Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Argentina →
in 2009–10
I noted that struggling farmers in Argentina were organizing and engaging in nonviolent direct action campaigns such as strikes and blockades.
The latest news suggests that they may be adding tax resistance to their arsenal (excerpts translated by me, and my Spanish isn’t all that hot so caveat emptor):
Leaders from the Córdoba district of the Argentinian Agrarial Federation (FAA) felt the concern of numerous rural producers from throughout the province in launching a tax rebellion to start in .
So, with all of this forcefulness, Agustín Pizzichini, head of the FAA’s Córdoba district, explained to La Voz del Interior that the proposal to halt national and provincial tax payments was launched by independent producers in various locations in the province during a meeting that took place on at the federation’s headquarters.
The meeting also took stock of the presence of the future head of the provincial council of Coninagro, Marco Giraudo.
The revolt is a reaction to the lack of “concrete measures” from the national government to confront the drought in the affected regions, the fall in profitability, and the increased tax burden from provincial mandates.
The drastic situation will be conveyed for consideration by the central council of the FAA on in Rosario.
While a group of directors of Agrarian Federation subsidiaries held a meeting in Oncativo, the head of the Pilar subsidiary, Juan Pivetta, said, as for himself as regards to the decision of a tax revolt, “not participating.”
However, he indicated that producers are willing to engage in other methods of protest, like a suspension of sales.
“The situation today is more serious; it is one thing to have problems, volatile prices, and it is another not to have a harvest; it will motivate a different reaction,” he argued.
Leonardo Ferrero, a producer and contractor from Hernando, said that the idea of halting tax payments “is what you hear from people who are desperate.
The credits (that the government announced) only work if the productive economy is well,” he argued.
Apparently the tax resistance threat by farmers in drought-ravaged areas of Argentina has had some effect (see ♇ ).
According to a report carried on AFP:
The Argentine government on decreed an agricultural emergency in the areas stricken by a historical drought, which exempts those producers from a vast region of the Pampa Húmeda from paying taxes for a year, announced president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
That’s one way to stop a tax resistance campaign!
“These decrees represent an effort from all Argentinians, because there is no other sector that has these benefits,” remarked the president regarding the exemption from taxes that will reach the income tax, the personal property tax, and the presumptive income tax, that will extend until .
“We are completely relying on great patriotism and effort because the government must receive taxes,” stressed the president in respect to the losses the measure means for the government’s coffers, at the beginning of a year that will include legislative elections.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Some states, whose governments are suffering from bloated budgets and recession-spawned drops in tax revenue, have decided to issue IOUs instead of tax refunds .
This is causing some taxpayers, many of which are having financial problems of their own this year, to see things a little more clearly than usual.
Like this fellow, who says: “Now let’s be absolutely crystalline clear on this issue: A tax refund is not some kind of bonus.
It’s not a stimulus check.
Not welfare!
It belongs to the taxpayer.
In fact, it’s not much more than a loan that the unwitting taxpayer has made to their state, and as such the government has no god-damned right to the money!” Well, that’s all well-and-good, and I’ve heard such sentiments before, but what’s different and encouraging is that this fellow wants to take the next step and encourage taxpayers to end their tax withholding so that in the future, the government is coming to them, hat-in-hand, rather than the other way around.
Maybe it’ll catch on.
Timothy Coughlin, while serving a life sentence, successfully filed for millions of dollars in fraudulent tax refunds from the IRS.
Or so says this news report. What interested me about the news article was that the conspirators were being prosecuted by a State prosecutor, who expressed frustration that he couldn’t get the feds to take any interest in the case.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, among others, is promoting a non-payment campaign against the government water monopoly.
I honestly don’t know much about the issues behind this campaign, and most of the web sites seem to assume that visitors are already up-to-speed.
But this campaign’s bold picket signs helped me find a graphic and a title for my book We Won’t Pay! so I’ll give ’em props for that.
Los Vecinos Autoconvocados [the mobilized neighbors?
— ♇] decided to have recourse to Justice against the city council’s measure to raise the value of the land and houses by decree; Moreover, they will return to gather in front of city hall to protest against the hike applied to the rates; They decided not to pay the TGI [property tax] and to leaflet against the city measure.
It was decided, after an exchange of opinions:
do not pay the TGI by confiscation [«por confiscatoria» — I’m not sure whether this is a description of the method the tax is collected, or the method it will be resisted, or something else — ♇]
conduct a protest march and cacerolazos at the Plaza de Mayo in the city of Paraná
leaflet the city to inform the public about the non-payment
Assembled together , the taxpayers of Paraná decided to bring a constitutional challenge today against the measure of the city executive to increase valuations by decree.
This act determined increases between 50 and 500%, or more in some cases, in the property tax rates charged by the municipality to Paranans.
The recommendation of the Executive Board of Los Vecinos Autoconvocados had been to suggest legal actions, before the decision of mayor José Halle not to review the situation and his refusal to meet with the citizens.
They also suggested taking as the groundwork the arguments of the opinion of the City Ombudsman of Paraná that had advised that the city council suspend the increases.
They also reiterated the motions against paying the fees in the current conditions and the proposal set forth to make the values that held until last year.
This is in addition to the potential tax resistance campaign by drought-stricken farmers in Argentina, which I’ve noted here a couple of times before.
I’m beginning to think that tax resistance may be the national sport of Argentina.
Here’s yet another example, one that seems unrelated to the other two I’ve recounted in recent weeks:
Neighbors in the town of Justo Daract decided not to pay until the mayor tells them what he would do with so much money.
A grass-roots [my latest best-guess translation for «autoconvocados»] group of neighbors in the puntana [I think this means it’s in San Luis] city of Justo Daract called the community to a “tax revolt” against the collection of a municipal rate that experienced an increase of almost 400 percent.
“We have decided not to pay the municipal fees until such time as the mayor (Ramón Domínguez) gives account before the public authorities of what he spends on administration,” said Ramón Guerrero, one of the grass-roots neighbors, according to a press release.
For his part, the president of the local City Council, the Justicalist Daniel Pairone, accused Domínguez of “handling, , between 40 and 60 million pesos, the fate of which is unknown because he doesn’t give explanations.”
“Never since he came to hold a balance of power in the City Council has he set foot in the district, so far in this administration,” said Pairone.
Another councilman, the radical John Rodríguez, said that “Domínguez tries to protect himself, justifying the tax increase by saying that what he is doing enforces a resolution from that had never been applied.”
On , the neighbors will make a march on the city capital, where they will demand the intervention of the provincial governor, Alberto Rodríguez Saá.
The initiative of the grass-roots neighbors counts on the support of the provincial deputies from Frente Juntos for San Luis: Eduardo Gargiulo, Carlos Berro, and Mónica Beatriz Ruti; and also expressed the support of the legislator for the Falkland Islands Veterans’ Movement, Alberto Magallanes.
Another article notes that the central government is trying to divide the opposition: promising to devote more of the tax revenue to local governments in the drought-stricken areas (in the hopes of getting those governments to come out in opposition to the strike).
“Farmers at roadblocks will prevent cattle from being sent to slaughterhouses, the Rural Society said today in a statement.
The society will let grains from drought-affected areas and perishable foodstuffs pass.”
Here’s some information about a tax resistance campaign that’s just getting off the ground in Lezama, Argentina (translation mine):
The decision of the provincial Chamber of Deputies not to take up the Lezama independence proposal set off a strong reaction from segments of the population of that region who launched a blockade of Route 2 and decided to stop paying municipal taxes as a form of protest.
The picket line on both sides of the principal thoroughfare on the Atlantic coast, as far as kilometer 126, was started and vowed, at first, to extend “continuously” until the legislature enacts the initiative, something that in parliamentary circles was considered “impossible.”
At last, shortly after , forces from the Infantry corps proceeded to clear the route, a measure that did not encounter major resistance from residents, although a youth whose name was not released was detained and transported to the Chascomús station.
Now, in an assembly that will be held starting at , the grassroots residents will decide whether to apply this and other controversial initiatives to frame their rejection of the attitude of the legislature.
In this framework, although not in an organic form, some residents of Lezama announced their decision to stop paying municipal taxes as a form of protest.
“It’s a decision from the grassroots.
Let’s begin by not paying the local taxes, and if they don’t collect the garbage, we reckon we will undertake to do so,” explained one of the spokesmen for the protest, who requested to remain anonymous.
“Some threw out the idea of recalling the delegation and requesting the resignation of the delegates, but that was rejected,” he continued.
“The people are exasperated, some guys are fired up because this decision of the executive delivered to a peaceful community on the road after three years of struggle,” noted Julio Prado, real estate agent and resident of Lezama.
The demonstrators in favor of independence took to the road early to stay two days in La Plata in an improvized encampment in front of the legislature, where at dawn they received notice that the proposition was not taken up.
“There is a schedule of permanent cuts.
They don’t understand that we live on the side of the road.
If they evict us, we will return in half an hour.
This will be continuous,” said Prado.
I don’t know much about the issues involved here.
There’s an Autonomía para Lezama blog that’s been in operation for three years, and seems to have a good archive of recent coverage of the struggle, if you want to investigate further.
So far as I can tell, the “independence” that the folks of Lezama are seeking is from the larger municipality of Chascomús, to which their town was annexed in .
There is also a party of Chascomúskovite unionists who oppose the Lezamanian secessionists.
At this distance it seems a tempest in a teapot, but I really don’t know what all is at stake.
Anyone know how to translate “autoconvocado”?
I’ve been using “grassroots,” but I’m not confident that it’s correct.
Remember the Chascomús/Lezama municipal secessionist foofaraw that I covered ?
Back then, residents of Lezama, Argentina announced a tax strike to protest the legislature’s unwillingness to consider granting them independence from Chascomús.
Apparently their campaign worked and they finally succeeded in convincing the government to see things their way.
After governor Daniel Scioli announced yesterday that he would not veto the law to create the new city of Lezama, passed by the provincial deputies on Tuesday, the citizens of Chascomús reacted with a series of proposals to reject the independence of the nearby town.
In a neighborhood assembly it was decided next Sunday to hold the Opening of the Summer Season of Chascomús on Highway 2. The event will include the election of the queen, shows, and other attractions.
The intention is to obstruct traffic during the signing of the law, a recourse that was frequently used by the residents of Lezama in order to gain their independence.
Furthermore, they proposed to carry out tax resistance, not paying taxes, cutting the railroad tracks, and declaring persona non grata the 58 provincial deputies who sanctioned with their votes the law for the creation of Lezama as well as governor Scioli.…
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Taxpatriate satyagrahi Jeff Knaebel has a new (to me, anyway) website, Gandhi Swaraj Padyatra to accompany his thousand-kilometer padyatra (a sort of walking pilgrimage) to promote Gandhi’s philosophies.
The Philadelphia Daily News carried an obituary for long-time tax resister George Willoughby.
“The Willoughbys were also tax-resisters, withholding their federal taxes to protest their use for military purposes.
The IRS tapped their bank accounts to pay the taxes, but when the accounts ran dry, agents seized their 1966 Volkswagen.
Friends, brandishing balloons, party horns, cookies and lemonade, invaded the IRS office in Chester and bought the car back for $900.”
From the looks of it, tax resistance is the national pastime in Argentina.
This time, it’s shopkeepers in San Juan, who have announced a tax resistance campaign to protest the fact that the street vendors who compete with them for customers are untaxed.
The mayor says it’s all a bluff, and that in fact the shopkeepers frequently divert goods to the street vendors in an attempt to evade taxes.
The shopkeepers are paying their taxes into a fund that they say they will only relinquish to the government when it begins to crack down on street vendors.
More tax resistance talk in Argentina from farmers who are frustrated with the government’s failure to stimulate grain exports.
The Federación Agraria Argentina of Entre Ríos met in Villaguay to discuss their response, and may decide to refuse to pay taxes outright, or to insist on paying them in goods rather than in money.
Federación head Alfredo de Angeli confirmed that outright refusal to pay was on the table, though he said that “it would be a lamentable tax rebellion.”
And here is some news about a small-scale tax revolt happening now in Argentina, from the pages of El Diario (translation mine):
Neighbors of
CWC
who met about neighborhood problems. The comrades have put floodgates in
front of their homes to stop the water from the floods.
Neighborhood Service: Tax resistance in the Commercial Workers Center neighborhood
Because of lack of service, they won’t pay any more municipal taxes
The critical situation in the streets in which we live in the Commercial
Workers Center of Villa Nueva, after intense stroms, has generated tax
resistance of a sort among the inhabitants of the area.
Following a meeting, arranged by Civic Front councilwoman Olga Vivas, and
attended by a large number from the neighborhood, the attendees decided that
if the neighborhood is “no man’s land” it will not agree to pay for the
services that are not being provided.
In addition to not paying taxes, the comrades warned that they will take
their case to Justice, starting legal actions over the damages and losses
caused by the negligence of the Department of Public Works in charge of
Natalio Graglia.…
Residents of Villa Nueva, Argentina have been urged to refuse to pay for road work on the grounds that the work is being paid for with federal grants that have come out of their taxes once already.
Translation (mine, caveat emptor):
Villa Nueva — The town set the blame on radicalism but later, on [Mayor] Vivas.
They cover the whole city with anti-government pamphlets
The town awoke with leaflets that call on citizens not to pay for street work. The government summoned the press and condemned the deed.
It isn’t the first time.
This has happened on numerous occasions, but in this case, the pamphlets appear to be signed by a Grassroots Group of Citizens, such that the Government was prompted to contest them publicly.
Nevertheless, this group disassociated itself from the act and emphasized that they don’t have partisan goals and don’t seek confrontation.
Villa Nueva awoke yesterday with leaflets that called on the citizens not to pay for road work, because it came to be by means of a nonrefundable subsidy from the national government.
“Seek advice,” the pamphlet said to the residents.
As is known, in the last year the city moved forward as never before in
paving work with funds that mayor Guillermo Cavagnero negotiated before the
government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In
, the Executive sent to the Council a
scheme under which residents would be charged a percentage of the work, as
with that money to carry out others of vital importance.
The publication, which flooded the streets of the town, stresses that sewers,
pavement, and lighting are brought about with money from the federal
government, and that these things should not be charged.
The article goes on to relate a string of denials and finger-pointing, as
everyone tries to pin the pamphlets on somebody else and to deny that they
had anything to do with it.
Conscientious Objection to everything, except for taxes
Although the controversial bill for Conscientious Objection, promoted by representative Elda Pértile, is broad in its range of action, it is very specific in that nobody can benefit from it in order not to pay up to the State.
Although the controversial bill for Conscientious Objection that is promoted by governmental representative Elda Pértile, is broad terms of its range of action, it is very clear with respect to one thing: nobody can invoke this privilege in order not to pay taxes.
The eighth article of bill number 2667/10 that calls for “the provincial government guarantees to all the people of the province of Chaco the fundamental right not to act against their own personal conscience” says that under no circumstances may a citizen “plead Conscientious Objection as treated in the present Law, in fulfillment of their tax obligation.”
“Conscientious Objection is the opposition of a person, for moral, ethical, or religious motives, to fulfill a legal duty or an order or mandate of authority," says the second article of Pértile’s bill.
And it continues in the third by saying the “when Conscientious Objection in the strict sense is asserted against the rules of the Province of Chaco, this corresponds to a protected act, so long as there is no rule that establishes a special procedure for the protection of the objector,” it declares.
In this regard it expresses that “the Judges who hear the dispute must: a) Determine if the objection is indubitably accredited and established as a substantial precept of the beliefs that are invoked; b) Undertake an analysis of the reasonableness of the objected-to rule, examining if the State established a strict public interest in its fulfillment by the objector and the possibility that there exists alternative, less-restrictive means for the conscience of the petitioner; c) Consider the existence of alternative service, if appropriate, or alternative acts that the objector can accomplish in lieu of those required by the objected-to rule; d) Consider the special protection of minors in cases in which they are affected by said objection.”
In principle, Conscientious Objection can be asserted against any sort of mandate that is derived from the legal order, like medical rules or tax requirements.
In any case, and taking into account the conservative sector it comes from, the bill is clearly aimed at providing a legal escape to those Civil Registry recorders who do not want to marry people of the same sex.
And also, if its decriminalization is adopted, to prevent those doctors who are against them from being obligated to perform abortions.
Tax Resistance
Although tax resistance seems a little crazy, there have been cases in various countries in which, in conscientious objection, many people refused to pay taxes.
As read in the community encyclopedia Wikipedia, tax resistance is typically motivated by disagreement with the policies of the government or institution that is imposing the tax.
This may include total opposition to the state or the taxing institution, and not only specific policies (for example, the opposition of Gandhi in his time to the British Empire).
Anarchists who resist taxes are opposed to anybody or any institution that exacts tribute (obligatory under threat of punishment).
Christian anarchists of the pacifist school resist taxes chiefly because they finance governmental violence.
Some people suggest that the right to refuse to pay taxes is in the spirit of democracy, giving the people a right to veto and to force government spending to be made with the consent of the governed.…
Remarkable how panicky the government gets about conscience when anyone starts to consider using it to put a kink in the money hose.
Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities.
In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made.
Here are several examples:
Labor strikes
In Germany, in , “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days.
The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
A tax strike in aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in , refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
In Savannah, Georgia, in , the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay.
The city then locked them out of the wharves.
This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3.
This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.
During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in .
The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in :
The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax.
Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down.
… The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional.
The citizens all side with the strikers.
Hartals and business strikes
“Bushel Bob” Williams’ produce stand
When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in , farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
For a week in , a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business.
They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them.
Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in , “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
In in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax.
The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed.
Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions.
Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.”
That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.
A Parisian cafe owner holds down the fort during a one-day business strike during the Poujadist campaign.
When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes:
“The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…”
The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
In , Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
In the Dutch West Indies in , “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in , people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
In , cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike:
“We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in , there were often business strikes:
…all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…
…merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…
Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…
In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of , businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:
The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French…
The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke.
They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.
This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.
Consumer strikes
In Cairo in , a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay.
This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
In Melbourne, Australia, in “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer.
They were patrons of the lower-priced seats.
The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.”
One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.
(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)
As internet telephony started to become a real option several years ago, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching over to such internet-based plans.
In , as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries began to promote a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general.
“The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe,” wrote Arundhati Roy.
“Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.
Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one.
No target is too small.
No victory too insignificant.”
When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott decided to stop using the mail.
He wrote to a friend:
Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage?
or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property?
Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters.
Only a few cents — what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war?
Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. …
I cannot… believe it best for me to pay the present demand of additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.
Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that had to be purchased and applied to certain types of documents.
One Quaker wrote in :
I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses.
Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been.
… at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.
Other Quakers began refusing to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were being directed to military expenses.
Joshua Evans wrote:
About , I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind. …
I had felt myself restrained, for thirty or forty years, from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.
Quaker shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:
[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.
I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles. …
I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax.
So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may.
But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.
Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods” — that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.
Government bonds are an obvious boycott target for people trying to restrict the resources available to the government.
John Payne wrote a tract in entreating Quakers to divest from government bonds that went to pay for wars:
[T]he King [once] had the power of summoning the barons to the field, and the barons their retainers: by these means armies were raised, fields fought, and blood-stained laurels acquired.
But now immense sums are wanted; and without them War would be an impossibility.
The magnitude of the money necessary, infinitely exceeds any resource which the kingdom can immediately supply: therefore the ingenuity of ministers has recourse to the aid of Funding; that is, of establishing a fictitious capital, which shall bear a certain rate of interest; and any person, purchasing of Government a portion of this fictitious capital, is put into the receipt of interest according to the sum he purchases, and the country is burthened with taxes to support the payment of such interest.
No man hazards his veracity by saying that War cannot be now supported without the Funding System.
As no man then can deny this solemn truth, is it not astonishing to find Quakers holders of stock, not only in their individual, but in their collective capacity?
What then is the conclusion?
The Quakers, at the time they declare their fundamental principles prohibit War, are actively and voluntarily supplying the only prop by which the modern system of War is supported.
Payne himself went even further.
Eager to avoid as much as possible paying money to the British government that was fighting the American revolutionary war, he bricked up a third of the windows of his home to reduce his property tax (which was assessed based on the number of windows), he disabled his coach to avoid its license fee, and he rode miles out of his way to avoid road tolls.
Upset at the government siphoning off a portion of pew rents in establishment churches “to relieve the embarrassments in the city finances, occasioned by an extravagant self-elected magistracy,” some people in Edinburgh around the time of the Annuity Tax resistance there proposed also refusing to rent pews until government spending were to become more responsible.
The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.
The “Potato Movement” in Greece is trying to circumvent the over-taxed middle-men of the above-ground commercial market by directly connecting producers and buyers in a way that is mutually-beneficial to them and less profitable to the state.
The British government’s enforced monopoly on tea imports into the American colonies was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots.
Boycotts of monopoly tea were widespread, and were famously backed up by acts like the Boston Tea Party, in which monopoly tea was destroyed in bulk.
Other monopoly British imports that suffered from American boycott included house paint, cloth, glass, paper, and dye.
One patriotic song included the lyric:
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!)
Boycotts of British-monopoly goods like salt were also, of course, big parts of the Indian independence campaign led by Gandhi.
During the tax resistance and protests that accompanied the campaign for the Reform Act of , “associations were proposed of persons who would undertake to use no excisable articles.”
In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.”
For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.”
Another report said that “[t]he leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.”
In the Vietnam era, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the [U.S.] government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”
Another possibility is to obstruct the sale of such goods:
In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
Farmers in Argentina decided in to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
In Greece, recently, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills have barricaded the offices of utility companies.
Governments spend a lot of time and energy, and hire a host of political scientists and other such clergy, to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and charitable, and that conversely, failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.
So governments and other critics of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns are quick to deploy this available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks.
This can have the effect of putting the resisters on the defensive, message-wise.
One way some resisters and resistance campaigns have tried to defuse this is through the use of escrow accounts.
The idea here is that instead of paying taxes to the government, the resister or resisters will pay their taxes into a special account that they will relinquish to the government at a future date if the government meets their demands.
The message conveyed by this is that “we are willing to pay our share of money for the government’s upkeep — we’re not just keeping the money for ourselves — but we’re not going to do so until the government shapes up.”
Here are some examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique:
In , Samoan chiefs met and decided to pay their taxes not to the German imperialist government, but to officers who were authorized to hand the money over to the Germans only if “a satisfactory settlement has been arrived at.”
In , a group of Catholic war veterans in Queens, New York began paying their property taxes into an escrow fund that they said they would refuse to turn over to the local government until it fired a Communist Party member from his post as a government advisor.
In New Guinea, in , natives in the Mataungan Association, upset at their political control being diluted in a local government that included immigrant representatives, set up its own tax agency and collected $29,000 “which, it says, it is holding in trust until the council reverts to its old native-only status.”
In the Friends Meeting at Cambridge established a “Peace Tax Fund” that worked partially as a redirection fund, but which also anticipated that some contributors would want to release the funds to the government if the government provided a way to do so that would not make them complicit in military spending.
Ed Guinan resisted his small business’s taxes by sending the checks to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
In , the Nashua Area War-Tax Resistance Support Group decided to keep the withheld taxes of its members in escrow “to be given to the government when policies change and when the money will be used for purposes other than war.” Resisters could reclaim their money from the fund if the IRS seized money from them individually, and meanwhile the interest earned in the account would be given to charitable causes.
New England War Tax Resistance set up three funds — a mutual insurance “penalty fund,” a “Direct Giving Fund” for resisters who wanted to immediately redirect their taxes, and an escrow fund which would hold on to resisters’ money in case they at some future point decided they wanted to settle with the IRS.
The Purchase Quarterly Meeting of Quakers set up something called the “Peace Tax Escrow Account” to which resisters could deposit their refused taxes and which the Meeting said it would turn over to the government if the government gave taxpayers a mechanism to pay such taxes without paying for the military functions of government.
In , District of Columbia politician Walter Fauntroy, upset at the District’s lack of political representation at the federal level, “asked city residents to file federal tax returns but withhold payment of federal taxes and place the money in an escrow account to be established by a group called ‘Taxation Without Representation Committee.’ ”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers lost a court battle in which the IRS hoped to force them to withhold taxes from a war tax resisting employee. They began withholding the taxes as ordered, but rather than submitting them to the IRS, they put the withheld money into an escrow account and told the agency they’d have to seize it themselves.
In , the Chamber of Commerce in Tijuana, Mexico decided to withhold taxes in protest against inadequate security during a crime wave there. The group brought in accounting consultants to help them establish an escrow account, in the hopes that the gesture would discourage the government from classifying the member businesses as tax delinquents.
In , New York state assemblyman Greg Ball encouraged his constituents not to pay their Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax but to instead deposit the amount due into an escrow account which would not be relinquished until the Metropolitan Transit Authority were audited and reformed.
In , shopkeepers in San Juan, Argentina, protesting against competition from untaxed and unregulated street vendors, began paying their taxes into a fund that they say they will only relinquish to the government when it begins to crack down on the street vendors.
In , Markus Zwicklbauer, a 58-year-old tax consultant from Fürstenzell, Germany, began paying his taxes instead into an escrow account which he says he will release to the government if the government can show him to his satisfaction that it will be spent for the benefit of German citizens and not wasted on bailouts of other Eurozone nations.
A bar owner in Michigan in , struggling in the wake of an indoor smoking ban that discouraged her customers, organized a tax protest of similarly-situated businesses that involved paying taxes into escrow.
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
