Here are a couple of new links for the frugality set:
Some bits and pieces from around the web:
To me, frugality is a game, a hobby, a competitive blood sport between me and the government with their running-dog State-privileged corporations. And it is a sport at which I excel! Part of the reason I am able to enjoy frugality is because I don’t cut from my/our budget anything that I value more than I value the time it takes to produce or earn it. We still travel abroad, I still pursue ethnic cooking, we indulge frequently in live theatre… But I don’t write much about the specifics of my various and many frugal strategies even though I am proud of them. For example, with food prices soaring, last month I was able to cut an additional 20% out of an-already-frugal grocery budget and I did so without sacrificing the foods — including luxury ones — that we enjoy. Again, frugality doesn’t mean giving up a single thing you truly value; it means discovering exactly what it is you value and, then, finding a way to afford it comfortably… and legally I should quickly add.
Don’t fear that you are alone. You aren’t. And while the IRS is a big scary bureaucratic matrix of control, consider how many bombs you had to dodge on your way to work or the supermarket or kids’ basketball practice today. None? Then you’re doing much better than the Iraqis. Isn’t taking a small chance with the tax man the minimum sacrifice we can make as individuals who want to stop the murder?
Here are some more things that have cropped up on the web in recent days that have caught my eye:
I maintain that it is the right of any individual person to reject and renounce a government which violates his moral conscience. I maintain that it is my personal right, in this very body, here and now, to ignore the State, and to refuse participation in its actions which violate humanity and life itself. I also declare that the same is my intention insofar as refusal to pay direct tax to any nation-state. There can be no treason if one’s first loyalty is to humanity and to life itself. Human life is above Nation-State. Personal conscience and individual moral sovereignty is above State sovereignty. How can the question of treason arise when one refuses to murder helpless women and children? He who claims self ownership can never commit treason because the State cannot own him. He is not the property of the State.
…[M]ake spending money into a conscious, deliberate process through which you take control and defend yourself, through which you demand full value. When you are skeptical of people trying to sell you something, then you stop being vulnerable to the incredible bombardment of ads and opinions that urge you to be a fool for “the newest, the shiniest, the sexiest” acme product. Remember… what you are actually trading is not a scrap of government paper but the irreplaceable time it took you to acquire that government scrap. Make sure you receive something equally valuable in return.
Long before the incident with the swindling computer company, I’d lost the sense of “businessmen as heroic producers of wealth” which I’d absorbed (briefly) from Ayn Rand’s novels. Experience taught that businessmen were no more honest or admirable than the average Joe; indeed, whenever money changes hands, honesty seems to decrease. Moreover, as a libertarian I became acutely aware of how well-connected businessmen embrace the Corporate State and glut themselves on tax-funded contracts and state protections/privileges. (The limited liability of corporations is a perfect example of the latter.)
Businessmen are often the biggest obstacle to the free market and the staunchest friends of government regulation. In his article What Is The Enemy, Sheldon Richman writes, “the great threat to liberty is the corporate state, otherwise known as corporatism, state capitalism, and political capitalism. (The Therapeutic State falls into this category, because the prime beneficiaries are corporate medical providers.)” And, so, one of the ideological motivations behind my frugal rebellion was/is to remove myself from the role of obedient consumer, a role that helps to legitimize and sustain a system I find morally and politically bankrupt.
The moral necessity of defunding the US Empire is as follows: The Empire is engaged in wars of aggression, the endless war on “terror,” violation of human rights and civil liberties, illegal rendition of terror suspects to foreign countries for torture and interrogation, denial of habeas corpus, denial of the Geneva Convention, torture, wiretapping US citizens, and use of depleted uranium weapons, an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction. Need I go on? People said it couldn’t happen here, but now we are the “good Germans,” dutifully doing what the IRS tells us to do, while the government commits war crimes in our name with our money.
…[T]ake the following pledge: “I withdraw my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual energy from the corrupt US government. I will not give them any financial support, nor will I willingly accept any tax-funded benefits from the US government. I will put my financial resources to better use such as Vermont secession. I will starve the beast.”
Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the [Iraq] war’s largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.
The graft continued well beyond the congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors’ pockets, records show.
And in other news…
Leslie Cagan, UFPJ’s National Coordinator, encouraged coalition members to support the campaign: “With Tax Day right around the corner, efforts are underway to encourage people to not lend financial support to this war.”Over $500 billion has already been spent on this war, with no end in sight. While we keep the pressure on Congress to stop funding the war, we also need to nonviolently take matters into our own hands and encourage taxpayers to directly refuse to pay for the war. UFPJ supports the efforts of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee and CodePink (both member groups of the coalition) as they encourage people to stop paying taxes for war.
and Wendy McElroy notes:…[W]hat we are doing is very similar to what John Galt and his fellows did when they went “on strike” and withdrew to Galt’s Gulch. We are denying the State and its army of leeches, not the product of our minds as such, but rather our productivity.
The lifeblood of the State is taxes. And the two biggest kinds of tax that most people pay are income taxes and consumption taxes (sales tax, gasoline tax, alcohol tax, etc.). If you can learn to live on less money, you can deny the State money twice — when you no longer spend it, and when you no longer earn it.
Consider an acquaintance of mine who buys the latest and fastest computer every year. Let’s say it’s a $2,000 computer. Here, we pay combined sales taxes of 14%, so he has to fork over another $280 at the time of purchase. Now assume he’s in a 33% tax bracket. He has to earn $3,403, to pay $2,280, to get $2,000 worth of computer. To get that computer he has to pay $1,403 in taxes.
From my viewpoint, every year I don’t buy a fancy new PC is a year I’ve kept $1,403 out of the rapacious maw of the State.
This doesn’t mean I’m working as a railroad laborer instead of as a physicist. No, I still work in my chosen profession, but only as many hours as I need to meet my very modest needs. This lets me “purchase” the most valuable commodity of all — my time, to apply as I see fit in other ways to enrich my life.
I’ve met many libertarians who wistfully wish they could move to a real Galt’s Gulch, to go “on strike” and deny the State the fruits of their labor. You can do this, at home, perfectly legally. All it takes is an adjustment of attitude and the development of new habits. Should this catch on — and, with a recession underway, frugality may become more a matter of necessity than choice — there will be not one, but thousands of “Frugalista Gulches.”
Being frugal is not an end in itself; it is not just another way to amass savings so that you are the one who dies with the most and pays the highest taxes. Frugality is a way to own your own time — rather than someone/something else having a slave-master claim on your life. The less you have to earn in order to maintain a healthy and comfortable lifestyle, the less you need to trade irreplaceable time for money — ½ of which will be stolen by State through various means from income to gas taxes, from licenses to fines. To the extent you work ½ the year to pay off the State, well, to that extent you belong to the State.…
Get yourself out of that toxic loop in which your time is used to enrich others and not yourself. Being as economically independent as possible is the first step toward liberating yourself from wage slavery, from having ½ your work time go to support corrupt politicians and the overwe’ening State. Stop saying “yes” to the State by participating more than you must in a system that is rigged to rip you off. The farther back you can step, the freer you are.
The program costs $7.65 million to run each year, [Nina E. Olson] said, and the IRS also pays private collectors $4.6 million in commissions, or around 25 cents on each dollar they bring in. That puts the cost of the program to more than $12 million a year.
Private debt collectors brought in $32 million in , Ms Olson said, but are expected to bring in as little as $23 million this year. When the costs are subtracted, the IRS program may have less than $11 million in net revenues for .
But there is a far greater cost, Ms Olson argued.
If the more than $7 million in operating costs were put into the IRS’s automated debt collection system — an existing program — the agency could bring in at least $91.8 million in net revenues, and possibly as much as $145 million — a much bigger return. Those figures do not include the commissions.
Ms Olson argued that when calculated against that backdrop, private debt collection cost the government at least $81 million a year in revenue.
Wendy McElroy, continuing her series on the “frugalista” philosophy, shares some of her tips on living frugally.
Here are some of my favorites from her recommendations:
Wendy McElroy shares her frustration about friends and family members who think her deliberately frugal lifestyle is an affliction rather than a blessing:
They value money and prestige above happiness — indeed, above all else. They judge a person as successful or a failure based on bank accounts, cars, bling… whatever costs a bundle to have means you are a success; if you don’t have it, you’re a failure. I honestly don’t think it occurs to them that someone would deliberately reject what they consider to be success.
A family member called specifically to tell us an old friend was now a millionaire and urge us to “get in touch with him!” I don’t know what he expected would happen… perhaps he thinks being rich is a communicable condition or we could hit the friend up for a loan and, so, finally replace the 16-year-old car that I love. I don’t know. But the message of the phone call was clear. People in our family think we are failures because we are not as wealthy as we should be… however wealthy that is. It doesn’t occur to them that wealth is a trade-off and, beyond a certain point, it becomes a terrible deal for us. After making their disappointment clear, such family members always say “just as long as you’re happy”… but they don’t mean it. They would vastly prefer us to be rich and miserable. For one thing, we could then leave mattresses full of money to nieces and nephews… thus living a miserable but successful life for the sake of others’ happiness.
I’ve been reading some of the writings of Anthony Benezet over the last few days and I came across many passages that are harmonious with what Wendy McElroy wrote. Benezet was a proponent of voluntary simplicity in the Quaker style — plain dress, avoidance of unnecessary ornament, disdain of riches, and an eagerness to do good to others instead of to do well for himself.
But whereas McElroy’s motives are for true satisfaction in this life, over the false and frequently-advertised promise of satisfaction mediated by wealth and bling, Benezet took for granted that riches could provide satisfaction in this world but denied that this world was where the action was — his sights were set on heaven and he didn’t want anything earthly (and therefore ultimately worthless) getting in the way.
Still, the similarities are striking. I think it’s satisfaction in this life, and not merely anticipation of reward in the next, that Benezet is thinking of when, in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, he notes that “I have solicited & obtained the office of teacher of the Black children & others of that people, an employment which tho’ not attended with so great pecuniary advantages as others might be, yet affords me much satisfaction, I know no station of life I should prefer before it.”
“Brad” at WendyMcElroy.com talks about voluntary simplicity as a way of building freedom. Excerpts:
Are you tired of feeding the State your tax dollars? Tired of contributing to the War in Iraq, or the War on Drugs, or welfare, or earmarks, or stupid laws, or fat Congressional paychecks? I can tell you a simple and totally legal way to reduce the amount of tax you pay.
Earn, and spend, less money.
Having to earn more money than you really need enslaves you in two ways. First, your most precious and irreplaceable asset — your time — is diverted, not to achieve your goals, but to achieve someone else’s goals. (This may be the case either if you’re a “wage slave,” or if you’re self-employed.) Second, a huge slice of your earned income is taxed away from you, and goes to fuel the State.
So if you want more freedom in your life, start by asking: what things that you spend money on are essential to your happiness, or to achieve your personal goals; and what things are not? The process of reducing your life to the essentials has been called “voluntary simplicity.”
A handful of interesting things that stumbled on our internets recently:
One tax attorney writes:If you watch too much late-night cable television, you probably have seen commercials that make it appear that paying federal taxes is no big deal, because you can always work out a “pennies on the dollar” deal. Don’t count on it.
I regularly tell my clients that Offers in Compromise based on doubt as to collectibility are a crap shoot. You can meet all of the suggested requirements and the IRS can still legally reject your Offer merely because it feels it’s not in its best interests.
Of course, by the time you find out that the Offer is not in the government’s best interest you have voluntarily given it all of the information it needs to seize your assets and have also given them at least an additional year (the filing of an Offer extends the statute of limitations) to collect the tax.
Wendy McElroy has been doing a bang-up job of documenting her frugal and well-constructed life over at WendyMcElroy.com.
Recently, she took some time to discuss how her frugality meshes with her activism. Excerpts:
Yet another reason I advocate “alternative” means of financing your life — e.g. barter, self-sufficiency, the gray-market, agorism, frugality, freecycling and other freebie networks etc. — is that these areas of endeavor still function without being taxed to death. You can get the full value of your labor if you barter it; you can acquire a “new” computer for free if you are willing to offer usable goods from your own basement or attic on the lists where such goods are exchanged. You can sell simply for what people are willing to pay if you do so privately or carefully in certain venues. As it stands now, the State (at every level) is literally willing to tax the food off your tables and the clothes off your children’s backs.
This will only get worse in . Much, much worse. Plan and act right now to protect the quality of life for yourself and your family. The quality of your life is not the amount of money you make. It is the level of comfort (the food, the shelter, etc.) you can sustain and that level can come largely from “alternative financing” rather than from an official pay stub. Indeed, as long as you sustain a reasonable comfort level — what used to be called “middle/working class” — the lower your official wage the better because, then, your taxes will also be lower.
This is not merely a frugal measure. It is a line drawn in the sand by which I say “No!” to the State. I am mad as hell at having to support with my own life — which is what my time/labor constitute — the thieves, hypocrites and parasites who are politicians and the others who slurp from the public trough. No. No. No.
A sort of parallel to this argument comes from Charles Hugh Smith at OfTwoMinds. He’s been spinning some pretty apocalyptic projections of the current economic catastrophe over there, and, though he comes from a very different political perspective from that of McElroy, the two converge in many ways:
The solution to our present problems is triage: understand the context of the problems, prioritize what can be saved, live within our means and strip away all the perverse incentives, borrowing and financial legerdemain which currently dominate our economy, government and society.
Only a nation convinced of its invulnerability could be so deluded as to spend its waning days of wealth arguing about how the borrowed trillions should be divided, as if they were the spoils of conquest rather than the outright theft of our children’s future.
Some of his recommendations:
- Learn a side-skill/business which either creates surplus food or energy or tradable goods. Grow some food, however small in quantity, if you can; it’s not just saving money, it’s about appreciating where real food comes from and what it tastes like. Learn to cook real food.
- Build networks based on reciprocity, generosity and mutual aid. Since our government cannot provide all that’s been promised (based on a much higher worker-to-retiree ratio), then we have to build alternative support networks of the traditional types: family ties, church, neighborhood, craft guilds, etc.
His bottom line: “Food is wealth, health is wealth, energy is wealth; all else is illusion.”
Some bits and pieces from here and there in the libertarian corners of the web:
It is a mistake, first of all, to think about rules regarding the location of forks as paradigmatic of manners and etiquette. It is a mistake, too, to suppose that there is no important distinction to be made between the rules of etiquette and the principles of manners. And it is a mistake for libertarians, especially, to disdain all this business as the stuff of authoritarian busy-bodies.
…Societies… need rules to keep people from bumping in too each other too roughly. The state is one potential source of those rules. Morality is another. But we should not… neglect the importance of etiquette. Especially if, as libertarians, we want to minimize the role of the state as rule-maker and enforcer.
…I would think, moreover, that libertarians would find the topic of good manners theoretically interesting. Manners and etiquette are, after all, kinds of spontaneous orders.
I no longer believe the American dream is functioning. My choice is to earn and spend less in order to control my own time and to avoid fueling the State through more taxes. I have called this choice “frugality,” but some people are more comfortable with the term “voluntary simplicity.” The point of such simplicity is not to save every possible penny. It is to ensure that your time and money are expended on your goals. Voluntary simplicity can be viewed as a “business plan” for getting the most out of life. Ask yourself what your goals are and what is necessary to get there. Of equal importance, ask what is not necessary.
