Some historical and global examples of tax resistance
A couple of New York Times articles give an overview of “people power” in light of what’s been going on in the Ukraine.
Youth Movement Underlies the Opposition in Ukraine discusses the similarities between the techniques and demographics of the opposition movement in the Ukraine and other recent “people power” movements (though the article doesn’t mention Serbia’s Otpor, that’s the comparison that jumped to my mind first).
Heeding the Roar of the Street gives a run-down of some of the instances of “people power” uprisings over , and the elements that make for success or failure.
Still, the very experience of overthrowing a government this way — of building independent institutions, diffusing power through civil society, and learning first-hand that it’s possible to say no to authority — unleashes something that’s hard for any politician to control.
Those tent cities aren’t merely a demand for freedom.
They’re acts of freedom themselves: of men and women voluntarily assembled both to defy the old order and to build something new.
With some powerhouse eastern regions halting payment of taxes to the federal coffers and trade disrupted, [President Leonid] Kuchma said the more than week-long dispute over contested presidential elections was paralyzing the ex-Soviet country.
“Another few days and the financial system could fall down like a house of cards,” Kuchma said in a meeting with [Prime Minister] Yanukovych.
“It is clear today that unremitted taxes have reached a billion hryvnas (€150 million, $200 million).
Customs duties have fallen by a quarter,” said Kuchma, according to a statement from the president’s office.
I can’t claim to know much about the issues involved, but I’ve noticed that some of the global tension concerning high food and fuel prices has taken the form of organized tax protests:
In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and have called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
Google is starting to do for newspaper archives what it has been doing for books: putting scanned images on-line and making them text-searchable.
Hooray for Google, says I.
Here are a few articles I found while browsing around today:
A couple of pieces regarding a reconstruction-era dispute over the legitimacy of the Louisiana state government (in which tax resistance played a role):
The Nixon Administration asked the Supreme Court today to rule out draft exemptions for men who are conscientiously opposed to the Vietnam war but not to all wars.
…
Besides, the Administration argued, if selective exemptions are approved people could refuse to pay their taxes on religious grounds or could defy other laws.
Washington [D.C.] Official Urges Tax Refusal to Push Statehood The New York Times (“Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to Congress, has urged residents here not to pay their Federal taxes until Congress makes Washington the 51st state.”
[C]ollection will be a formidable challenge after years in which taxes
were identified by Palestinians with foreign occupation.
Tax resistance is strong in the territories. It spread during a seven-year
uprising against Israeli rule, when Palestinians working in the tax
department resigned. According to Israeli estimates, only 20 percent of
Palestinians taxed in the West Bank met their payments in 1993, when tax
revenues totalled some $90 million.
The Palestinian Authority has already run into difficulties collecting
taxes in Gaza and Jericho, and it has published appeals in recent weeks
urging tax payment as a national duty. Outside of Jericho, it has no
police powers in the West Bank, and the legal system there remains under
Israeli control.
“Taxes are the dowry of independence and the key to democracy,” said Atef
Alawneh, director general of the Palestinian finance department, at the
ceremony today in Ramallah.
“Nonpayment of taxes under occupation was a national struggle worthy of
praise,” he added. “Now it is 180 degrees different. Now delay in paying
means a delay in building the Palestinian state.”
Zuhdi Nashashibi, the finance minister in the Palestinian Authority, said
he was confident Palestinians would now “hurry to pay” their taxes.
Mr. Alawneh argued that collection by Palestinians would be more effective
because it would lack the coercion of military occupation, would extend to
places the Israelis were unable to reach because of security concerns, and
would create new revenue sources. The tax authorities will not use force,
he said, but will rely instead on friendly persuasion and public goodwill.
Remember what this sort of thing used to be like? You’d get yourself down to
the library, and then you’d look through each volume of the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or whatever,
one at a time, hoping that what you were looking for was among the things the
editors of that guide felt was worth indexing. Then with luck, some of what
you were looking for was available in bound volumes, microfilm, or microfiche
on-site (elsewise you could always try for inter-library loan, but that might
take a couple of weeks). In the case of the first, you could find it on the
shelves or ask the reference librarian, and then thumb through the pages, but
in the case of the latter two, you’d have to haul your film over to a reader
(one that wasn’t broken or occupied) and then spend five minutes or so just
trying to locate the pages you were interested in. Then, if it turned out to
be good, you’d have to scribble things down or drop in some coin for a
barely-legible photocopy.
Lucia Cecchet (Mainz University): “The rhetorics of tax evasion in Attic oratory and some modern counterparts”
Yaruipam Muivah (EHESS-PSL Université Paris): “Tax avoidance by the hill people in the North-East Frontier of India in the early colonial period, 1875-1913”
Yener Koç (Boğaziçi University Istanbul): “Taxing the Tribes: The Resistance and Adaptation of the Tribes of the Ottoman East to the Tax Policies (1850–1900)”
Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (University of Kassel): “(Not) paying taxes in Roman and Byzantine Egypt”
Vasilis G. Manousakis (University of Crete, Rethymno): “Taxes, tax avoidance and the black economy in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944”
Daniel Olisa Iweze (University of Benin, Benin City): “Women’s Protests Against Colonial Taxation in the Eastern Region of Nigeria”
Benjamin Müsegades (Heidelberg University): “Negotiating and evading taxation. Communes and lords in late medieval southwest Germany”
Rachel Renault (Le Mans University): “Tax avoidance and tax resistance in 17th and 18th century Germany: imperial taxation and local agency (Saxony and Thuringia)”
The latest tax resistance scuttlebutt:
NWTRCC is putting on a free, on-line “War Tax Resistance 101” workshop. Register here.
If you’ve been curious about how to become a war tax resister in the United States, you can learn the basics and get your questions answered by people with extensive knowledge and experience.
Eva Davoine, Sébastien Laffitte, and Wouter Leenders of the University of California at Berkeley conducted a class on “The History of Tax Resistance” last year.
Here’s their syllabus.
It focuses on tax resistance as either rebelliousness or as political “tax revolt”-style resistance, and doesn’t seem to much touch on the conscientious objection variety.
The Republican party, now a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, are leading off by taking some largely-performative jabs at the IRS.
They passed a bill that would rescind the measure passed last year that gives the agency a big boost in funding, but because such a bill would require approval of the Democratic-controlled Senate and of the Democratic president to become law, and as the Republicans in the House made no effort to negotiate a bill that might plausibly get such approval, this was all just for hoots and hollers.
A more interesting (though also, realistically speaking, in the hoots-and-hollers category) jab comes in the form of the “Fair Tax Act” which would replace the bulk of U.S. federal taxes with a nationwide sales tax.
The House plans to bring this up for a vote soon.
This is a proposal that’s been around for a while (for details, see my analysis from ).
It’s not going to happen, but for some reason it’s important for some Republicans that they get to vote on it.
They’re selling it as something that would “abolish the IRS” and so maybe the dreadful details of the proposal matter less than it being just a symbol of the Republicans standing with the taxpayer against the hated tax bureaucracy — something the party seems to have decided on as a winning strategy for appealing to voters.
The real, practical test of the Republicans’ enthusiasm and capabilities for restraining or hobbling the IRS (and of Democrats’ willingness to come to the agency’s defense) will come during the upcoming federal budget deliberations.
Nuclear weapons foe John LaForge (see ♇ ) has surrendered himself for a prison term rather than pay a fine imposed by a German court after he was convicted of trespass during a protest at a German air force base.
The “Don’t Pay UK” campaign now has a German counterpart.
They are trying the threshold gambit: signing up people who are willing to pledge to boycott their utility bills but only when one million people sign on to the pledge.
(Recall that Don’t Pay UK started with a similar threshold scheme, but discarded it when it looked like they would not meet their target number.)
Organizers are upset about the burden of rising electricity prices on poorer households in particular.
