Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → religious groups and the religious perspective → Robert McGee’s cross-cultural studies

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

Robert W. McGee has written a paper titled The Ethics of Tax Evasion: A Survey of International Business Academics which is available on-line. From the Abstract:

In 1944, Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled The Moral Obligation of Paying Just Taxes. His dissertation summarized and analyzed 500 years of theological and philosophical debate on this topic, much of which took place in Latin. Since Crowe’s dissertation, not much has been written on the topic of tax evasion from an ethical perspective, with a few exceptions. In 1998 and 1999, a few articles were published on the ethics of tax evasion in the Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy. An edited book on this topic was published in 1998. ¶ The present paper summarizes, updates and expands on Crowe’s work.

Back in October I linked to Robert McGee’s paper on The Ethics of Tax Evasion. McGee has a new paper out that covers much of the same material — Three Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion:

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

In 1944, Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled “The Moral Obligation of Paying Just Taxes”. His dissertation summarized and analyzed 500 years of theological and philosophical debate on this topic, much of which took place in Latin. Since Crowe’s dissertation, not much has been written on the topic of tax evasion from an ethical perspective, with a few exceptions. In 1998 and 1999, a few articles were published on the ethics of tax evasion in the Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy. An edited book on this topic was published in 1998.

The present paper summarizes, updates and expands on Crowe’s work and the other more recent work that has been published on this topic. Three basic views on the ethics of tax evasion have emerged over the centuries. This article presents and critiques those three views and raises some questions about points that have not yet been explored in the literature.

Other papers of McGee’s available on-line include:

• Why People Evade Taxes in Armenia: A Look at an Ethical Issue Based on a Summary of Interviews
• Is It Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State? A Look at Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Mormon and Baha’i Perspectives
• Jewish Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion
• Christian Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion
• The Ethics of Tax Evasion and Trade Protectionism from an Islamic Perspective
• Is Tax Evasion Unethical?

I’ve mentioned before the many on-line research papers by Robert McGee, who has spent the last dozen years or so examining the international and historical opinions of philosophers and religious scholars about the ethics of tax evasion, and comparing this to the attitudes of people today.

He’s got a new paper out now, The Ethics of Tax Evasion: A Survey of Romanian Business Students and Faculty.

McGee typically finds in his surveys, to his surprise and mine, only weak support for tax evasion under any circumstances. For instance, in this survey, on a scale from 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree), even a statement like “Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1935” ranks only a 4.5 — among the five faculty members who also took the survey, that question gets an even more incredible 6.8! (An earlier survey of “international business academics” had a similar result for this question: 4.23)

This paper includes many of the comments written by the Romanian students and may be a good source of information on the sort of attitudes that must be overcome to build sympathy for tax resistance.

I’ve mentioned on past Picket Line entries the work of scholar Robert W. McGee, who has researched the historical and cross-cultural attitudes concerning the ethics of tax evasion. He now has released several new reports that cover Argentina, Armenia, China, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Poland, Romania and the Ukraine.

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

McGee surveyed people in these countries and asked them to give a response from 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree) to statements including:

1. Tax evasion is ethical if a large portion of the money collected is spent on projects that I morally disapprove of
2. Tax evasion is ethical if some of the proceeds go to support a war that I consider to be unjust
3. Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1935

Not all questions were asked in all surveys, but here were the results for those three questions, along with the average scores for all of the “Tax evasion is ethical if…” questions:

As you can see from this data, which resembles other sets that McGee has collected, those who answer his surveys do not tend to give much support to tax evasion even in the most extreme circumstances (such as a hypothetical Jew in Nazi Germany paying a government in order to buy the mechanism of his own murder).

Of the 906 people who responded to that statement (“Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1935”), the average response on a scale from 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree) was 4.01 — right in the middle.

This demonstrates that the tax resistance movements have a long way to go in influencing public opinion to be at all sympathetic to their viewpoint. But it also demonstrates, I think, that much of the opposition to tax resistance may be unthinking and knee-jerk and that if people had an opportunity to actually consider the consequences of their thinking on the subject (is that hypothetical Jew really ethically obligated to help pay for Auschwitz?) this might be a beneficial consciousness-raising event that would cause them to look on tax resistance in general in a more sympathetic light.

^* This was originally on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) and I had to convert the numbers to match the others.

Following up on yesterday’s post about Robert McGee’s surveys of attitudes about tax evasion, the IRS Oversight Board today released the results of its survey of attitudes about tax evasion in the United States.

American taxpayer support for overall compliance reached an all-time high, according to an annual survey commissioned by the IRS Oversight Board. Nearly nine out of ten Americans (88%) feel that it is “not at all” acceptable to cheat on your income taxes, the highest level recorded since tracking began in 1999 and up two points from 2004. Attitudinal support for compliance also remains strong, with nearly three out of four agreeing that it is everyone’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes (72%).…

Support for turning in tax cheaters also surpassed last year’s record high, with nearly one of every three taxpayers (30%) agreeing that it is everyone’s personal responsibility to report anyone who cheats on their taxes, a six point increase from 2004 and 11 points from 2003.

There is no margin of error given for any of these numbers, and they’ve only been doing the survey since 1999, so these “all-time,” “record” numbers may not really be important as such, but this is a bit of a window into attitudes in the U.S. toward tax compliance.

Myself, I was surprised that the percentage of Americans surveyed who “completely agree” that “It is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes” was only 72%. I would have guessed that such a loaded question would have gotten nearly unanimous support, especially since as McGee has demonstrated, people tend to be unwilling to support even a statement like “Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1935.”

Robert McGee has been researching the ethics of tax evasion for over a decade now, through surveys, interviews, and reviews of the existing literature. His findings are provocative and controversial. I have had an opportunity to ask Mr. McGee some questions about his research, and I share his answers here:

The Picket Line: Could you first give us a thumbnail sketch of your research into the cross-cultural philosophy of the ethics of tax evasion and your international surveys of present-day opinions about the ethics of tax evasion?

Robert McGee: Several years ago I wrote an article on the ethics of tax evasion. It was published under the title “Is Tax Evasion Unethical?” [University of Kansas Law Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), 411–35.] A slightly different version of that article was posted on the Social Science Research Network website. The abstract can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=74420. You can download the full article by hitting the download button.

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

That article was partly based on a 1944 doctoral thesis written by Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest, who researched 500 years of theological (mostly Catholic) literature on the ethics of paying just taxes. His research showed that the same basic questions and arguments had been popping up over the centuries. He found that tax evasion was sometimes viewed as ethical, although scholars could not agree on the specifics.

I decided to do some research to expand on the Crowe thesis, so I asked scholars from different religious perspectives to write a paper on the ethics of tax evasion from their religious perspective. I received positive replies from various Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Baha’i scholars. Their manuscripts were later published in the Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy and as chapters of an edited book titled The Ethics of Tax Evasion (Dumont Institute 1998). Their views are summarized and critiqued in the following articles of mine:

• McGee, Robert W., “The Ethics of Tax Evasion and Trade Protectionism from an Islamic Perspective”. Commentaries on Law & Public Policy, Vol. 1, 1997. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=461397
• McGee, Robert W., “Christian Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion”. Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1998. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=461398
• McGee, Robert W., “Jewish Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion”. Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy, Vol. 1, No. 3, Summer 1998. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=461399
• McGee, Robert W., “Is It Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State? A Look at Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Mormon and Baha’i Perspectives”. Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 149–181, Winter 1999. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=251469

If one were to summarize the various religious views, one could generalize by saying that Mormons and Baha’is think tax evasion is always unethical, Jews believe tax evasion is always or almost always unethical (the two Jewish scholars who wrote papers were in basic agreement that tax evasion is always unethical but I found another Jewish scholar who thought there might be some room for fudging a bit), other Christians think tax evasion may be ethical under certain circumstances and Muslims think tax evasion is ethical if the tax is based on income or if the tax raises prices (like sales taxes, value added taxes or tariffs do). But other Muslim scholars disagree with this view and take the position that tax evasion is always unethical.

I later summarized these views as well as various secular views, in the following paper:

• McGee, Robert W., “Three Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion” (November 2005). Andreas School of Business Working Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=841526

Basically, this paper summarizes and critiques the literature on the three main views, that tax evasion is (1) always unethical, (2) sometimes unethical, or (3) never unethical. These positions are also critiqued in my book, The Philosophy of Taxation and Public Finance (Kluwer 2004).

I also did a study asking Armenians why they evade taxes. That study can be found at:

• McGee, Robert W., “Why People Evade Taxes in Armenia: A Look at an Ethical Issue Based on a Summary of Interviews”. Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy, Vol. 2, No. 2, Pp. 408–416, Spring 1999. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=242568

A few years later I expanded on this research by conducting surveys on the ethics of tax evasion in a number of countries. Basically, the surveys consisted of (usually) 18 statements that began, “Tax evasion is ethical if….” Respondents were told to insert a number from 1 to 7 in the space provided to indicate the extent of their agreement or disagreement with each statement. I then ranked the 18 arguments for tax evasion from strongest to weakest. The results showed that:

1. There is a widespread belief that there is a duty to pay taxes,
2. Some arguments for tax evasion are stronger than others,
3. The results are different for different countries,
4. The results are sometimes different for different subsets of the population — business professors, business students, law students, philosophy students, males v. females, Caucasians v. Hispanics, etc.

Some results were surprising. There was widespread support for the position that Jews living in Nazi Germany had an ethical duty to pay taxes to Hitler.

I might mention that this research is not yet completed. I am continuing to conduct surveys of sample populations in different countries. The results are posted on the Social Science Research Network website www.ssrn.com as they become available. Readers can find the links to these studies at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=2139. As of the date of this writing the following surveys have been posted:

Argentina

http://ssrn.com/abstract=875892

Armenia

http://ssrn.com/abstract=878396

http://ssrn.com/abstract=869309

Bosnia

http://ssrn.com/abstract=899609

China

http://ssrn.com/abstract=869280

http://ssrn.com/abstract=869304

Guatemala

http://ssrn.com/abstract=813288

Guatemala vs. U.S.A. (comparative study)

http://ssrn.com/abstract=892323

Hong Kong

http://ssrn.com/abstract=869306

International business academics

http://ssrn.com/abstract=803964

Macau

http://ssrn.com/abstract=890355

Poland

http://ssrn.com/abstract=875434

Romania

http://ssrn.com/abstract=813345

Ukraine

http://ssrn.com/abstract=875437

About 20 more studies are in progress.

The Picket Line: What led you to this area of research? Are you a tax resister?

Robert McGee: It seems that I have always been interested in taxation and the ability of governments over the centuries to extract taxes from the citizenry and their success in convincing the citizenry that they have a moral obligation to pay. One pivotal event in this intellectual curiosity came while reading Yes I Can, the autobiography of Sammy Davis, Jr. during the late 1960s as an undergraduate student. It was there that I learned the federal government was confiscating more than 90 percent of his marginal income, which led me to ask, “Who the fuck are these guys who can get away with such an injustice?” That’s not what America is all about. Sammy was doing all the work and taking all the risks but the feds were reaping almost all of the benefits.

It was at about this same time that I was reading Karl Marx, who espoused the belief, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” I concluded that the U.S. tax system was right out of Karl Marx.

Am I a tax resister? Not really. I pay all the taxes that are legally owed but I try not to pay a penny more. I don’t pay because of any moral obligation. I pay because I don’t want to be hassled by the feds. I applaud anyone who resists the feds or any other level of government.

I am rather aggressive in filing my tax returns. I have been audited a number of times but usually no deficiency is found. I am a CPA and I have a law degree and a master’s in taxation, so I know something about minimizing taxes. One time an IRS goon said I owed $122. I filed a Tax Court petition to fight it. When I met with the IRS appellate division goon to resolve the issue he explained that his supervisor needed to see a tax deficiency. I knew I didn’t owe it and cited the relevant Internal Revenue Code provisions to prove it, but he wouldn’t budge because his supervisor told him to come up with a deficiency, so I paid the $122 to get them off my back. I should have castrated both of them on the spot.

The Picket Line: In many of your surveys, you’ve asked people to say to what extent they agree or disagree with the statement “Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1935.” For tax resisters, this is something of an obvious truism, but the people who answer your surveys frequently disagree with tax evasion even in such an extreme case as this. How do you explain this?

Robert McGee: I deliberately included this statement in my surveys to test the limits. I thought that surely tax evasion would be ethically justified if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany. My early surveys used 1935 as the relevant date but I received an e-mail from a Jew who suggested 1940 would be a better date, so I used 1940 in my later surveys. Isn’t that incredible? A Jew who is more concerned with the date I chose than with the statement itself?

I received a lot of criticism for using the Jewish item. Many people thought it was offensive. Some people insisted that I remove that statement from future surveys. I actually did remove it, along with two other statements dealing with human rights issues, from my China surveys because I did not want my Chinese co-authors to get in trouble with the Chinese government. Human rights is not something Chinese scholars can discuss. But I kept it in the other surveys and I intend to keep using it as a means of testing the limits.

Personally, I believe that anyone who thinks there is an ethical obligation for Jews to pay taxes to Hitler is nuts, but the surveys have found that the vast majority of respondents disagree with me on this point. There are several possible explanations for their response. Some respondents just put 7 in each slot, indicating the strongest possible disagreement with any reason for tax evasion. I wonder if they ever bothered to read the 18 statements.

Another possible explanation is that they worship the State and believe that there is always some obligation to pay. Although the Jewish item usually received lower scores than the other items, indicating some agreement with the statement, the Jewish item did not always receive the lowest score and the score it did receive was often in the 3 or 4 range, indicating that a strong degree of disagreement existed in the minds of the respondents.

Another explanation is that some religious nut cases believe God commands them to pay taxes. They follow the Bible blindly in the mistaken belief that God wrote that book. Actually, the Bible is unclear on the point. In some places it states that we must obey all laws but in other places it fudges a bit. Jesus weaseled out of the issue by stating that we should pay Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s and pay God the things that are God’s, without indicating exactly what Cæsar is entitled to.

The Picket Line: Have you had an opportunity to engage directly with any of your survey respondents who stated they believed that German Jews had an obligation to pay taxes to the Nazi government, to ask in more detail why they felt this way? Do you find that if people are challenged to think through examples such as this that their opinions on conscientious tax resistance in general tend to become more accepting?

Robert McGee: I am now doing a study with a co-author who is a Hasidic rabbi. He distributed the survey to his orthodox Jewish students. Surprisingly, many of them put 6 or 7 in the slot for the Jewish statement, indicating a strong disagreement with the view that Jews are ethically justified in evading taxes in Nazi Germany. Females often had higher scores than males for this item, indicating that they were even more strongly opposed to evasion.

There are several possible explanations for the high scores even among Jews. There is the widespread belief within Judaism that God commands Jews to obey all laws, which includes tax laws. If one really believes that bullshit, it is easy to conclude that Jews have an ethical duty to pay taxes to Hitler.

There is another widespread belief within Judaism, which goes back hundreds if not thousands of years in the Jewish literature, that Jews must not do anything to discredit other Jews. Therefore, a Jew must not evade taxes, not because of any ethical duty to the State but because of a duty to other Jews.

Another reason cited in the Jewish literature is that Jews must not do anything that might cause them to go to jail, since they would not be able to practice their faith while in prison.

Ayn Rand would probably cite this belief that there is a duty for Jews to pay taxes to Hitler as an example of the sanction of the victim.

Does inclusion of this item in the surveys make people more likely to believe that tax resistance is sometimes justified? In some cases I think that it does. But the high scores for this statement indicate that inclusion of the Jewish example is not very persuasive. Although this example is often thought provoking, I do not think it convinces many people that tax evasion can be justified on moral grounds, although it does start them thinking about the issue. If they were convinced, they would have put 1 in the space provided, which was almost never the case.

From conversations I have had with respondents I have found that many of them have never before questioned the moral authority of government to extract whatever it likes from the citizenry. One explanation is the belief that any democratically elected government can do no wrong in this regard because the people have consented to be taxed. I have pointed out the flaws in this line of reasoning in my various books and articles, but very few people have read what I have had to say on this point, and some people who have read my stuff have sent me vitriolic e-mails disagreeing with the various positions I have taken on tax evasion.

The Picket Line: The IRS Oversight Board released its own survey on tax evasion this year, and although it used fairly loaded questions, it seemed to show a lot more sympathy for tax evasion than your surveys have. For instance, only 72% of Americans surveyed “completely agree” that “It is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes.” Do you think that this indicates a stronger bias toward taxpaying amongst the business professionals, students and educators you survey than in the population in general, or is there some other explanation?

Robert McGee: The two surveys are not directly comparable, although it is interesting to compare the various views. My surveys were targeted at specific audiences, whereas the IRS surveys targeted a more general audience. Also, the IRS survey asked the views of Americans, whereas my surveys solicited the views of non-Americans, for the most part, although some surveys that have not yet been published solicited the views of various Americans, including members of the Florida Institute of Certified Public Accountants and various student groups.

I do not think you can say categorically that the results of the IRS survey are different from the results I obtained. The range of scores in my surveys was 1 to 7, so the argument could be made that anyone who answered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 for at least one of the 18 statements believes that tax evasion is ethically justified in at least some cases. If one takes that position, then one can conclude that more than 90 percent of the survey participants believe that tax evasion is justified in some circumstances, since fewer than 10 percent of the respondents put a 7 in all 18 slots. But my surveys also indicate that the vast majority of respondents believe there is some ethical duty to pay taxes.

Tax evasion ethics researcher Robert McGee has made two additional papers available on-line:

• Jewish Perspectives on the Ethics of Tax Evasion (with Gordon Cohn)
• A comparative Study on Perceived Ethics of Tax Evasion: Hong Kong vs. The United States (with Simon S.M. Ho and Annie S.Y. Li)

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

The first of these is most notable for the response given to the following statement:

Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1940.

Asked to rate their response to this question on a scale of 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree), the average response from the 107 Orthodox Jewish undergraduates from New York who were surveyed was 3.12. That’s about smack dab in the middle.

McGee notes that there is a strong bias against tax evasion in the literature of Jewish religious ethics, for a number of reasons, which may be why this group was one of the most disapproving of tax evasion of all those McGee has surveyed (see The Picket Line 6 July 2006).

Robert McGee’s released another paper in his long series of cross-cultural surveys about the ethics of tax evasion. This paper — Ethics, Tax Evasion and Religion: A Survey of Opinion of Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — gives the result of the survey given “to 638 students at a large college in the western United States, 562 of which were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

He found that this group was more strongly disapproving of tax evasion than most other groups he’s surveyed, even when presented with extreme situations. For instance, survey takers were asked to rank the following statement on a scale from 1 (strongly approve) to 7 (strongly disapprove): “Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1940.” The average score was 5.144, meaning that they believed German Jews had an obligation to fund their own extermination.

Part of the reason for this may be that the Mormon church has a much blunter, less nuanced teaching about tax evasion than do most Christian churches — that tax evasion is wrong, no matter what.

I’ve discussed McGee’s work on previous Picket Line entries, for instance:

• 5 October 2005
• 8 December 2005
• 9 January 2006
• 21 February 2006
• 22 February 2006
• 6 July 2006
• 15 September 2006

Robert McGee has released another of his studies of cross-cultural attitudes toward the ethics of tax evasion: The Ethics of Tax Evasion: A Comparative Study of Germany and the United States.

This time, 71 “business school graduate students and upper level undergraduate students” at the Georg-Simon-Ohm Fachhochschule in Nuernberg, Germany were surveyed, and compared with 119 business students at Saint Thomas University in Miami, Florida.

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

The survey, which will be familiar to you if you’ve read or read about McGee’s previous studies, asked respondents to rank a series of statements about the ethics of tax resistance on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means “strongly agree” and 7 means “strongly disagree.”

The statements included such sentiments as “Tax evasion is ethical if tax rates are too high,” “Tax evasion is ethical if some of the proceeds go to support a war that I consider to be unjust,” and “Tax evasion would be ethical if I were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in 1935.”

Typically, McGee’s surveys find remarkably little support for tax evasion, even in extreme cases. The German business students ranked the “Jew in Nazi Germany” hypothetical at 3.59 on the 1 to 7 scale — on average disapproving of tax evasion in even this circumstance, though mildly. The American students were even less inclined to countenance German Jews failing to pay their dues to help enforce the Nuremberg Racial Purity Laws: they ranked the statement at 4.99 on the scale.

I’ve discussed McGee’s work on previous Picket Line entries, for instance:

• 5 October 2005
• 8 December 2005
• 9 January 2006
• 21 February 2006
• 22 February 2006
• 6 July 2006
• 15 September 2006
• 13 October 2006

Robert McGee has been conducting surveys on how people perceive the ethics of tax evasion in different circumstances for many years, and he has written up the results of these surveys in a number of papers. One of the remarkable things he finds is that, by and large, people believe that you’re obligated to pay your taxes even in the most extreme circumstances — for instance Jews in Nazi Germany paying taxes to fund their own murders.

Typically, he will distribute surveys to a group of people asking them to say, on a scale of 1 to 7, how much they agree or disagree with statements that begin “tax evasion is ethical…” and end with circumstances like the following:

I took some time to go through his papers and pull out the answers to two of these questions in particular (#s 13 and 16). Unfortunately, the questions were not always worded the same way (once in a while the question was phrased with the double-negative “Tax evasion would not be unethical if…”, sometimes the year on the Nazi question was given as 1935 instead of 1940, and one time the phrasing of that question was entirely different). In one case, instead of a scale from 1 to 7, the scale was from 6 to 0 (I have adjusted those numbers in the table below to conform with a 1-to-7 scale).

Below are the results, showing the number of people in each survey, the average answers to questions 13 and 16, and the average result across all of the questions in the survey. Note that some of the surveys did not include all of the questions, so these averages are not necessarily comparable across surveys. It is also possible that one or more of the surveys in the table incorporate one or more of the other surveys under their umbrella (it was sometimes hard to tell from the papers themselves):

The surveys:

Some things that jumped out at me while I was reviewing the data:

• In two cases, #25 & #31, the 177 business students at a university in the Dominican Republic and the 315 faculty and students in Australia, the Nazi example actually scored worse than average — in other words, survey responders thought that a Jew in Nazi Germany had a worse excuse for tax evasion than the majority of other questions on the survey (in fact, the Australians rated that excuse 15 out of 18).
• In comparison, the “unjust war” example was considered a worse-than-average excuse for tax evasion in ten of the 43 surveys. Eight of those ten surveys were done in the United States (the other two were the Dominican Republic and Australia). Only 13 of the 43 surveys were done in the United States, so this seems to indicate that the United States is a particularly hostile place for the war tax resistance argument.
• The survey respondents most hostile to the idea that Jews in Nazi Germany could ethically resist their taxes were 26 students at an Episcopal seminary in the southern United States, who gave them a 5.54 out of 7.
• The group most hostile to war tax resistance was 202 accounting majors at a large college in Utah.
• Six surveyed groups gave war tax resistance an average score indicating that war tax resistance was more ethical than not (<4). The strongest show of support was a 3.3 average score from 256 students at Hubei University and Wuhan Industrial College in China. The other five groups included two groups of students from Beijing, one from Macau, one from Kazakhstan, and one from Iran. These groups typically had lower scores in general across the board, with the exception of the Iranian students, who had a 5.06 average score but a 3.67 score for the war tax resistance question.
• Only ten surveyed groups, on average, agreed more than disagreed with the idea that Jews should not feel ethically obligated to fund their own extermination. One group was evenly split, and 24 surveys showed that on average, people felt Jews were obligated to pay Nazi taxes.

I’ve put together some remixes of yesterday’s data-dump concerning Robert McGee’s surveys on how people perceive the ethics of tax evasion in different circumstances.

I wanted to answer four questions:

1. Which of the surveyed groups found war tax resistance to be most (and least) ethical?
2. Which groups found tax evasion by Jews in Nazi Germany to be most (and least) ethical?
3. Which groups found war tax resistance to be most (and least) ethical relative to their view on the ethics of tax evasion in general?
4. Which groups found tax evasion by Jews in Nazi Germany to be most (and least) ethical relative to their view on the ethics of tax evasion in general?

Those last two items are meant to correct for the possibility that some groups might have been numerically more or less supportive of war tax resistance or of tax evasion by persecuted Jews only because they were more or less sympathetic to tax evasion in general. For example, the 79 students from Kazakhstan thought war tax resistance was more ethical than not (3.76), but their average response to all 18 questions on the survey was right about in the middle of the range (4.14), so it’s not that they’re particularly sympathetic to war tax resistance so much as they’re particularly skeptical about tax evasion being unethical at all.

My first remixed table orders the surveys by how sympathetic they are to the ethical nature of war tax resistance based on the score they gave (1=most sympathetic, 7=least sympathetic):

The top three (most sympathetic to war tax resistance):

• 256 graduate and advanced undergraduate business & economics, law, and philosophy students at Hubei University and Wuhan Industrial College
• 173 graduate and advanced undergraduate business and economics students at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing
• 187 graduate and advanced undergraduate business and economics students at the University of Macau

Given this, you’d think China would be a hotbed of war tax resistance. Maybe it is!

The bottom three (least sympathetic to war tax resistance):

• 202 accounting majors at a large college in Utah
• 300 (non-accounting) business majors at a large college in Utah
• 107 undergraduates at a branch of Touro College in New York

The next table orders the surveys by how sympathetic they are to the idea that it is ethical for Jews to evade Nazi taxes (note that only those scores less than 4, the first ten entries in the table, consider this variety of tax evasion more ethical than not, on average):

The top three (most sympathetic to Jewish evasion of Nazi taxes):

1. 31 French executive MBA students
2. 168 business & economics students at the Technical University of Kosice
3. 16 philosophy and theology students at the University of Presov

The bottom three (least sympathetic to Jewish evasion of Nazi taxes):

1. 26 students at an Episcopal seminary in the southern United States
2. 205 business students in a university in Colombia
3. 117 accounting students at a large university in Miami, Florida

The next table orders the survey by how much the sympathy for war tax resistance in particular exceeded the average sympathy for tax evasion under all of the circumstances in the questionnaire (note, though, that some questionnaires did not include all of the questions; in particular, those given in China did not include some of the human rights-related questions like the one about Jews in Nazi Germany):

The top three (most sympathetic to war tax resistance in particular, relative to the existing sympathy to tax evasion in general):

1. 131 master’s degree accounting students at governmental universities in Iran
2. 187 graduate and advanced undergraduate business and economics students at the University of Macau
3. 90 advanced undergraduate business students at Hong Kong Baptist University

Iran! Who woulda thunk it? Anyone know if there is a tradition of war tax resistance in Iran? It seems, at least, that the concept has some resonance there.

The bottom three (most unsympathetic to war tax resistance in particular, relative to the existing sympathy to tax evasion in general):

1. 107 undergraduates at a branch of Touro College in New York
2. 202 accounting majors at a large college in Utah
3. 638 students “at a large college in the western United States, 562 of which were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

Now, the same trick with the Nazi question:

The top three (most sympathetic to Jewish evasion of Nazi taxes relative to their sympathy for tax evasion in general):

1. 31 French executive MBA students
2. 107 undergraduates at a branch of Touro College in New York
3. 16 philosophy and theology students at the University of Presov

(Note that the Touro College students were among the least relatively sympathetic to war tax resistance. Touro College “was established primarily to enrich the Jewish heritage.” This makes the sympathy for Jewish evaders of Nazi taxes easy to explain, but doesn’t explain the lack of sympathy for war tax resistance. McGee suggests that Jewish teachings about taxes, like those of Mormons, are more unequivocal than mainstream Christian teachings about the duty of paying taxes.)

The bottom three (least sympathetic to Jewish evasion of Nazi taxes relative to their sympathy for tax evasion in general):

1. 177 business students at a university in the Dominican Republic
2. 315 faculty, graduate and undergraduate students at La Trobe University, Victoria University, the Melbourne campus of Central Queensland University, RMIT University and the Caulfield campus of Monash University
3. 134 graduate students and upper division undergraduates at the Romanian-American University in Bucharest

Here again are the surveys by number, along with the paper or papers in which those surveys are discussed:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC casts a critical eye on Obamacare, and explains some of its complications for war tax resisters.
• Three major corporations have announced that they are pulling their investments from “private” prison companies in the United States under pressure from activists.
• Robert W. McGee continues his series of investigations into attitudes on the ethics of tax evasion, this time surveying philosophy professors about which circumstances, if any, they think may justify tax evasion. He’s also done a meta-study of some of his earlier work to try to determine if there are gender differences in evaluating the ethics of tax evasion.
• At Hit & Run, Jesse Walker takes note of the rise of the underground economy in Zimbabwe.
• Breton “bonnets rouges” are holding rallies outside the prison where some of their comrades are being held awaiting trial on charges of destroying highway tax portals.
• The fight against new water charges in Ireland is escalating, with protesters blockading contractors for Irish Water who had been sent to install meters in Cork.
• The folks behind the Spanish “comprehensive disobedience” project have launched a multi-lingual, international website: IntegraRevolucio to coordinate the work of people around the world who are working on similar lines. They also plan to launch a new media project — RADI.MS — soon.

Robert McGee has published another paper with a cross-cultural examination of attitudes concerning tax evasion and resistance. This paper compares the self-reported attitudes of business students in Beijing and in New Jersey.

One thing that makes this paper interesting is that it includes the questions about whether it is okay to evade taxes if the government is violating the rights of its subjects. In the past, McGee had omitted those questions from his surveys in China for fear that they would get his co-researchers (or subjects) in trouble with the human-rights-hostile Chinese government.

The students surveyed were asked to respond to 18 statements about tax evasion with an indication of the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement (1 = strongly agree; 7 = strongly disagree; with a gradient of numbers in between). Here are some examples:

I thought the response to question #13 about war tax resistance was interesting. It seems to show a respect for war tax resistance in China that I would not have expected to find. The difference between the Chinese average and the U.S. average is statistically significant on that question, and it represents one of only two questions in which the Chinese sample were significantly more in favor of tax evasion (and of only four in which they were more in favor, significantly or not).

An international tax resistance news round-up:

Catalonia

• The Diputació de Barcelona, which governs the largest province in Catalonia, voted to stop paying value-added and income taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead forwarding the money to the Catalan Tax Agency. The left-wing separatist party Candidatura d’Unitat Popular proposed the measure, which managed to also win support of the center-left Entesa bloc. The Catalan Tax Agency currently forwards such taxes to the Spanish government, so the practical effect of this is currently minimal, but it sets the stage for an eventual Catalan independence bid in which its government will stop relinquishing such funds.
• Meanwhile the Spanish Constitutional Court declared Catalonia’s attempts to strengthen the independence of its own tax agency “unconstitutional and nullified.”

France

• I recently became aware of the French Revolution Digital Archive, on which I discovered the following propaganda images or political cartoons from that struggle:

Greece

• Six Δεν Πληρώνω (“won’t pay”) activists who engaged in a protest against transit fare increases in Thessaloniki in 2011 were given suspended sentences.
• The Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών (“people stop paying”) movement continues its campaign of disrupting auctions of seized property.

Honduras

• In many parts of Honduras, crime syndicates / protogovernments rule the streets, often extorting more money from their subjects than does the internationally-recognized Honduran government. Some people resist these taxes, known locally as “impuesto de guerra” or “war tax,” but the consequences of refusal can be, and frequently are, deadly. The latest victims included eight bus company employees in Choloma, who were gunned down in broad daylight, a block away from a police station and by attackers in police uniforms, in retaliation against drivers who did not pay the tax. In May, 2013 bus drivers there took collective action, going on strike to demand better security.

Ireland

• Right 2 Water Galway claims that it has learned via a Freedom of Information disclosure “that 71% of those expected to pay a water charges bill hadn’t done so by May of this year.” They are urging people to continue to hold out, noting that there are no penalties for nonpayment until four quarters have passed without paying, and collection action cannot take place until much later still.

Spain

• The Spanish war tax resistance movement has recently released its tallies of war tax resistance and redirection for this tax season. According to the group, some €92,514 was resisted by the 647 people whom they were able to find in their census. The complete report breaks this down by region and municipality and lists the 162 destinations to which these resisted taxes were redirected.

Wales

• The town of Crickhowell has decided it’s no use complaining about the strategies big multinationals use to avoid paying taxes — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! They’re pairing up with a television show to try to come up with similar “offshoring” tax strategies to those the big guys use:

  By mimicking the methods multinational companies use to pay less tax in Britain, business owners in Crickhowell hope to protest against those who do not pay their fair share of tax.

  Advised by experts and followed by a BBC camera crew, family-run shops in the Brecon Beacons town have submitted their own DIY tax plan to HMRC.

  Residents want to share their tax avoidance plan with other towns, in a bid to force the treasury into legislation to close loopholes which allowed companies such as Amazon to pay just £11.9m in tax last year on £5.3bn of U.K. internet sales.

  They’ve created a website, Fair Tax Town, and hope, if they’re successful in their scheme, to share their techniques, open-source-style, with other towns, in hopes of getting the government to close the loopholes that allow the multinationals to outcompete them by avoiding their taxes more successfully. The movement is using tax resistance in service of a pro-tax agenda, which they acknowledge may seem ironic:

  We do have reservations about tax resistance as a protest tool. Some within the tax justice movement ask whether it is a legitimate protest tool at all. We generally argue that tax is the lifeblood of democracy and encouraging people not to pay tax is a perverse way of approaching the question. However, tax resistance has a long and honourable tradition — think back to the tax protests of the Suffragettes, of Mahatma Gandhi; or of the Poll Tax movement.

various

• Robert McGee, whose scholarship on the attitudes of people concerning tax evasion and resistance in different cultures has been a topic here before, has published a new paper, this one on The Ethics of Tax Evasion in Islam. In contrast to his more typical work, this one is more speculative than empirical, and summarizes the opinions of Muslim authorities about the proper limits of the government’s authority to tax, and of the subject’s obligation to submit to such taxation.

Today, some of the international tax resistance news that’s been collecting in my bookmarks in recent weeks:

Nicaragua

The tumult in Nicaragua continues.

• The University Alliance for Democracy and Justice has called on businesses to join a prolonged tax strike and a short general strike, aimed at forcing the resignation of President Ortega. The statement from the group accused the organized business sector of being “accomplices” and “complicit” with the Ortega regime because of their inaction thus far.
• I noted a list of tax resistance tactics being posted on Twitter (#SOSNicaragua). Here’s my translation:

  Tips for economically punishing the Daniel Ortega regime

  Tips for practicing autonomous tax resistance

  To win freedom by nonviolent means is not easy work. The force holding the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship together is money and with our taxes we are fueling that repressive force that treats us as though we were inferior beings, with hatred and contempt. The police do not protect us, they attack us, and incredibly we pay them to do it. No more! As citizens we can reduce our monetary contributions to this regime by making a tax boycott.

  Here is a list of tax resistance methods that we can practice in our daily lives:

  Limit your purchases to tax-exempt items

  • Domestic fruits and vegetables, unpackaged rice and sugar, domestic vegetable oil, eggs, bread, milk, and cheese.
  • Domestic meat and cuts of meat other than loins or steaks.
  • Personal hygiene and household products produced in Nicaragua.
  • Do not ask for a bill for your purchase. If it’s a “vandal” business, they will be free not to report the tax on your purchase. [Vice President Rosario Murillo has called anti-regime protesters “vandals.”]
  • Buy from the informal sector. Small businesses, stretches of the marketplace, groceries and businesses under the fixed-fee system. You can ask the business-owner which tax system they fall under if you have any doubt.
  • Reduce purchases made with credit or debit cards. The government keeps 1.5% of every purchase made with a card.
  • Reduce your spending on entertainment activities and on the consumption of alcohol.
  • If you do consume alcohol, try to do so in places that do not issue invoices. In general such places are where the drinks are less expensive.
  • If you are going to eat out, try to do so in traditional places, not in the chain restaurants.
  • Buy only what you need. The regime urges “normalcy” in order to encourage consumption.

  These methods will be effective if enough people join in for a considerable time. In addition, they will help you to save, which is welcome in these times of crisis.

  You will demonstrate our solidarity with the suffering of political prisoners and with the families of the victims who keep crying out for justice to a system that has no intention of giving it to them.

  Share this notice

  #SOSNicaragua

Elsewhere

• Robert McGee has published another in his series of studies of attitudes across cultures about the ethics of tax evasion. The latest probes Chinese business students — those studying in the United States and in China.
• TheNewspaper.com continues to do great work in tracking down examples of people disabling traffic-ticket-generating speed- and red-light-cameras, including, recently:
  • Several recent examples from France of cameras being spray painted-over, set on fire, or covered with bags or tape.
  • Several more examples from France of fire, paint, and ramming as disabling techniques.
  • Examples from France and Italy of paint, tape, boxes, fire, gunshots, power saws, and wire-clippers being put to good use.
  • Examples from France, Italy, and Russia of bags, taped posters, fire, power-drills, battering, spray paint, toppling, blocking, and disemboweling as techniques for disabling the cameras.
  • Examples from France, Italy, and Sweden of fire, paint of many colors, and saws being used against the hated devices.
• When the Kenyan government slapped a 16% tax on petroleum products, petroleum transporters launched a strike, leading to fuel shortages in Nairobi. “Kenya’s energy regulator has revoked the license of the Kenya Independent Petroleum Distributors Association for allegedly leading the fuel boycott,” a news report says, “equating their action to economic sabotage.”
• Attorney Carlos Muriete has called on residents of La Rioja, Argentina to stop paying property and vehicle taxes to protest inadequate municipal services. “The city is wrecked, there are craters that cars fall into and serious accidents can occur, it is dirty, full of rats, sewage is running in the streets, there is no control of the dogs and the health of the people is in danger,” he said.

Some recent links from here and there:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC reports back from the Tax Day protest at Wall Street that united the War Resisters League and Extinction Rebellion.
• Turkish opposition politician Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu says he plans to refuse to pay his utility bills until president Erdoğan withdraws 50% price hikes instituted at the beginning of the year. He recently addressed supporters from his home where electricity has been shut off for non-payment.
• Robert McGee has conducted or supervised many surveys about the ethics of tax evasion in countries around the world. He has now summarized several of those studies along with a bibliography of additional cross-cultural tax evasion attitude research.
• War tax resistance season in Spain is in full swing.
• What was sometimes billed as the “Confessions of a Failed Tax Resister” (Rebecca Gordon) did the rounds around Tax Day in the United States this year. Gordon was a war tax resister in the 1980s but eventually threw in the towel, paying her taxes, penalties, and interest, and returning to being a compliant taxpayer. “It wasn’t the life decision I’m proudest of, but here’s what happened.” Meanwhile, Owen Silverman at the University of Connecticut’s student paper put in a plug for conscientious tax resistance, though it sounds like he thinks we should wait for the government to legalize it first or something.
• ProPublica has been continuing to do exposés about how the tax system is rigged in favor of the rich at the expense of the little guy. One of the latest is “If You’re Getting a W-2, You’re a Sucker” which is specifically about how wage-earners get the shaft. Peter J. Reilly looks at the comparative woes of the 1099 granfaloon and finds them not too bad all things considered.
• The scrappy human underdogs who are taking on the traffic ticket robot cameras have won more battles in recent weeks, burning and blinding cameras in France, chopping one down in the Netherlands, smashing one in Russia, toppling one in Italy, burning and blinding a few more in France, chopping down yet more in France, and torching & dropping a couple more in Italy in recent weeks.