Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → Robert Burrowes

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):

Some pieces from the tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage:

More on the ostensibly voluntary “liberty bonds” in the United States during World War Ⅰ:

Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence:

Miscellaneous war tax resistance articles:

Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen’s war tax resistance:

Miscellaneous other articles of note:

  • Finding Out Who ‘Really’ Spends Your Tax Money St. Petersburg Times (a conservative tax revolt group working with war tax resisters & Noam Chomsky)
  • 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.”
  • Israelis Yield West Bank Taxation and Health to Palestinians The New York Times

    [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.

I like the future.

Today: some things from hither and yon that have caught my eye, but that I haven’t managed to weave into a Picket Line post yet:

  • Thanks to Amazon’s on-line reader, you can read excerpts from Gregory Vistica’s Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy concerning the anti-WMD activism of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, and the FBI / Naval Investigative Service / Knights of Malta campaign to discredit him. Hunthausen at one point resisted a portion of his federal taxes to protest against the United States government’s policy of threatening to attack its enemies with nuclear weapons.
  • Here’s an old article from The Libertarian Forum about a property tax strike in Chicago in that bears a lot of resemblance to the organized Chicago property tax strikes of the 1930s. I wonder if we’ll see more of this during the current economic troubles.
  • Here’s an undated report about Australian war tax resister Robert Burrowes. “Robert has been refusing to pay part of his taxes in ‘legal tender’ (as stipulated by Regulation 58 made pursuant to the Tax Act ) because he does not want to contribute to military expenditure. Instead he has attempted to pay ‘in kind’ with such constructive and symbolic items as shovels, trees and Aboriginal land… and by donating the balance of the claimed money to various peace and development organisations.” There’s other stuff on-line about Burrowes’s case but I haven’t had time to look into it yet.
  • Glenn D. McMurry wrote up some memories of his time at Bethel College in the 1930s, including his recollections of Benny Bargen.

    I had the opportunity of living in the Bargen home for an entire summer session. That experience further confirmed my knowledge of Bennie’s character. He was a dedicated Christian and a staunch pacifist, believing and practicing all forms of non-violence. In conversations with Bennie one could almost be persuaded that all wars in which our country had participated could have been prevented by pacifist methods.

    Non-violence for Bennie didn’t end with his war philosophy. He didn’t want any of his money to be used for violence of any type. Therefore, in order not to pay federal tax on his income, he would accept only a very low salary. The Bethel administration wanted to raise his salary. They tried every loophole in the book to help Bennie, and still conform to his desire to pay no income tax. He remained content to live on his meager salary in order to be true to his moral beliefs.

    To live out such a life style, Bennie had to make decisions that made life difficult for his family. Near poverty became the family’s lot! The administration gave the most meager housing. Usually it meant an upstairs apartment requiring his climbing to the top with great difficulty [Bargen’s legs were paralyzed from polio]. It didn’t bother him, but it bothered Esther, his very dedicated wife. She had high aspirations for herself and her two children, and she found it difficult to attain them because of Bennie’s demands. Even his eating habits were affected. He would figure his calories and eat only the minimum amount of food he felt he needed to keep alive.

  • In excerpts from his book Experiments in Moral Sovereignty, taxpatriate Jeff Knaebel investigates the link between war and taxes, as exemplified in Thomas Paine’s observation that “In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but wars were raised to carry on taxes.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Speaking of council tax resisters, here’s another one, from :

Courier refused to pay council tax while travellers camped at layby

Protester could have bank account frozen

A north-east man who staged a council-tax protest against travellers camped illegally near his home has been told his bank account could be frozen and his property seized.

Billy Thomson told Aberdeenshire Council he would not pay his council tax while travellers were camped in a layby at Garlogie.

Now, the authority has called in sheriff officers, who have threatened to freeze the self-employed courier’s bank account and seize property from his home in an attempt to force him to pay the £700 bill.

The 59-year-old first took a stand against the authority when caravans were parked in the layby on the B9119 Aberdeen to Echt road for nearly a year in .

When the travellers left he began paying his council tax again, but stopped in when travellers camped there for about four months.

The layby has since been shut to prevent travellers from returning.

Mr Thomson, of Garlogie Cottages, said he respected travellers’ rights, but criticised the council for “persecuting me, but not them”.

He said: “While the travellers were parked there no one could use the layby, and it had been a well-used service.

“I decided that from then on, when these people are parked there without paying council tax, neither would I.

“I know a lot of travellers — they are decent people and I respect their choice of lifestyle, but Aberdeenshire Council has shown double standards.”

Mr Thomson said he first received notice that Aberdeenshire Council was seeking the unpaid tax when he received a letter from the authority earlier .

He said he took the letter to the council’s Inverurie office seeking an explanation as to why the authority was seeking payment from him but not the travellers, but “never got a straight answer”.

“I cannot see any difference between me not paying my council tax and the travellers not paying it,” he said.

A spokesman for Aberdeenshire Council said: “We take the recovery of council tax very seriously and we continue to make efforts to collect tax which has not been paid.”

For those of you who don’t speak English as the English do, “travellers” I think refers to either vagrants, gypsies, or Irish Travellers; while a “lay-by” is something like a highway rest stop.

Here’s another example:

Protest at bumpy road danger zone

A former landlady who claims her life is being made a “misery” by unfinished speed bumps is making a council tax protest.

June Robinson has canceled her council tax direct debit in a bid to make council bosses listen to her pleas for help.

The 62-year-old is kept awake by traffic bumping over four unfinished speed ramps at the junction of Beach Road and Beach Avenue in Cleveleys.

She said: “It’s made my life a misery. It’s been going on 10 weeks — bang, bump everyday. I wake up at 5am with the bangs. I’ve got a crack in my bedroom because of the vibrations.…”

These all have in common a mode of tax resistance that’s relatively rare in the United States — refusing to pay a tax because the government is charging too much or providing too little in return, as though the government were a subscription you could cancel when you decided it wasn’t worth the cost (would that it were).

Evan Reeves with his 5,574 checks

Tax resisters, as well as people just disgruntled or disgusted with their taxes, will frequently stumble on the passive-aggressive tactic of paying their taxes, but in a way that is particularly inconvenient for the tax collector. Some times also, they will choose a mode of payment that is both unusual and that has some symbolic or propaganda value. Today I’ll mention some examples of these techniques.

  • Evan Reeves wrote out 5,574 separate checks for $0.96 each to pay his federal income taxes. On each check, in the “memo” field, he wrote the name of a U.S. soldier who died in the Afghanistan or Iraq wars. He enlisted like-minded friends to help him fill in the checks.

    • Homeless artist John Ed Croft tried to use aluminum cans, “the currency of the homeless,” to pay his income tax in .

  • A fellow who thought he did not deserve his $137 traffic fine paid it by folding 137 dollar bills into origami pigs and arranging them in a pair of Dunkin’ Donut boxes to turn them in at the police department.

    • One of 137 dollar bills folded into origami pigs that a man used to pay his traffic fine.

  • Many people have hit on the idea of paying their taxes using the lowest denomination legal currency available. Here are some examples from recent years:
    • Richard Ross paid his $4,079 property tax bill by lugging eleven sacks of loose change to the county treasurer.
    • Normand Czepial paid his Quebec property taxes with 213,625 pennies submitted in an inflatable children’s swimming pool (alas, Canadian law allows anyone to refuse to accept more than twenty-five pennies in a single transaction).
    • Tax resisters in Bilbao paid part of their fine with 20,000 pennies.
    • Ron Spears paid a past-due property tax bill with 33,000 pennies, carried into the county treasurer’s office “in buckets on a hand truck.”

    • War tax resister Cynthia Sharpe prepares to pay her taxes with a check written on a giant mock-up of a coffin lid.

  • Australian war tax resister Robert Burrowes has tried to pay his taxes in a number of odd ways:
    • with a truckload of “Aboriginal land”
    • with medical supplies
    • with 104 trees
    • with 94 shovels