“It is one of those things not easily accounted for, that men who would scorn to do an injustice to a fellow man, in a private transaction, — who would scorn to usurp any arbitrary dominion over him, or his property, — who would be in the highest degree indignant, if charged with any private injustice, — and who, at a moment’s warning, would take their lives in their hands, to defend their own rights, and redress their own wrongs, — will, the moment they become members of what they call a government, assume that they are absolved from all principles and all obligations that were imperative upon them, as individuals; will assume that they are invested with a right of arbitrary and irresponsible dominion over other men, and other men’s property.” ―Lysander Spooner
Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → how tax resistance fits the bill → isn’t some government worth paying for? → how government degrades ethics
The folks over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute have posted to the web Albert Jay Nock’s insightful “Anarchist’s Progress” (which was originally published in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury in ).
It included this meditation on ethics that struck a chord with me:
Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one’s conscience.
Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it — the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers — felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.
The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect — nay, would have wished to respect.
Among the passages of Raleigh’s writing Thoreau refers to is this one, from A Discourse of the Original and Fundamental Cause of Natural, Arbitrary, Necessary, and Unnatural War, which I thought was interesting enough to reproduce here:
Here’s another excerpt from Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection. The protagonist, Nekhludov, has been following a troop of prisoners who are being marched to Siberia. The first day of the march is in terrible heat and five of the prisoners die of heat stroke (this is based on an actual case, as Tolstoy mentions in a footnote). Nekhludov sees two of the bodies being carried away.
He runs into his sister later at the train station and says “what things I have seen today! …Two convicts have been murdered.”
“Murdered? How?”
“Murdered. They were made to march in this heat and two of them died of sunstroke.”
“But why — murdered? Who murdered them?” asked Natasha.
“Whoever it was that compelled them to march,” said Nekhludov…
Afterwards, Nekhludov reflects:
Yes, they were murdered.…
“Most terrible of all,” he thought, “was that the man has been murdered — but no one knows by whom. Yet it is murder — there is no doubt of that. He was led out with the others, on Maslennikov’s instructions. Maslennikov probably made out the usual order, putting his stupid, florid signature on some formal document with a printed heading, and naturally he won’t consider himself responsible. The prison doctor is even less to blame. He did his duty carefully, he picked out the ones who were not strong, and couldn’t have been expected to foresee the terrific heat or that the gang was going to be taken out so late in the day, or that they were going to be so closely packed together. What about the inspector? — but he was only obeying orders to send off a certain number of exiles and convicts of both sexes on a given day. Nor can the officer commanding the escort be blamed, for his duty lay in accepting a certain number and dispatching a certain number. He led them off according to instructions, and he couldn’t have known that those two robust-looking men were going to fall and die. Nobody is to blame, and yet the men are dead — killed by the very people who cannot be held to blame for their deaths.
“And all this,” said Nekhludov to himself, “is because of these governors, inspectors, police officers, and policemen consider that there are circumstances when man owes no humanity to man. Every one of them — Maslennikov, the inspector, the officer of the escort — if he had not been a governor, an inspector, an officer, would have thought twenty times before sending people off in such a press and in such heat; they would have stopped twenty times on the way if they had noticed a man getting faint and gasping for breath; they would have led him apart from the others, allowed him to rest in the shade, given him water, and then, if anything had happened, they would have shown some pity. But they — they did nothing like that, they even prevented others from helping: and this was only because their eyes were set not on human beings and their duty toward them but on the duties and responsibilities of their office, which they placed above their duty to men. That is the whole truth of the matter.
“If a man has admitted, be it for a single hour or in a single instance, that there can be something more important than the love he owes his fellow men, he may commit every conceivable crime and yet consider himself innocent.”
A flash summer storm passes, distracting him from his thoughts for a while. He tries to recover his train of thought:
“Ah, yes, I remember — I was thinking that the inspector, the officer of the escort, and all the others are for the greater part gentle and kind: it is their calling that makes them cruel.”
He remembered the indifference of Maslennikov when he was told what was going on in the prison, the severity of the inspector, the harshness of the officer of the escort when he was refusing places on the carts to the people who asked for them, and would pay no heed to the woman on the train who was in child labor. Evidently the reason why all these people were so invulnerable, so immune from pity, was simply that they were officials. “As officials, they can no more be filled with pity than this paved ground can absorb the rain from heaven,” he thought, as he looked at the sides of the cutting paved with stones of many colors, down which the rainwater was streaming, instead of soaking into the earth. “It may be necessary to pave the cutting, but it is sad to think that so much soil must be made barren when it might yield grain, grass, shrubs, and trees. And it is the same maong men,” he thought; “it is possible that governors, inspectors, and policemen may be useful, but it is terrible to see men lose the quality that distinguishes them from beasts — pity and love for one another.
“This is what it comes to,” he went on. “These men accept as law something that is not a law, and they do not accept the eternal, immutable law that God Himself has written in man’s heart. That is why I am so unhappy in their presence,” he thought. “They frighten me, and they are indeed terrible. More terrible than brigands. After all, a brigand may be open to pity, but these men are not. They are as safe from pity as these stones are from vegetation. That is what makes them so terrible. Pugachev and Razin are considered terrible — but these men are a thousand times worse. Suppose a problem in psychology was set: What can be done to persuade the men of our time — Christians, humanitarians or, simply, kindhearted people — into committing the most abominable crimes with no feeling of guilt? There could be only one way: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen, and so forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced of the existence of a kind of organization called ‘government service,’ allowing men to be treated like inanimate objects and banning thereby all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this ‘government service’ must be so unified that the responsibility for their dealings with men would never fall on any one of them individually. [emphasis mine — ♇] Otherwise it would be impossible in our times for human beings to countenance such cruel deeds as those I have witnessed today. It all comes from the fact that men think there are circumstances when they may treat their fellow beings without love, but no such circumstances ever exist.…”
As this excerpt illustrates, Resurrection functions largely as a vehicle for explaining and promoting Tolstoy’s philosophy (though this excerpt is more expository than the norm). I thought it worked pretty well as a story, but I think it would most appeal to people who like what they read in Tolstoy’s essays on Christian Anarchism, and are curious as to how those more abstract ideas look when they’re represented in the more flesh-and-blood lives of characters in a story.
The section I put in boldface above is heartbreaking, since it serves as a prophecy of what did in fact happen in the following decades, particularly in Russia.
Davi Barker has written an interesting series of articles on “Authoritarian Sociopathy” summarizing some of the work done to extend the findings of the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments:
- Authoritarian Sociopathy — if you invent a role that incentivizes evil many people will willingly adjust to the role and become evil; if you internalize “obedience to authority” as a core personality trait you will become capable of murder and tolerant of abuse
- Power and Deception — people placed into positions of authority are less troubled by their own unethical behavior
- Power and Compassion — powerful people become less able to sympathize with the suffering of other people
- Power and Hypocrisy — powerful people develop a double-standard of judging ethical lapses in which they give themselves a pass but judge others harshly for the same behavior — but there’s a catch, and it just might work in our favor
Here’s a nice animated video, called “George Ought to Help” that attempts to show that when people call on governments to mandate contributions to otherwise charitable causes, they are using disreputable violent means to feel-good ends:
It still perplexes me when I talk to people from the substantial pacifist contingent in the war tax resistance movement and find that for many of them, while they’re not convinced violence or the threat of violence would be an appropriate response to the aggression of, say, a Nazi Germany, or even to an armed intruder trying to break into your home — the government using violence to force people to contribute to education, the arts, scientific research, and other such nice things is peachy keen. Would they go door-to-door taking donations for the National Endowment for the Arts at gunpoint, I wonder?
I haven’t been following the disturbances in London closely, but was struck by the on-camera explanation from one woman who was walking away with her booty from a store she had helped to loot:
“Well, we’re getting our taxes back!”
You get stolen from all year long, and then the opportunity comes for you to get your share of stolen goods: why shouldn’t you?
Just another way in which government, by endorsing the sociopathic behavior its agents undertake, contributes to the normalizing of sociopathic behavior in general.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- If you give a person power over other people, this may cause that person to judge other people more harshly and themselves more leniently, according to a set of experiments by behavioral economics and social psychology researchers.
As Dan Ariely summarized:
This effect is stronger when the powerful people believe they have come by their power legitimately or deservedly.They simulated a bureaucratic organization and randomly assigned participants to be in a high-power role (prime-minister) or low-power role (civil servant). The prime-minister could control and direct the civil servants. Next, the researchers presented all participants with a seemingly unrelated moral dilemma from among the following: failure to declare all wages on a tax form, violation of traffic rules, and possession of a stolen bike. In each case, participants used a 9-point scale (1: completely unacceptable, 9: fully acceptable) to rate the acceptability of the act. However, half of the participants rated how acceptable it would be if they themselves engaged in the act, while the other half rated how acceptable it would be others engaged in it.
The researchers found that compared to participants without power, powerful participants were stricter in judging others’ moral transgressions but more lenient in judging their own: “power increases hypocrisy, meaning that the powerful show a greater discrepancy between what they practice and what they preach.”
A tax I haven’t paid much attention to here is the campaign “donations” that are extorted from businesses, groups, and lobbyists as the price of obtaining access to, and favorable actions from, politicians who are or may be in office.
In a promising development, the CEO of Starbucks announced that Starbucks and 100 other “major companies” have pledged to withhold any political contributions to current Federal officeholders “until a fair, bipartisan deal is reached that sets our nation on stronger long-term fiscal footing.”
This condition is vague enough that I worry the campaign may fizzle out in ambiguity, but the idea that companies might mutually pledge to withhold campaign contributions is a marvelous one and one I hope will catch on.- Peter J. Reilly continues his series touching on war tax resistance at his Forbes.com blog. In this episode, he takes a second look at the court case in which William Ruhaak tried to assert a legal right to conscientious objection to military taxation, saying that Ruhaak’s argument isn’t so frivolous after all. In another post, Reilly looks at the “paper tiger” of IRS tax enforcement, and shows how most taxpayers, if they keep their tax debt under $10,000, can get away with letting the statute of limitations expire and never have to pay it.
- Conscience and Peace Tax International has a good overview of the scope and history of war tax resistance internationally.
- Cindy Sheehan has done a further write-up on her tax resistance: “I vowed that I would never, ever pay a penny to this government in the form of income taxes again, because: A) My oldest son was priceless to me and I feel this nation owes me and B) other people’s sons and daughters all over the world are precious to me and I refuse to fund their murder, torture, displacement, etc.… I will defer paying my taxes as long as slaughter abroad is the foreign policy of this government, economic terrorism is the paradigm here at home and the Bush mob continues to roam the world as unrepentant criminals.”
Dan Ariely takes a look at Power and Moral Hypocrisy. When researchers arbitrarily cast subjects into positions of authority by doing a group role-playing exercise in which certain people are assigned to high-political-status roles like “prime minister,” those people become more strictly judgmental of others’ behavior while at the same time becoming more lenient in judging their own. That is to say that political power and authority don’t just attract hypocritical people, they generate hypocritical people.
