Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
cool stuff I found in back issues of MANAS
I found a peek at the birth of the modern American tax resistance movement hidden away in a edition of the MANAS Journal which features the article “No Compromise:”
Among those taking a decisive position are a number of men calling themselves the “Peacemakers,” who met in Chicago last April and pledged themselves (1) to refuse to serve in the armed forces in either peace or war; (2) to refuse to make or transport weapons of war; (3) the refuse to be conscripted or to register; (4) to consider to refuse to pay taxes for war purposes — a position already adopted by some; (5) to spread the idea of peacemaking and to develop non-violent methods of opposing war through various forms of non-cooperation and to advocate unilateral disarmament and economic democracy.
(Reported in the Politics.)
The idea of non-payment of taxes has been put into practice by Ammon Hennacy, a Tolstoyan of Arizona, and by Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio (see MANAS, March 31), and possibly by others.
Milton Mayer, of the University of Chicago, who writes regularly for the Progressive and has contributed to Harper’s, the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, has frequently written and spoken of this form of protest against war.
Walter Gormly, of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, finds the payment of taxes for war a violation of the principle established by the International Military Tribune which conducted the Nuremberg Trials.
The Tribune Charter identifies as a crime against peace, the “planning, preparation, initiating or waging of a war of aggression,” and in a letter to the Bureau of Internal Revenue Gormly asserts that the United States is doing just that “by maintaining bases, subservient governments and military forces from Korea to Turkey, by intensive research on methods of mass slaughter and by maintaining a huge military organization.”
As Section Ⅱ, Article B, of the Charter declares that “the fact that the defendant acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility,” Mr. Gormly feels obliged, to avoid possible prosecution as a “war criminal,” to refuse to pay a federal income tax, a large part of which goes for preparation for war, and he has so informed the Federal Government.
The story of “Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio” is given in an earlier edition:
The determination of Mrs. Caroline Urie, social worker and widow of an American naval officer, to pay no taxes for war purposes will probably strike many Americans as an irrational attitude.
On , Mrs. Urie wrote President Truman announcing that she had deducted 34.6 per cent of her tax — the proportion she estimates is earmarked for war.
“If they want to send me to jail,” she said, “that’s all right with me… I’ll never pay any more money for war.”
Democracy, it will be argued, is a rational process.
Nobody likes war, and nobody likes income taxes, but we have to put up with both.
We have a Congress to decide these things, and if everyone could question the decisions of the Congress whenever he pleased, soon there would be no Government, no order, no national defense, no anything.
So Mrs. Urie is irrational.
But what, exactly, is she to do, feeling the way she does?
From where she stands, paying for a war is irrational.
Maybe she has read Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor.
Maybe she is convinced that democracy means the right to have no part of killing anybody, for any reason, and to take the consequences of this position.
In her case, the consequences might be a jail sentence, although this may be doubted.
Mrs. Urie once worked with Jane Addams at Hull House.
For five years she was director of the School for Immigrant Children.
The Government may feel a little silly trying to put her in jail.
Maybe it should.
A week or so ago a leading news magazine blandly announced that a war with Russia is “in the cards,” not now, but later, when both nations are “ready.”
This was followed by a page of explanation telling why the war would be delayed.
Nobody wants a war, but there it is, and all the man-in-the-street can do is wait around …or so it seems. The news magazine also told what the war would mean — compulsory labor, compulsory financing, compulsory everything.
Compulsory death for millions was not mentioned — that is taken for granted, we suppose.
The news magazine said nothing about stopping the war.
It was just a nice, objective account for the American business man — what to expect, and when.
A visit to a large aircraft factory here on the Pacific Coast adds considerable local color to one’s sense of doom.
One plant, at least, seems to be making no commercial planes at all.
In the plant in question, 10,000 men working two shifts are turning out jet fighters and bombers as fast as they can.
The plant has Government contracts.
It’s all official, according to schedule, and absolutely democratic and rational.
But from Mrs. Urie’s viewpoint, it’s not rational at all.
She objects to buying death for somebody on a cost plus basis.
Thoreau had a similar idea, about a century ago.
Actually, there are two rationales in this problem: there is the rationale of a great nation getting ready for war, and the rationale of a lonely individual getting ready for peace.
So far as Mrs. Urie and her income tax are concerned, the democratic process is 34.6 per cent irrational, and she won’t go along.
This is her way of trying to be a good citizen and a good human being at the same time.
It is beginning to take some imagination.
A edition has a letter to the IRS (and an amusing recollection of a telephone conversation with an IRS agent) by tax resister Richard Groff.
Other issues of the journal include a review of Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War and the Income Tax, and a great deal of discussion of the work and thought of Gandhi and Thoreau.
I plan to spend some time browsing their free archives on-line in the coming days.
Bits & Pieces from around the web:
Have you ever been tempted to want to expand the federal government with a new bureaucracy?
Lord knows, many people have.
But those few libertarian hold-outs may have finally met the ultimate temptation — the anti-agency agency:
The Government Reorganization and Program Performance Improvement Act of 2005 would create a standing sunset commission, which would review all federal agencies and programs every 10 years and recommend changes.
If lawmakers did not vote to continue a program, its funding, not just its authorization, would automatically cease.
Of course, the commissions (it will take two, apparently) would be full of people appointed by the politicians, so I’d be a fool to expect much good to come out of them, but daydreams are free.
Rahul Mahajan at Empire Notes takes a critical look at the U.S. anti-war movement:
I begin with the observation that criticism of the war has been almost entirely as a fiasco, a failed and reckless venture, and not as a moral failure.…
In one breath, one mentions torture by U.S. troops, checkpoint killings, the savage destruction of Fallujah, and then in the next one talks about the great bravery and nobility of the troops that did it and of one’s complete support for them.
Well, such a complete disjunction between the evil of the enterprise and the nobility of those who carry it out is just untenable.
There is no need to paint the American soldiers as any more monstrous than the cogs in other monstrous machines have been.
But neither are they any less so.
More important, the way they have conducted themselves and the way that Iraq has been treated since the regime change doesn’t just reveal something about the Bush administration.
It doesn’t just reveal something about the military-industrial complex and corporate CEOs. It reveals something about American culture and about the deeper morality of this country and its people.…
The Iraq occupation is a mirror in which to look at this country, and so far nobody wants to take a serious look.
Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun examines the implications of a recent claim by a U.S. General that “U.S. and Iraqi forces have killed or arrested more than 50,000 Iraqi insurgents in the past seven months.”
And here’s a little something for the “harm reduction” advocates.
Alcohol prohibition finally ended in in Athens, Tennessee — one of those freakish “dry town” hold-outs in our nation’s noble experiment.
Well, when you keep an experiment going that long, you’re bound to pick up a few data points along the way.
For instance:
According to court records, Athens police made one less misdemeanor driving under the influence arrest in than in .
The Sheriff’s Department and troopers made 37 fewer DUI arrests last year.
That figure includes Athens police’s felony arrests.
Driving under the influence includes alcohol and drugs.
The city’s numbers are not staggering, but Athens police Capt. Marty Bruce said he sees an impact.
On the weekends since Athens went wet, police typically arrest two to three drivers for DUI, Bruce said.
“Before, it was eight to 10 people,” he said.
How did legalizing alcohol cut down on drunk driving?
The Decatur Daily decided to ask a drunk driver for his opinion:
Kendall Dowell of Athens, who has four DUIs on his record, making him a felon, said going wet has kept people from driving to Huntsville and Decatur for alcohol.
“It is much easier for people to get the alcohol here, stay home and stay safe,” Dowell said.
In any society of the future worth talking about and working toward, independent moral decision will be the dominant cultural habit — the universal goal and the highest abstract good.
So, when it comes to making a living, here and now, the primary task is to build a pattern of endeavor which permits that kind of decision — a pattern which, if and as it is successful, increases the opportunity for that kind of decision.
In this regard…
We recall the story [of] an eminent engineer whose professional abilities led him most naturally to municipal employment.
This man, who was young in his career at the time of this episode, realized that municipal governments are sometimes corrupt.
For him, right livelihood meant foresight in respect to the possibility that he might some day be asked to participate in dishonest practices, under pressure from the city fathers.
Confronted by this abstract possibility, he laid plans for a small business of his own, so that he would be economically free, should he feel morally obliged to resign as city engineer.
He was a man with a wife, two small children, and a mortgage, which made a steady income of substantial importance.
It eventually happened that the small business was the means of preserving this man’s integrity without harm to his family.
People sometimes tell me that they admire the stand I’ve taken, and “wish” they could do such a thing themselves, but for some financial reason or other, they cannot.
Sometimes these reasons are unforeseeable and urgent — more often, they’re ordinary but expensive lifestyle choices.
It is a rare person who, like the engineer in the example above, has the foresight to consider moral autonomy an asset worth valuing as such and worth including in financial calculations.
I’ve been reading through on-line copies of back issues of the journal MANAS over the past few weeks.
Not all of the articles are to my taste, but the ones that are I’m enjoying very much.
It reads much like a blog — the regular, plaintive and personal expression of a handful of people who feel strongly and want to express themselves to a small audience of the similarly-minded.
One of the things I like about the journal is that it has a sophisticated, secular and urgent concern with ethics and with the intersection of ethics and politics in the nuclear age.
It disappoints me that there isn’t more of this sort of exploration to be found today.
Sophisticated ethical discussion these days seems either to be abstract, academic and nearly impossible to read, or so thoroughly based within a particular religious tradition that it is hard to access from without.
Occasionally I’ll come across something on tax resistance in MANAS. Here’s one example, from (I’ve added some boldface emphasis to bits of especially-sharp rhetoric):
District Director of Internal Revenue
Philadelphia 7, Pa.
Dear Sir:
Enclosed you will find my Federal Income Tax return for , complete except for one detail:
I am refusing on conscientious grounds to pay my tax of $125.00.
You are entitled to an explanation for this refusal.
I do not intend to pay because I believe the use to which the greater part of my tax money would be put is morally wrong.
I refer of course to the preparation for war which is the major activity of the United States Government today.
That a third global war would spell the virtual end of human culture as we know it is a fact often repeated but seldom appreciated.
Those who obediently hand over their taxes to the government may well be financing the extermination of our species.
I decline to be a party to that act.
If one refuses to serve in the armed forces or to build the weapons of war (and I am one such person), how shall he justify his continuing to buy bombs and pay salaries that others may prepare to commit crimes against humanity?
Taxes for war are tithes paid to the devil.
It is not the principle of taxation to which I object.
If there were some practical way to pay that fraction of my tax which is to be used for constructive purposes, I would gladly do so.
But I cannot now see a way to accomplish this.
So I must refuse to pay any tax at all.
When we pause to consider the matter, we see that today our citizens are being presented with a fatal chain of cause and effect: the final link in this chain, a third World War, would be an unparalleled human catastrophe; the middle link is the fact that the most concentrated effort and greatest expenditure of our federal government is toward the preparation for this war; the first link is that the source of more than half these funds is the individual income tax.
What thoughtful person is not inwardly disturbed at contemplating his role in helping to forge this chain?
I for one mean to hold a chisel to that first link.
When two-thirds or more of the taxes demanded of me by the government is to be used to murder or at least to threaten to murder my fellow men on the other half of the globe, meanwhile contaminating with radioactive fallout all the earth and its creatures, it is just about time to draw the line, if indeed one ever intends to draw a line beyond which his honor will not allow him to pass in compromising with evil.
We are indifferent and morally insensible to the horrors that steal upon us by degrees.
Too late we may realize we have become helpless in their grip, as did doubtless many Germans under the Nazis.
Almost everyone is willing to agree that war is no solution to the problems of the world, that they should be met in a more creative way; yet almost no one is willing to act as if he believed this, which after all is the real measure of his belief.
Men have reason to suspect the worth of whatever must be guarded by terror and violence.
Not one fundamental human value need be defended, nor indeed can be defended, by the inflammatory threats and denunciations of our Department of State or the missiles and H-bombs of our Defense (sic) Department.
There is always the danger of mistaking the ugly symptoms for the disease itself, but if the chief enemy of man today is some institution, it is that of war itself, and not any mere form of government.
Man has only one defense against the horror weapons, and that defense is peace.
Not the so-called peace which is really only an interval during which to prepare for the next war, but that state of genuine brotherhood in which the concerns and loyalties of men transcend the arbitrary limitations of national boundaries and political ideologies and instead approach universal welfare as the only legitimate frame of reference when making the value judgments which every day are demanded of each of us.
In all candor I cannot predict that this ideal state of affairs will ever come to pass; but that melancholy fact in no way lessens the obligation we all share to work toward it in whatever way we feel we can.
Similarly, the fact that unjust deeds such as robberies and murders continue to be committed neither makes them just nor is it an acceptable excuse for our participation in them.
Thus I merely propose to extend into a vital area what is commonly regarded as a valid principle.
How strange that a person should feel he must explain to others exactly why he opposes the extinguishing of his species!
Surely it is the task of everyone concerned with ultimate human welfare to resist the forces which impel us toward the appalling crime and folly of collective suicide.
If some charge that this seems a negative approach, I reply that the first step in doing what is right must always be ceasing to do what is wrong.
I therefore stand ready to risk the displeasure of the State and the penalties and inconveniences she may impose upon me rather than willingly assist her in her immoral acts.
RICHARD GROFF Ambler, Pennsylvania
Tax resister Richard Groff, whose letter to the IRS I reprinted in ’s Picket Line, also wrote a four-part essay for MANAS on Thoreau (which was later published as Thoreau and the prophetic tradition).
I’m a sucker for Thoreau, so I dove into this eagerly.
The essay, surprisingly to me considering Groff’s own tax resistance, does not attend much to Thoreau’s civil disobedience specifically, but instead analyzes Thoreau’s relentless self-examination and enthusiastic philosophy of living in an interesting attempt to place it in what Groff describes as a prophetic tradition.
(Links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.)
Some excerpts:
This essay is particularly good, I think, both in its rhetoric and in its attitude.
I can’t say that I agree with him when he says that “the point is the smile” — in other words, that what matters is the change in attitude and posture that tax resistance represents, and not the practical withholding of money — but in many ways he seems to articulate what I have felt as I have tried to withhold cooperation from the government and have tried to justify and advocate this to others.
I was a spavined old man of forty-three (this was ten years ago) when I realized that my Government was unlikely ever again to order me to pick up a gun and kill a man who has never offended me and who had been ordered by his Government to pick up a gun and kill me; each of us subject, if he disobeyed the order, to being set upon by his own Government.
The last time my Government ordered me to perpetrate this abomination — for such it may be seen to be, on its very face — was in .
On that occasion I had said No (as who wouldn’t, to such a preposterous demand?) and the Government retired in instant confusion.
I had not expected that it would stand up to me like a man; rather, I had expected it to use its brute force on me.
But I appeared to have taken it by surprise.
Governments taken by surprise hasten to reclassify, supposing by this device they may escape their predicament.
Mine reclassified me.
It reclassified me as “indispensable war worker” because I was beating my gums in the lower depths of the one remaining peaceable division of a university engaged in a great secret war project.
(The university’s motto was, Let Knowledge Grow from More to More, that Human Life May Be Enriched; and by , its knowledge had grown to the point where it was able to enrich human life in Hiroshima.)
When I saw that all a man had to do was say No to send the Government headlong, I lost my fear of it.
I had long since lost my respect for it, as any man necessarily must for any such organization, be it Murder Inc. or Murder United.
But the Government found other men to do its sorry work, and enough of them, I suppose, because it did not come near me again; not even in , when it enacted universal peacetime conscription (which Woodrow Wilson had called “the root evil of Prussianism”).
It sent me a classification card again, and I sent it back with a letter of regret and heard nothing more.
Others may have had another sort of experience with Government, or with Governments more purposeful than mine, but mine convinces me that Government, whatever it means to be, good government or bad, is something of a humbug.
The good things it pretends to do are done by men — by free men, and even by slaves — and the one thing it is specifically designed to do, and always promises to do, it never does, namely, keep the peace.
A humbug and, like all humbugs, a fourflusher.
A few years ago I was invited to Hungary on a religious mission.
My American passport forbade me — quite tyrannically — to go to Hungary.
But my American Constitution forbade the Government to interfere with my religion.
As between the passport and the Constitution, I held with the Constitution and so informed the Government before I went.
The Government waited until I got back and then threatened to take my passport away from me, and thus make me a prisoner of my own country, unless I immediately swore that I would never again disobey its regulations present and future.
Again, all I had to do was say No.
My religion forbade me to swear at all and my Americanism forbade me to agree to obey anybody’s future regulations, and I said so.
The Government ran away at once.
There remained one matter in respect of which I felt that the Government needed a really good licking and would not behave itself until it had one.
That was money.
If men for its abominations were, as it seemed, a dime a dozen, it wanted only to get the dime to get the men.
I might be palsied and arthritic, but I could still hand over the dime and the Government would let me go my windbroken way.
As long as I went on giving it its annual allowance, I could no more expect it to mend its ways than I could a reprobate son.
I had to say No to the dime and see what happened.
The Government was even then — this was — on a shooting spree and I was financing the spree.
It was ordering men to kill other innocent men and burn down their shanties, and I was buying it the men.
I was paying others to do what I would never do myself or, indeed, countenance in others in any other circumstances.
This couldn’t go on.
Such were my reflections when, that same season, in a German town, I saw the ruins of a hospital in which eighty-five people, their eyes bound after surgery, were burned up blind when a bomber missed the railroad station.
I realized that my notion of war as two innocent men ordered to kill one another was a little refined.
War meant killing people in hospitals, including whatever Jews in Germany Hitler had overlooked.
This really couldn’t go on.
I notified the Government that I was cutting it off without a nickel of my dime until it straightened up.
It was spending at least half of its allowance on criminal debauchery and I did not see how I could be a God-fearing American and go on paying its upkeep.
Taxes are inevitable. So is death. But suicide isn’t inevitable.
I intend to die unwillingly and without giving death any help.
The inevitability of any evil is not the point; the point is my subornation of it.
Why should I, on receipt of the Government’s demand for money to kill the innocent, hurry as fast as I can to comply?
My neighbor says that the Government will take the money anyway, by force and violence and other lawful means.
He is right, but what’s that to me?
If a robber ties me up and robs me, I have not become a robber.
If the wicked Russians kill me and my little ones in my (or at least in my little ones’) innocence, I have not become a killer.
I have become a killer only if I kill wicked Russians (or, more likely, their wicked little ones).
My neighbor says that my refusal to pay half the tax begs the question, since the Government will use half of what I do pay to kill the innocent and, in the end, with interest and penalties, get more from me than if I had paid the whole tax with a smile.
Agreed. But the point is unaffected; the point is the smile.
I am told that the Government doesn’t need my piddling nickel to get on with its abominations.
Agreed again. But I need it.
The year I first refused to pay it, the tax came to $33.94.
I could buy myself a champagne supper with $33.94.
Or I could send it to the American Friends Service Committee, which could buy 1,697 dinners with it for hungry children in Orissa Province in India.
One way or another, the Government doesn’t need the $33.94, and I do; and its characterization of the amount, when I went to court for it, as “this small tax” was contumelious.
Of course the Government can get along without my money.
If it gets less from me, or none, it will get more from my neighbor.
Or more from me, then less from him.
It will get the money and buy the guns and give them to the Portuguese to defend democracy against the Russians by killing the innocent in Angola.
Good enough.
I am not the government; I haven’t the power to put a stop to the abomination, but only to put a stop to my being willing to perpetrate it myself.…
If I need not pay my taxes because I am squeamish about the killing of men, then, says my neighbor, the vegetarian need not pay his for inspection of the killing of animals, etc., and, in the end, no one need pay his taxes for anything he doesn’t much fancy, and this is Anarchy.
My neighbor is not alone in saying it.
When the Circuit Court of Appeals was hearing my complaint against the Government, one of the Judges said to my learned counsel, “Is the plaintiff aware that this Court, if it held for him, would itself be laying the axe to the root of all established Government?”
And learned counsel said, “I think he is, Your Honor.”
Is a man who is worth anything at all to be diverted from positive horrors by putative horrors?
I have no primary obligation to save established Government from the axe, but to save myself from the fire.
I will pay for the conveniences of Government, including those conveniences I don’t use.
I will pay for its inconveniences, because prudence dictates that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.
But why should I pay for its madness — or my neighbor’s, if you will — because the madness is established?
All the more reason for cutting it off at once; all the more.
The Government is anarchical, not I.
It, not I, denies the kingdom of God and throws its anarchical bombs into the midst of the family of man.
I am not first of all a doctor of political philosophy, with no better business than to set terms like Anarchy in order (though I may say that if there were only one other term, and that Slavery, I, like Locke’s judicious Hooker, would know how to order the two).
I am first of all a man; not much of a man, and getting no better; but still a man, born with a set of terms to live by and an instinctive apprehension of their validity.
My neighbor says “Anarchy” as if he were affirming the Eleventh Commandment instead of denying the Second and the Sixth.
He wags his head and says that there is no other way than established Government — or even than this established Government — to manage human affairs.
Who said that human affairs are manageable? — Not I.
Perhaps they aren’t.
They do not seem to be just now, nor for a long time since.
If they aren’t, then a man who may not live until they are must manage his affairs as best he can.
The burden of proving manageability is on the managers or, as they are known in election year, the rascals.
Neither my neighbor nor the rascals can relieve me of my responsibility by thumbing through their index of terms and threatening me with Anarchy.
But all this is by the bye.
I do not mean to argue Pacifism here (another of my neighbor’s terms).
I mean to abide by the Aesculapian oath to do good if possible, but in no case to do harm, whether or not the doctors of medicine (or of political philosophy) abide by it.
And if I can not once in a while try to be righteous without succeeding in being self-righteous, I am sorry that I am offensive and that my neighbor is diverted by the offense.
My neighbor is forever saying that the situation is pretty bad (or at least hopeless) and asking, “But what can one man do?”
He means to answer his own question with, “Nothing.”
I tell him what one man can do, almost nothing, perhaps, but not quite nothing, and do at no more effort than it takes to keep his golf clubs polished.
But when I tell him, he says, “But one man is ineffective.”
I know that one man is ineffective.
I know that Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were ineffective.
They all hated war — so they said, and I believed and believed them — and they all made war.
I hear that John F. Kennedy, as President, is the prisoner of his position.
And these men are managers, and my neighbor and I are not even managers.
How, then, should one of us be effective?
But one of us can try to do the right thing, all by himself, and, maybe, even be effective.
The United Nations has not been able to disarm the world by one man; I, all by myself, can be more effective than it has been.
“But someone must take the responsibility for Society.”
Is there no other way than public preferment to take responsibility for Society?
If there is none, a man may have to be irresponsible.
Too bad; but not as bad as being responsible for the offenses the men-turned-Government are obliged to commit in Society’s name.
Society, grumbling at the offenses, but assenting to them, has compelled me to choose between a bad course and a worse.
Thoreau imagined a State which would recognize the individual as a higher and independent power.
He may have been whimsical then. He would be much more whimsical now.
Two victorious world wars for democracy have not extended democracy even among the citizens of the victorious nations.
Two victorious world wars for democracy have extended, not the black man’s, but all men’s enslavement to war and its preparation.
The State that Thoreau, so whimsically in his time, so much more so in ours, imagined “would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.”
Some of us who once pitied the Forgotten Man would like ourselves to be forgotten now, but the State insists upon remembering us each and several; not, to be sure, as men, but as cards to be slipped soundlessly into a computer.
But when one of the cards does not slip soundlessly out the other end, the computer may not know, for a moment, what to do, and so, for a moment, do nothing.
The only thing a man — a man, not a card — can do now is obstruct and pray for obstruction.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
Mr. Kennedy spoke these words at his inaugural, I knew that I was at odds with a Society which did not immediately rebel against them.
They are the words of totalitarianism pure; no Jefferson could have spoken them, and no Khrushchev could have spoken them better.
Could a man say what Mr. Kennedy said and also say that the difference between us and them is that they believe that man exists for the State and we believe that the State exists for man?
He couldn’t, but he did. And in doing so, he read me out of society.
This good man, and the good men around him, can neither do good themselves nor allow me to do good if I would.
They are all of them prisoners of their position — prisoners already of the Government which tries to imprison me.
I offered to give the Government all the money it wanted, no matter how much it wanted, if it would use it to help my countrymen.
My country’s children needed schools.
Its old people needed medical care for want of which I (with my own eyes, as my mother would say) had seen them die.
But the Government wouldn’t hear of these needs.
They were all beyond its capacity — the capacity of the Government of the richest nation in history.
So straitened, indeed, is the Government’s capacity to help men, at home or abroad, that it is constrained to notify the children of Orissa Province in India that they either have to make war on “our” side or starve.*
Shall we say “Yes” to a Government, no matter what it asks of us?
If so, men are freer in Prague than they are at home; and this would seem strange unless you hold that ours is a Government that, unlike any Government that ever was before, never asks anything of us.
Our government is certainly better than many in many respects, but in the one respect of mortal wrong, the killing of the innocent, it is identical with all the rest.
There is something to practice’s making perfect.
I may say, “I would say No to Communism,” or, “I would have said No to Nazism.”
But if I cannot say “No” to a Government whose pains are light, what makes me think I would say “No” to a Government whose pains are heavier?
It is excruciatingly easy for me to say “No” to Communism, and I say it.
I would not rather be red than dead; I would rather be neither.
But I would rather be either than have the blood of the innocent on my hands.
Wouldn’t you?
The Russians will have to answer to their Government’s abominations, you and I only to ours.
What our Government requires of you and me, in our dotage, is only that we give it the money to buy the gun and hire the man to carry it.
What say you?
The world may end next week, or next year, and the last flash will light up the darkness in which we stumble now.
We shall be able to see then, in an instant, that the Government, like us, wasn’t itself very good or very bad but only, like us, enchanted, and, in its enchantment, like us in ours, turned everything it touched to iron.
Between now and then we shall none of us change our wonted ways very much or very fast, and we should not expect to.
But then, in the last flash, instead of saying, “What little can I do?” we shall say, “What little could I have done?”
* “It is my belief that in the administration of these (foreign aid) funds we should give great attention and consideration to those nations which have our view of the world crisis.” ―President Kennedy (Newsweek, ).
In an issue of MANAS that I ran across in , I noticed that the pacifist tax resister Ammon Hennacy trod a similarly-annotated though much more frugal path:
Ammon Hennacy, militant pacifist, one-time Tolstoyan, and now, as he says, a “Catholic” anarchist, is a man who likes to make things simple.
He is also a vegetarian, which contributes to simplicity of diet.
Here is his budget for (with his comments):
Total
$10.00
Whole wheat flour, 25 lbs. (could grow own wheat)
$1.25
Vegetable shortening, 3 lbs.
.68
Cornmeal, 5 lbs. (could grow own corn)
.46
Oleomargerine, 2 lbs.
.38
Rice, 4 lbs. (price is too high)
.58
Raisins, 2 lbs.
.23
Syrup, 5 lbs.
.47
Yeast, salt, sugar, etc.
.50
Total
$4.55
Electric light bill
1.00
Bundle of CO and CW’s
2.40
Postage stamps, haircuts, etc.
2.05
At , Hennacy was making about seventy-five cents an hour as a farm laborer in Arizona.
His theory, then, and ever since, was that if he worked by the day, no withholding tax would be taken from his pay by his employer.
In this way Hennacy frustrates the government’s plan to use some of his earnings for the preparation for war, for the design and manufacture of H-bombs and similar devices.
Hennacy is bound and determined that none of his labor will contribute to the military program of the United States, and he is probably the most successful man in the country in carrying out this resolve.
He calls himself a “one-man revolution,” and if someone asks him if he thinks he can change the world, he admits to some uncertainty, but replies that he is making sure that the world won’t change him!
…Incidentally, while working as a day laborer in Arizona, he put his daughters through college, living on ten dollars a month, himself.…
The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:—
In all
$28.12½
Boards
$8.03½
mostly shanty boards
Refuse shingles for roof and sides
4.00
Laths
1.25
Two second-hand windows with glass
2.43
One thousand old brick
4.00
Two casks of lime
2.40
That was high
Hair
0.31
More than I needed
Mantle-tree iron
0.15
Nails
3.90
Hinges and screws
0.14
Latch
0.10
Chalk
0.01
Transportation
1.40
I carried a good part on my back
These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter’s right.
I have also a small woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually.
If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.
I became curious about this need to fill in a ledger that Hennacy & Thoreau & I had.
Although this is the third year that I have published an accounting of my budget, I still have to overcome an inhibition that discourages me from doing so.
In part, I think this inhibition comes from a taboo about discussing detailed money matters with others — it would be easier for many people to blog about the follies of their sex lives than about the line items in their budgets.
In part also, I worry that it is a particularly boring form of exhibitionism (people would probably rather read about your sex life than your checkbook, too).
But there is also a sort of lingering feeling that matters of money and economics are themselves shameful.
In the same way that everyone has bowel movements but it isn’t polite to bring it up in conversation, everyone has a budget but nobody is supposed to really talk about it.
If you pay too much attention to money it must be because you’re poor, or stingy, or greedy, or obsessed with money in a vulgar way, or something shameful like that.
This is too bad, because the part of our lives that we hide in this way is a big part of the lives we live.
Somehow in the course of history, while we were acquiring tools like money and credit and capital and commerce to supplement and amplify our ways of living, we were also shoving a lot of how we live behind a veil.
The irony is that these same tools give us a convenient notation for quantifying and reconciling much of our incomes and outgoes, the heartbeats of our economic health — it’s as if someone has handed us binoculars and we responded by putting on a blindfold.
This taboo has some big disadvantages — it means that we don’t compare notes and learn from each other’s experiences, and also it means that we often do not look at our own economic behavior very closely, even by ourselves from behind the veil.
We wander around, spending money with our eyes closed, stumbling into debt, wondering why things don’t quite work out according to plan but ignoring that we’re blinding ourselves.
And because we hide our true economic health from each other, we evaluate each other very superficially — we judge someone’s well-being by sizing up their bling because we know no better and aren’t supposed to ask.
We envy people whose sparkling debts are crushing them and pity people who would rightly fight tooth and nail not to trade places with them.
It’s hard not to entertain conspiracy theories when confronting this.
After all, it’s easier to make a profit off of customers who can’t tell whether or not they’re being ripped off, and it’s easier for a government to tax people who won’t bother to translate that lost money into lost time and energy because they don’t know any better.
There are powerful people who benefit from this money taboo.
But whether the wool was pulled over our eyes or whether we put the blinders on ourselves, we can’t expect someone else to come along and restore our sight.
We have to, and we ought to, do that ourselves.
