Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → Francois Tremblay

I’m not yet on facebook, but I understand it’s all the rage. I note that there’s a Facebook Tax Resistance Group now. Looks to be the brainchild of Francois Tremblay, who also has some interesting things to say over at his blog.

A handful of interesting things that stumbled on our internets recently:

• Over at the LegalMatch law blog, Kate Langmore reviews the prospects for a tax resistance campaign by opponents of California’s Proposition 8.
• An ex-cop is working on a reality TV show designed to catch cops breaking the law. In the first episode, they catch cops lying to obtain a search warrant and then film them busting into their targeted house — only to find Christmas trees growing where they expected to find a marijuana farm, and surveillance cameras transmitting their surprised expressions back to KopBusters central.
• Wendy McElroy has been journaling a year of frugality at her blog — getting the jump on what’s likely to become an increasingly popular genre.
• At Tax Update Blog, Joe Kristan reports that the IRS’s “Offers in Compromise” program doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it:

  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.

  One tax attorney writes:

  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.

• Kristen McKee’s working on some pre-new year’s resolutions. “One thing I’ve noticed in my deschooling process is my shift from helpless victim, to active participant, in many different areas of my life,” she writes. One of those areas is taxes: “In the past, I paid my taxes the easiest way I could figure out so I could get the most money back, or the way I knew most others to do it. This year I am trying to be true to what I really feel is important and learn how to minimize or eliminate the taxes I pay that go to fund a war.”
• Francois Tremblay investigates how shared belief generates power and notices the charmingly naïve and unashamedly naked liberal ideology hanging loose at Check Your Premises.
• More local currency news: Introducing the Milwaukee Bucks.

So lately I’ve been being very urban homesteader — baking bread, brewing beer and sake, making yogurt, weeding the garden, canning soups. I’ve been looking for a paying gig, too, which I think partially explains my sudden explosion of home usefulness: it gives me something productive to do while I wait for résumés and bids to be ignored.

What I haven’t been doing much is writing anything substantial for The Picket Line. Sorry ’bout that.

Meanwhile all sorts of interesting things have backed up in my bookmarks, waiting for me to add some insight or context before passing them on for you to enjoy. I think instead I’ll just let them spill out here and trust you to fill in the blanks:

• Francois Tremblay wonders if taxpayers become complicit in what their tax dollars support. He weighs the arguments for both sides (no, because their participation is legally required; and yes, because their participation is nonetheless voluntary) and then engages in some spirited give-and-take with his readers.
• Steven Schallert writes about his war tax resistance at his interestingly-titled blog shutters slide to unveil fingerprints of angels.
• War tax resisters Phil and Louise Baldwin Rieman died in a car accident shortly after Christmas last year. There have been several remembrances of the couple on-line, such as this one from the Church of the Brethren.
• Murray Rothbard writes about ending tyranny without violence (through withdrawal of consent) and the nearly 500-year-old insights of Étienne de La Boétie.
• Carl Watner takes a fresh look at the Whiskey Rebellion and what it means about the origin and nature of the U.S. government.
• Gene Healy and Benjamin Friedman of the Cato Institute note that the U.S. military is preparing a new occupation, and when they meet the enemy the enemy will be us.
• The Taxpayer Advocate said in its annual report that American taxpayers pay — above and beyond what they actually are charged in taxes — nearly two hundred billion dollars just trying to do the paperwork involved in taxpaying.
• Our local paper did the math and put a number on a conclusion that should have been pretty obvious: it’s much cheaper to take public transit than to drive. According to their figures, it costs Bay Area drivers about $1,000 per month to get where they’re going by car instead of by bus and rail. Hell, we pay that much for rent.
• There seems to be a lot of buzz about a revival of local, alternative currencies during this recession.
• A writer for Rebelión notes that Europe’s public is sick of spending so much on the military and asks, “is tax resistance not therefore justified, an investment in the struggle for what is worth the trouble of defending instead of the military costs that impede this to a great extent?” (en español)
• Finally, U.S. nuclear weapons spending topped $52 billion last year (and that’s only counting what we’re allowed to know about). Compare that to the budget of your favorite government agency, business, or non-profit.

Francois Tremblay offers his thoughts on Eight Ways You Can Personally Help to Smash the State.

Number six is our flavor-of-the-site:

Okay, enough with the hard work, here’s an easy one: don’t pay taxes. There are many different ways to do that. You can simply not file, which is not actually as risky as people think (considering that even plain cheating on your returns is not that bad, as only 7% of returns get reviewed over a 7 year period). If you are risk-averse, you can minimize your taxable income and get rid of taxes entirely “legally.” Take any opportunity you have to work for yourself or work “under the table.” Sometimes buying online or on the black market can also help avoid sales taxes. Become an income tax assistance volunteer.

Tax resistance is one small but effective centuries-old way to help starve the State and its gargantuan war machine. When done by a single individual, it’s a way to protest coercion and act in accordance with your moral principles. When done by the masses, it’s the most powerful anti-State messages there is.

Follow the link to see the other seven.