assigned to his case walked up to him and seized his picket sign — telling him he planned to auction it off!
The next day, Hennacy was picketing again with some new signs that he and a friend had hastily made the night before… each one carefully marked “this sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
In the Irish Tithe War, farmers would give temporary pasturage to the livestock of people when seizures were impending:
An organised system of confederacy, whereby signals were, for miles around, recognised and answered, started into latent vitality.
True Irish ‘winks’ were exchanged; and when the rector, at the head of a detachment of police, military, bailiffs, clerks, and auctioneers, would make his descent on the lands of the peasantry, he found the cattle removed, and one or two grinning countenances occupying their place.
A search was, of course, instituted, and often days were consumed in prosecuting it.
Observers noted that during the resistance by British nonconformists against the taxes for sectarian education included in the Education Act, “they are taking the precaution of putting their property out of their own names, so that the collectors will not have anything to levy on.”
Resister John Clifford said, “In the hope of preventing the authorities from getting their money in this way I made over all my household effects to my wife, but the collectors seized them just the same.”
Another resister, Thomas Watson, foiled the collectors for at least eight years with the same technique.
Tax resister Karl Hess sold the rights to royalties from his book to a community organization he worked for, so as to get a more easily-concealable lump sum of cash instead of a more-seizable royalty stream.
War tax resister Aleck Dodd transferred his property into his wife’s name when he began to resist, in order to “protect my family from the possible results of my action, and not to evade the collection of my tax by due process of law.”
Paying in cash is one way to keep transactions off of the government’s radar and make them more difficult to tax.
You can take another step in the same direction by switching to barter.
When the IRS told tax resister Karl Hess “that they would take every cent, literally 100 percent, of every penny I might earn and that they could discern”…
I asked… how they would handle it if I decided to just barter for a living.
They had a ready answer: “If you get some turnips for your work, we’ll take the turnips.”
Fortunately for me, either the IRS is surfeited with vegetables, or turnips are a good deal more difficult to track down than cold cash.
And so I survive.
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.
It is increasingly easy to get ones needs met by engaging in off-the-books (or at least out-of-the-mall) transactions — not just under-the-table cash payments or barter, but also swaps and freebies.
There are a number of websites and other innovative projects that facilitate things like this.
You can go to yerdle or Trade A Favor, for instance, and join a community of sharers, or you can “turn what you have into what you want” at swap.com, or you can visit the “barter” or “free” sections at your local craigslist, or find a neighbor with a hedge trimmer you can borrow at NeighborGoods, or swap the books you’ve finished for ones you’d like to read at PaperBack Swap, or pass along the clothes your growing child just outgrew through thredUP, or rent a car from a person rather than an agency with Getaround, or join your local Freecycle network to help useful stuff find good homes.
Some links from here and there:
The Center for a Stateless Society has reprinted an interview with Karl Hess from a edition of Mother Earth News in which he describes his transition from Republican speechwriter to homesteading tax resister.
The britishprotest.com site covers Sophia Duleep Singh of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
April 15th — the usual federal income tax return filing deadline in the U.S. — was in the more whimper than bang category this year.
The powers that be decided to extend the filing deadline to , and for that and other reasons, taxes are less on people’s minds than usual this time of year.
But here are some items that have recently come to my attention:
The U.S. government is sending out “stimulus” payments willy-nilly.
Thousands of dollars in forgivable “loans” are being made available to businesses (though it’s something of a crapshoot which businesses will and won’t get them), and most Americans are also getting some free money as well.
The individual stimulus checks are already starting to go out.
Americans who got tax refunds direct-deposited in their bank accounts last time they filed their taxes were the first to see money.
The rest of us have to wait a bit.
There was some worry that people who are so poor that they don’t have to file tax returns would be overlooked, but the IRS has created a method for non-filers to apply for the stimulus money too.
Businesses in Mexico are threatening a tax strike to pressure the government into granting tax relief or other financial aid during the pandemic crisis, and some state governors there are also making noise about withholding taxes from the federation.
