Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → the danger of “feel-good” protests → “symbolic” tax protests?

In a Sunday School class at my church, someone told the story of how a wealthy Russian Mennonite long ago avoided serving in the military by hiring replacements. “What’s the difference?” someone muttered. Others in the class agreed. It seemed that in the eyes of God, there would be little difference between serving in the military and paying someone else to serve in the military. “Then why don’t we talk about our war taxes?” muttered another person in the class. “Because that would be too relevant,” was the sarcastic reply.

The room hunt continues. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living in-between homes — sleeping in stale sheets on a mattress on the floor surrounded by boxes, using a corner payphone on a loud street to make calls and sharing a slow internet connection at a public library one hour a day, except on Sundays and Mondays when the library is closed. My mind has been unsettled too, which means that today’s Picket Line will be a meandering ramble over lots of territory.

When I was a kid, playing organized sports, I remember learning certain ways of losing. I don’t mean that I learned ways to throw a game, but that just as winning has certain protocols (to gloat or not to gloat, for instance), so does losing.

Some of these techniques I learned from other kids, but many of them I learned from parents and teachers and coaches. When they noticed the discouragement of impending loss descending on the team, they’d show us how to lose less painfully.

One technique is to change your goals, so that instead of sadly failing to win the game you’re triumphantly succeeding at playing a good game, or doing your best, or giving everybody an even chance to play. Another technique is to claim victory on some other playing field: beating the other team at playing fair-and-square, or at being good sports, or at playing the better, though losing, game (whenever remotely plausible, I learned, luck is to blame for things that go wrong, while skill and just reward are the best explanations for things that go right).

Before the game both sides were clear as to what the stakes were, how the victor would be defined, and what meaning the victory would have. The loser must unremember all of this.

Of course the winning team is not going to participate in these redefinitions. The coaches of the winning teams I was on didn’t spend a lot of time reassuring us that we were every bit as good as the team that scored fewer points but that clearly did its best, played fair, and showed true spirit in spite of its terrible luck.

I remember disliking these tricks at the time — seeing them as akin to what we called “indian giving” (perhaps in tribute to the game-redefinitions that characterized the treaty negotiations between the United States and the “fully sovereign” native Americans).

These tricks seemed like cheating. Or maybe not cheating exactly, but dishonorable in a similar way. Like the “sour grapes” technique of not losing some struggle you’d lost. Or the “best two out of three” gambit to a coin toss that doesn’t go your way.

But on the other hand, nobody likes to lose — particularly a kid — and the grown-ups probably thought they were doing us a favor by showing us the sneaky exits they’d learned about. I’ve tried many of these excuses over the years as balms to soothe the hurt of defeat, and have in my turn ridiculed the balms used by those I’ve defeated.

The earliest of these placebos come to lose their effectiveness, but often only to be redrafted in more complex forms and brought back into service, disguised with sophistication. How often do you hear a news account of a court case in which the phrase “both sides claimed the ruling as a victory” is used? You’d think cases like this could be easily settled out of court.

I was reminded of all this by a phrase I heard a few days ago — one that comes up again and again at peacenik events. The phrase is “incredibly powerful statement” and it is usually used to decorate the description of some wholly ineffective but goodhearted gesture.

(I was hoping this cancer hadn’t spread to The Picket Line, but then I found Gina Lunori’s advocacy of tax resistance from where she wrote: “Imagine the power of this statement. What if every person who felt that the government had lost their moral support also withdrew their practical support? What if only one in ten did? It would be the beginning of the end. It would be that nonviolent revolution we’re praying for.” Perhaps. But please slap me if you hear me advocate tax resistance as “an incredibly powerful statement.”)

The “peace movement” is full of these feel-good lies that transform actual defeats into moral victories. Listen to the folk songs at rallies — we’re powerful, we’re rising, the People are with us, victory is ours, we will change the world, thinking good thoughts is probably all that’s necessary, it feels good to be as righteous as we are. It reminds me of the hymns sung at feel-good liberal Christian churches — nobody really dies, there’s no good reason to question that a benevolent God exists, Jesus lives and counts you as one of his bestest friends, giving up sin is easy and painless and not really all that necessary anyway, it feels good to be as righteous as we are.

Turning to a belief system like these when the chips are down is like getting nothing but a Hallmark “get well” card from your family when you’re dying in the hospital. When I hear the chant “The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated” I also hear the gentle campfire songs from my childhood: “We are one in the spirit, we are one in The Lord…” They have a similar purpose — to reinforce a myth and to exchange an unfavorable reality for a triumphant fantasy.

One reaction to this are the violent, “black bloc”-style protests (expect to see some at the upcoming party nominating conventions) — which are as much a reaction against the nonviolent protesters as they are an action directed against those outposts of capitalism, globalism and imperialism cleverly disguised as Starbucks franchises.

These protesters see nonviolent protest as a pathetic and timid pleading to an unresponsive and hostile government — symbolic rather than direct, predictable (and predictably ineffective), self-aggrandizing, hobbyish, and effectively collaborationist: Ultimately, no better than the electoral process at generating real change. And they’re not willing to go along with the well-worn techniques of losing.

Their verdict is just. But violent protest, if subjected to the same withering analysis, would probably fall harder and faster. For one thing, this government has an overwhelming advantage in any sort of violent confrontation, and this would probably be true even if the protesters used less arbitrary tactics and had the support of a large majority of the civilian population. Violent conflict with the government is a losing proposition at this stage (even when looked at simply pragmatically and strategically, not ethically). But the “black bloc” crew wants to try something that might actually work, and they probably reason that if the non-violent protest organizers and the authorities both angrily oppose their tactics it must mean that they’re on to something.

(I must say that in their favor, the violent protesters have much more provocative chants: “2 — 4 — 6 — 8 — Don’t impeach: assassinate!” has a thrill to it that “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” will never have.)

This isn’t to say that the situation is hopeless. What I mean to say is that this pathetic-nonviolent-protest vs. futile-violent-protest dichotomy is a false one. The “nonviolent protest movement” in this dichotomy is a caricature (unfortunately one that has come to life in a form that seems almost as though it were designed to fail).

The path to success lies in neither of these extremes, but in a movement that does not mistake a non-confrontational action for a non-violent one, and one that does not confuse making an “incredibly powerful statement” with making progress.

People who are committed to (or who prefer) nonviolence and who regret the rise of the “black bloc” and other violent protesters should ask how Gandhi prevented the Indian National Congress from choosing the tactics of those in India who were advocating armed insurrection. The answer: he was more hard-core than they were, and he demonstrated results.

Demonstrating results is going to be a slow-and-steady process. There are billions of us sharing this planet, so we have to keep our expectations low about the global effects of our individual actions. It takes a whole bunch of people, all working in the same direction, to extinguish a species or to build weapons of mass destruction with global reach. Similarly, no one can expect to undo this sort of nonsense alone or with a single change of heart. We each do what we can and hope that there will be enough of us doing what we can to make a difference.

But being more hard-core means first of all to care enough about the problem to do more than “root” from the sidelines. Putting a bumper-sticker on your car is something you’d do for your favorite football team. Holding a sign at a rally is like something a really enthusiastic fan might do at the stadium. If you really care enough, you’ll want to be a player on the field. If you really care enough, a “moral victory” — or any other second-best “statement” — won’t be the victory you’re fighting for.

Don’t mistake rooting for something with working for it. Don’t think that your regret and disapproval about your country’s actions is being solemnly weighed somewhere. (It isn’t, but your taxes are.) If all you want is to “make an incredibly powerful statement” — go start a blog.

If only I had recourse to that Christian thought experiment about what happens at the end of your life if you have to “meet your maker” and plead your case before an omniscient and just God.

Imagine Joe Liberal stammering as God asks how he reacted to the Reign of the Dubya Squad. Joe remembers having angrily talked politics over beers, and having pretended he really did feel as passionate about the issues as he now wishes he had — spinning mad shit about the Nuremberg Principles and the French Resistance and feeling around with his eyes closed for that line he knew he wouldn’t cross or for that ever-retreating line that if they ever cross they’ll have finally gone too far.

But then he remembers the bumperstickers on his car, and the emails he forwarded, and the time he clicked on that button on that website to add himself to that petition, and the letter he signed and sent to his Senator (he thinks he remembered to put that in the mail), and the time he shouted down that gung ho patriot in his own living room during that party. Joe remembers how he boldly helped block traffic at that rally, even for a while after the cops told him to disperse.

And with a hubris that makes a sound like falling harps he open his mouth to say all this and the Schwarzeneggar of the Skies puts up a hand to silence him and says “I didn’t ask what your opinion was; I asked if you supported the government. Nevermind…” and He pulls out a file folder.

It’s not the Book of Judgment — in my thought experiment it’s worse. It’s all of his W-2 forms. And some sort of seraphim or something is there with an adding machine summing up everything that went to Dubya over the years. And Joe’s mouth is opening and closing with a “ba-ba-ba-ba” like he’s singing do-wop with these falling harps and he reaches for the last thing he’s got, the awful, the hopeless, the White House Lawyer-Approved Eichmann Defense:

“That’s not my fault — I didn’t have any choice!”

And it’s like he’s said the magic word, but instead of Groucho’s duck, pie charts and graphs fall from the sky and he sees himself surrounded by evidence that not only could he have avoided paying federal income taxes, but more than a third of his fellow Americans did avoid it. What the hell was Joe’s excuse? He knew what the government was using that money for and he paid it anyway.

Okay, enough. I’ve given this speech before. I don’t believe that I’m going to the big traffic court in the sky when I die and probably neither do you, so why am I having this strange daydream? I think it’s because even if there’s no Judgment, I can still tell there’s right and wrong. Even if the statutes haven’t come down on stone tablets embroidered with lightning bolts and suitable for southern courthouses, I’ve still got to shrug off this inconvenience and find out what’s right and do it. The judge is me, and even so, he shows no favoritism, and the reason I can hear him is not because I’ve died and gone to an unlikely heavenly prelim, but because I’m very much alive.

After I had the terrible realization that even in the wake of such a shocking and successfully brutal terrorist attack on my country, I feared my government’s reaction to the attack more than I feared Al Qaeda.

I found myself wanting to speak out with a strong voice against the direction the country was taking and against the actions of the government, but I found myself holding back because the voice of my conscience would tell me “if you really believed what you say you believe, you wouldn’t be able to continue to fund the government the way you do.” Eventually, I came to really believe what I said I believed.

When I started this experiment in “tax avoision” I kind of gritted my teeth, bunched my brow, put my head down and started forward. But so far the path has been all downhill and the weather’s been fine. My life is fuller now than it was before, and I’m happier and more relaxed. I’ve got more free time, and I haven’t really had to sacrifice much — most of my savings have come from spending smarter and taking on less-expensive pastimes. I’m eating as well or better than before, for instance, but I’m cooking at home rather than going out. I can drink drip coffee at home all month for the price of one of the mochas I used to grab on my way to work.

I’m living a life that’s more closely aligned with my principles — a long overdue reconciliation of my actions with my deepest intentions. And this has given me a strong and unexpected sense of relief. I tried to describe this feeling to a friend a long time ago and came up with a sort of half-assed analogy that I haven’t been able to improve: You know how when someone’s house gets robbed, the person often feels a sense of violation and loss that goes way beyond the value of whatever is missing? I bet if that person was robbed again the next week, it wouldn’t be quite so bad. And if they were robbed every week, pretty soon it wouldn’t register much besides a curiosity of “what’s missing this time?” But if the robbery stopped, and suddenly they felt that they were safe in their home, that their belongings were really theirs, maybe a sense of elation would come in that’s equal and opposite to the feeling of the original violation.

I sometimes feel embarrassed by the ease of my experiment and by its strong personal rewards. I’m not supposed to be enjoying myself! This is supposed to be sacrifice and hard work! What happened to feeling “hard-core?” Instead “tax avoision” has turned out to be satisfying and suspiciously harmonious with my laziness. Ultimately, though, I’m no glutton for punishment: I’m glad it’s been easy so far.

I am concerned sometimes that what I’m doing is more of a passive reaction rather than an assertive action. My tax resistance isn’t so much working for good as it is minimizing my collaboration with evil. But at least it doesn’t interfere with my working for good, or counteract whatever good works I might do.

I like to think The Picket Line is one of these good works — more than “a powerful statement” I hope, but an encouragement and a resource for people trying to take the small, patient steps toward a better world.

On a local Friends Meeting held a workshop on tax resistance that I attended. I was pleasantly surprised at the large number of people who attended (given that the workshop was held during the distracting week between Christmas and New Years), and I was delighted at the amount of interest expressed and the quality of the conversation.

One San Francisco Quaker is skeptical about “easy, low-risk,” “symbolic” tax resistance and issues a challenge:

Scenario: The federal government has instituted a 50-cent-per gallon gasoline tax to cover expenses related to the war in Iraq.

For embellishment, imagine it’s and an entirely new Presidential administration that you voted for in has just assumed office (I don’t care which party as long as you think it was a good choice). We could imagine the new administration is being fiscally responsible and making up for past as well as ongoing deficits, and is exhibiting integrity by tying the tax directly to its use.

Question: What would Quakers do?

Would they continue to behave the same as usual?

Would they always pay in cash and withhold the extra charge for the war tax? If so, would they submit to being arrested for nonpayment of taxes — or maybe even theft — if the station owner called the police? How long would they stay in jail before paying the tax and any accumulated fines?

Would they pay by credit card but modify the receipt to withhold payment of the tax before signing?

Would they carpool? Or join carsharing groups?

Would they sell their cars?

Would they refuse rides in privately owned vehicles?

Would they move to the country and buy a horse?

Would they just buy a Prius?

Before doing any of the above, would they consent to wait expectantly together in meeting for business, to ask the Inward Teacher what on earth they should do?

I think it’s useful, from time to time, to contemplate such hypotheticals. What would your response be if the government enacted an explicit war-tax on something you enjoy or require. What if the government did enact a “Peace Tax Fund” designed to make people feel like their tax dollars were being spent peacefully?

Gotta love bureaucracy. The Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (which “listens to taxpayers, identifies taxpayers’ issues, and makes suggestions for improving IRS service and customer satisfaction”) just released their latest report, containing dozens of recommendations. I only skimmed, but for some reason recommendation #TAP A04-072 caught my eye:

Many taxpayers and even some experienced practitioners are confused by the reference to the Earned Income Tax Credit in some documents as “Earned Income Tax Credit” (“EITC”) and the use in other documents of the term “Earned Income Credit” (“EIC”).

The Committee recommended that the EITC program work with other IRS organizations to agree upon and implement consistent use of either “Earned Income Tax Credit” (“EITC”) or “Earned Income Credit” (“EIC”).

Earned Income Tax Credit Director David R. Williams responded:

EITC Director advised Committee that the recommendation was not politically feasible.

I laughed out loud.

Another tidbit gives tax resisters a quantitative peek at how much trouble they cause the IRS when they resist token amounts. This comes as part of TAP 04-037, a recommendation that the IRS computers be instructed not to bother to pursue balances smaller than $25 (currently the cut-off is $5):

A cost analysis of IRS Balance Due Notices showed the cost of a single notice ranges from $0.45 to $4.79, depending on the type of notice and whether it is reviewed by the notice Review function prior to issuance. Although the cost of administering a tax module through a cycle of several notices is significantly higher.

Some war tax resisters resist in this way: They calculate how much federal income tax they owe, then they determine what percentage of income tax revenue the federal government spends on war, and then they hold back that percentage of their income tax while paying the rest.

This is a variety of protest that relies on symbolism and on the emphatic value of civil disobedience. But sometimes these resisters claim that what they are doing is not merely a protest but is a variety of conscientious objection — an attempt to practically withdraw support from immoral government policies, or to evade complicity with those policies.

Looked at in that way, the tactic they’ve chosen seems disconnected from the ends they claim to be pursuing. If they withhold 50% of their income tax, for instance, because they believe that that is the percentage of income tax revenue the federal government spends on the military, the remaining 50% that they do pay isn’t any less likely to be spent on the military or to expose the payer to any less complicity. The separation of the bad money they’ve held back from the good money they’ve sent in is only in their mind. It’d be like using half a can of orange paint to paint one chair, and half of it to paint another chair, and expecting to end up with a red chair and a yellow chair.

The people who practice this variety of war tax resistance aren’t idiots — they know that the government isn’t doling out each individual taxpayer’s tax dollars one-by-one with the Defense Department last in the queue (“sorry, General, but it looks like we’ve run out!”). And they’ll acknowledge this if you ask directly. But from time to time, many seem to forget that they’re engaged in a symbolic protest, and they deploy the rhetoric of conscientious objection to explain their position.

This was a particularly difficult problem with the Quaker war tax resisters I’ve been studying. The most typical Quaker war tax resistance position went something like this: We must refuse to pay any tax that is levied for the purpose of supporting war or the military, but we must cheerfully pay taxes for the support of civil government even when that government uses some of that tax money to fund a budget that includes military and war spending. Or, as “Philalethes” put it: “we ought not to ask Cæsar what he does with his dues or tribute, but pay it freely. But if he tells me it is for no other use but war and destruction, I’ll beg his pardon and say ‘my Master forbids it.’ ”

Philalethes’s argument, and the others quoted here, can be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.

When resisters would deploy their most daunting rhetoric of conscience and pacifism to defend the first prong of this forked position, their critics would respond by wondering why such passionate reasoning wouldn’t apply equally well to the second. Attempts to answer this objection by asserting the harmlessness or blamelessness of paying a mixed tax would then threaten to undermine the force of the conscientious objection argument, which seemed to rely on a heartfelt refusal to be involved even indirectly in bloodshed. As one critic put it:

Why might they not as well resist the payment of a tax which goes to the support of the army or navy of the United States? If they have any conscientious scruples at all upon the subject, they must be carried out or they are good for nothing. What difference is there, in principle, between killing a fellow man in war and paying another man to kill him? And, again, do not the Friends pay one man to kill another when they pay their share of the general tax towards the support of the government and the means of national defense?

There came to be a hotly disputed science of discerning the difference between war taxes and “mixed” taxes, the former being ones that would trouble a good Quaker conscience to the extent of civil disobedience, but the latter being ordained and blessed by Jesus and the Apostles. The problem was that the nature of the difference between these taxes was difficult to pin down.

If the government raised taxes across the board as it was going to war and raising military spending to match, was this a war tax, or since it was just going into the general budget as before (although a higher percentage of this budget was being spent on war than usual) was it no less objectionable now than it had been before? What if the government, in the course of raising taxes, had explicitly said that the latest tax hike was for the war? Would that matter, and if so, how is it that your conscientious objection might be triggered by something of so little weight as a legislative preamble?

In many cases it was indeed the case that the words uttered while money changed hands were thought to be more important than the actual, practical transaction. Thus, for instance, the Pennsylvania Assembly would not fulfill requests of money for fortifications or other war expenses, but would respond to these requests by granting money “for the King/Queen’s use.” In this way, although the practical, real-world effect was the same, the Quaker consciences were spared. “We did not see it,” one said, “to be inconsistent with our principles to give the Queen money notwithstanding any use she might put it to, that not being our part but hers.”

But what of those militia exemption fines that Quakers so regularly refused to pay? These were fines that conscientious objectors (or, often, anyone with enough money and better ideas of how to spend his time) could pay in lieu of otherwise mandatory military service. Most of the writings about Quaker war tax resistance that I’ve collected are about resistance to these fines. But if the fines went into the general fund just like any other tax, as they sometimes did, on what ground could a Quaker object to the one and not the other?

In fact, the evolution of Quaker resistance to militia exemption taxes underwent an interesting shift over time from conscientious objection to a more confrontational civil disobedience.

At first, Quakers justified their resistance to these taxes by saying that they could neither bear arms nor pay a substitute to bear arms in their place, or that they could not pay a tax that was specifically designated for war purposes as this would mean actively participating in war.

But over time, this justification underwent a shift (one that was subtle enough that I have found no records that try explicitly to justify it). Quakers came to object to militia exemption taxes even when these taxes went into the government’s general fund, or even if they were specifically designated for humanitarian purposes that Quakers would not otherwise object to. They objected to these taxes, not because the taxes would make them participants in war but because, as the Meeting for Sufferings of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting put it in :

Believing that liberty of conscience is the gift of the Creator to man, Friends have ever refused to purchase the free exercise of it by the payment of any pecuniary or other commutation to any human authority.

This is a much more radical position. No longer was resistance to militia exemption taxes just a refusal to participate in the wars and fightings of the powers of the world; instead, it became a notice that those powers had overstepped their bounds when they pretended to regulate and tax conscientious scruples.

People trying to extract war money from Quakers occasionally tried to “hack” this odd protocol by which they could approve of “mixed” taxes in most circumstances. For instance, in when Benjamin Fletcher tried to get the Pennsylvania Assembly to cough up some money to fight the French & Indians, he wrote:

[I]f there be any amongst you that scruple the giving of money to support war, there are a great many other charges in that government, for the support thereof, as officers salaries and other charges, that amount to a considerable sum: Your money shall be converted to these uses, and shall not be dipped in blood.

You’ll recognize this as the same sort of promise held out by today’s proponents of the Peace Tax Fund Act: Give the government your money and in return the government pledges it will spend your money only on the good stuff and will spend someone else’s money on the stuff you don’t like.

It took some fortitude to look at mixed taxes and to say that the mixture of taxes for war with taxes for civil government didn’t wash the blood off the former but further bloodied the latter. The “epistle” of John Woolman and others to their fellow Friends introduced this position:

[T]hough some part of the money to be raised by the said Act is said to be for such benevolent purposes as supporting our friendship with our Indian neighbors and relieving the distresses of our fellow subjects… and we could most cheerfully contribute to those purposes if they were not so mixed that we cannot in the manner proposed show our hearty concurrence therewith without at the same time assenting to, or allowing ourselves in, practices which we apprehend contrary to the testimony which the Lord has given us to bear for his name and Truth’s sake.

Job Scott “believed a time would come, when Christians would not so far contribute to the encouragement and support of war and fightings as voluntarily to pay taxes that were mainly, or even in considerable proportion, for defraying the expenses thereof.” And Moses Brown worried that this might mean completely unraveling the distinction that allowed Quakers to think of themselves as both conscientiously objecting to supporting war, but also obeying the Biblical instructions to “render unto Caesar” and “pay ye tribute”:

[S]ome Friends refuse all taxes, even those for civil uses as well as those clear for war and others that are mixed, and thereby dropping our testimony of supporting civil government by readily contributing thereto, it has been a fear whether this variety of conduct won’t mar rather than promote the work. Could we be more united in the ground of our testimony and in our practice in it, I should have more hopes of its speedy obtaining in society. A time will doubtless come when a smaller proportion will be for war than at present when the greater part being for civil uses, friends may pay as there is and ought to be according to the apostle, a conscientiousness in paying to the support of civil government as well as refuse that for war…

Then he anticipates the “Peace Tax Fund” idea, or something like it:

…to refuse the payment of such when even a lesser part be mixed for war before we applied to the authority to separate them would not at present be my place, but probably before that time come when the lesser part will be for war friends may be agreed to ask a separation which, if it should be refused, we might be united in refusing even those the greater part of which may be for civil uses.

Joshua Maule sparred with other Friends about this issue. When the government added a war surtax to the regular tax bill, many Quakers were untroubled by paying it: although it bore the name of a war tax, it was collected in the same way as the general tax they’d been paying all along, and like that tax, it was deposited in the general fund and spent at the whim of the legislature. But Maule felt that by calling it a war surtax, the government had brought it into inevitable conflict with the Quaker conscience, and he lashed out at more accommodating Friends. “[T]hat [tax] for the war and bounty was not mixed with any other,” he wrote, “until those who paid it voluntarily mixed it themselves and thereby made it their own act to pay the price for men to go forth to the field of human slaughter.” The way Maule figured it:

[I]f I owe a just debt, I must pay it; if the person receiving the money uses it for a bad purpose, the accountability is with him; but if he demand money of me avowedly to be used in any way to the plundering of my neighbor, destroying his property, or taking his life, then if I furnish money thus demanded I become an accomplice in the evil work and accountable for the sin. I consider our civil taxes a just debt that should be promptly paid, but I am satisfied that no human authority has either a moral or a religious right to demand of me money or means of any kind to aid in destroying the lives and property of my fellow-men.

But note that Maule only refused to pay the surtax — that portion of his total tax that was “avowedly” being raised for war. Certainly, though, the government was “avowing,” with every budget, that it was going to be spending some portion of both the surtax and the regular tax on the very same things. And so those who disagreed with Maule shot back that he was playing plenty of money “to aid in destroying the lives and property of [his] fellow-men” and he knew it, so won’t he please give it a rest. Nathan Hall put it well when he wrote to Maule:

[W]hether we pay less or more of that tax, a certain proportion of it goes for military or war purposes; and it avails nothing to say: “We did not pay it for that purpose, and if wicked and bad men so apply it, it is their lookout, not ours.” We can say that of all the tax as well as a part.

If the law had said so many dollars to be raised for war purposes, instead of such a portion of each and every dollar, it would have been plain and not a mixed tax. Such is not the case; it is all collected together and thrown into one general treasury, where it remains till it is apportioned out for the different purposes designated by the law. There might be as many different classes of objectors or withholders of tax as there are purposes for which it is appropriated, and the officers of government know nothing of the nature or cause of any of them; they would only know there was a deficiency, and apply that on hand in due proportions for their different purposes, and the deficiency, when collected, in like manner. To illustrate it more fully I will suppose a case which I believe is strictly parallel, thus: We both have a testimony against the use of ardent spirits, but are, being very thirsty, placed in a situation where we can get no water except some that has a small portion of whiskey in it. Being under the necessity of taking something, you may, by inquiry and calculation, find what proportion of the objectionable article is contained in it, and leave just that much in your bowl; while my understanding will be that in partaking I partake of both good and bad, and in refusing refuse both. So that with me the question is and has been, not what portion I should pay so much as whether any at all.

When I was speaking at the Abundance League a while back about my tax resistance, one horrified liberal — alarmed at the enthusiasm those around her were showing for the stand I’d taken — launched into a defense of government spending on things like roads and general infrastructure. I thought what a shame it was that such valuable things as these had to be bought at such high prices from their monopoly supplier so as to support their “one Iraq war free with purchase” promotion deal.

Milton Mayer, whose book On Liberty I reviewed , was a war tax resister. In his essay The Tribute Money (The Progressive, ), he explained why. Excerpts:

I cannot see why I should not persist in my folly. Like every other horror-stricken American I keep asking myself, “What can a man do? What weight does a man have, besides petition and prayer, that he isn’t using to save his country’s soul and his own?” The frustration of the horror-stricken American as he sees his country going over the falls without a barrel is more than I can bear just now. He tries to do constructive work, but all the while he is buying guns. I have thought as hard as I can think. I have thought about, for example, anarchy. Not only am I not an anarchist, but I believe in taxes, in very high taxes, and especially in a very high graduated income tax. I realize that a man who believes in taxes cannot pick and choose among them and say he will not spend 50 per cent of them on guns just because he doesn’t need guns. I realize that anarchy is unworkable and that that is why the state came into being. And I realize, too, that the state cannot be maintained without its authority’s being reposed in its members’ representatives. I realize all that. But in this state — and a very good state it is, or was, as states go, or went — I cannot get anybody to represent me. My senators will not represent me. My congressman will not represent me. I am opposed to taxation without representation.

Were I God I would turn Milton into a pillar of salt for how many times he looked back behind him on those patriotic liberal platitudes (“its members’ representatives”) and rose-lit recollections (“a very good state it is, or was”) as he was walking away to dissidence.

Don’t tell me that I am represented by my vote. I voted against the national policy. Having done so, I am constrained in conscience to uphold my vote and not betray it.…

Methinks he misunderstands what a vote is. As Thoreau explained, “voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.” If you are “constrained in conscience” to go beyond this, you’re not a democrat but an anarchist. Good for you. But embarrassing for Milton:

If my offense is anarchy — which I dislike — I can’t help it. If the preservation of society compels me to commit worse evils than anarchy, then the cost of preserving society is too high. Society is not sacred; I am.…

Would that he would extend the realm of the sacred so as to let other people participate in it, rather than making his conscience king of his own money while advocating “a very high graduated income tax” for others.

My first responsibility is not to preserve the state — that is Hitlerism and Stalinism — but to preserve my soul. If you tell me that there is no other way to preserve the state than by the implicit totalitarianism of Rousseau’s “general will,” I will reply that it is the state’s misfortune and men must not accept it. I have surrendered my sovereignty to another Master than the general will — I do not mean to be sanctimonious here — and if the general will does not serve Him it does not serve me or any other man.

In so far as there is any worldly sovereign in the United States, it is not the general will, or the Congress, or the President. It is I. I am sovereign here. I hold the highest office of the land, the office of citizen, with responsibilities to my country heavier, by virtue of my office, than those of any other officer, including the President. And I do not hold my office by election but by inalienable right. I cannot abdicate my right, because it is inalienable. If I try to abdicate it, to the general will, or to my representatives or my ministers, I am guilty of betraying not only democracy but my nature as a man endowed with certain inalienable rights.

I have thought about all this, in the large and in the little. I have thought about my wife and children and my responsibility to them. War will not even save them their lives, not even victorious war this time. And it will lose them their most precious possession, their souls, if they call a man husband and father who has lightly sold his own. I have thought of the fact that better men than I, much better men, disagree with me. That grieves me. But I am not, in this instance, trying to emulate better men.

I have thought about my effectiveness. A man who “makes trouble for himself,” as the saying is, is thought to reduce his effectiveness, partly because of the diversion of his energies and partly because some few, at least, of his neighbors will call him a crank, a crook, or a traitor. But I am not very effective anyway, and neither, so far as I can see, is anyone else. If anything is effective in matters of this sort, it is example. I go up and down the land denying the decree of Caesar that all able-bodied men between eighteen and twenty-five go into the killing business and urging such men as are moved in conscience to decline to do so. If a million young men would decline, in conscience, to kill their fellow men, the government would be as helpless as its citizens are now. Its helplessness then would, I think, be at least as contagious abroad as its violence is now. Other governments would become helpless, including the Russian, and thus would we be able to save democracy at home and abroad. Victorious war has failed to do it anywhere.

But how can a million old men who themselves will not decline to hire the killing expect a million young men to do it? How can I urge others to do what I do not care to do myself? …

“The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.”

Of course the government doesn’t want me for military service. I am overage, spavined, humpbacked, bald, and blind. The government doesn’t want me. Men are a dime a dozen. What the government wants is my dime to buy a dozen men with. If I decline to buy men and give them guns, the government will, I suppose, force me to. I offer to pay all of my taxes for peaceable purposes, the only purposes which history suggests will defend democracy; the government has, I believe, no way, under the general revenue system, to accept my offer. I like the out-of-doors and I do not want to go to jail. I could put my property in my wife’s name and bury my money in a hole or a foreign bank account. But I am not Al Capone. I am… an honest man. And I am not mathematically minded; if I did try deceit, I’d be caught.

There is only one other alternative, and that is no alternative either. That is to earn less than $500 a year and be tax-free. I’d be paying taxes anyway on what I bought with $500, but that doesn’t bother me, because the issue is not, as long as I am only human, separation from war or any other evil-doing but only as much separation as a being who is only human can achieve within his power. No, the trouble with earning less than $500 a year is that it doesn’t support a family. Not a big family like mine. If I were a subsistence farmer I might get by, but I’m a city boy.

I would be hard put to answer if you asked me whether a man should own property in the first place, for a government to tax. If I said, “No, he should not,” I should stand self-condemned as a Christian Communist. It is illegal, under the McCarran Act, to be either a Christian or a Communist, and I don’t want to tangle with both the Internal Revenue Act and the McCarran Act at the same time, especially on the delicate claim to being a Christian. Still, the Christian Gospels are, it seems to me, passing clear on the point of taxes. When the apostle says both that “we should obey the magistrates” and that “we should obey God rather than man,” I take it that he means that we should be law-abiding persons unless the law moves us against the Lord.

The problem goes to the very essence of the relationship of God, man, and the state. It isn’t easy. It never was. History, however, is on the side of us angels. The primitive Christians, who were pacifists, refused to pay taxes for heathen temples. They were, of course, outlaws anyway. The early Quakers, who were pacifists, refused to pay tithes to the established church and went to prison. But the war tax problem seems not to have arisen until , when a considerable number of Quakers refused to pay a tax levied in Pennsylvania for the war against the red Indians.

The Boston (and New York and Baltimore and Charleston) “tea parties” of the 1770’s were, of course, a vivid and violent form of tax refusal endorsed, to this day, by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Seventy-five years after the Revolution, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because the government was waging both slavery against the Negroes and war against the Mexicans. Thoreau was put in jail overnight, and the next day Emerson went over to Concord and looked at him through the bars and said, “What in the devil do you think you’re dong, Henry?” “I,” said Thoreau, “am being free.” So Emerson paid Thoreau’s poll tax, and Thoreau, deprived of his freedom by being put out of jail, wrote his essay on civil disobedience. Seventy-five years later, Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay and worked it into a revolution. It could happen here, but it won’t. The place was propitious for Gandhi, a slave colony whose starving people had no money or status to lose, just as the time was propitious for Thoreau, a time of confidence and liberality arising from confidence. Totalitarianism was unthinkable and parliamentary capitalism was not in danger. The appeal to the rights of man was taken seriously, and McCarthyism, McCarranism, and MacArthurism were all as yet unborn.

I doubt that anybody will be able to bring me more light in this matter than I now have. The light I need will come to me from within or it won’t come at all. When George Fox visited William Penn, Penn wanted to know if he should go on wearing his sword. “Wear it,” said Fox, “as long as thou canst.” I hasten to say that I feel like Penn, not like Fox. I know I can’t say that you ought to do what I can’t do or that I’ll do it if you do it. But I don’t know if I can say that you ought to do what I do or even if I ought to do it. I am fully aware of the anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 percent of the 50 per cent I do pay is used for war. I am even fuller aware of the converse anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 per cent of the 50 per cent I won’t pay would be used for peaceable purposes. In addition, if the government comes and gets it, and fines me, as I suppose it might, it will collect more for war than it would have in the first place.

Worst of all, I am not a good enough man to be doing this sort of thing. I am not an early Christian; I am the type that, if Nero threw me naked into the amphitheatre, would work out a way to harass the lions. But somebody over twenty-five has got to perform the incongruous affirmation of saying, “No,” and saying it regretfully rather than disdainfully. Why shouldn’t it be I? I have sailed through life, up to now, as a first-class passenger on a ship that is nearly all steerage. By comparison with the rest of mankind, I have always had too much money, too many good jobs, too good a reputation, too many friends, and too much fun. Who, if not I, is full of unearned blessings? When, if not now, will I start to earn them? Somebody will take care of me. Somebody always has. The only thing I don’t know is who it is that does it. I know who feeds the young ravens, but I know, too, that the Devil takes care of his own.

One occasional tactic of tax resistance campaigns involves choosing a particular tax or portion of a tax to resist, not because that tax or that portion is particularly offensive, but because it is easier to resist or the ramifications of resistance are less frightening. This, in theory anyway, will encourage more people to begin resisting.

Today I’ll give some examples.

Hang up on war
  • The American war tax resistance movement for a long time targeted the excise tax on telephone service — both because it was a tax that had historically been instituted and raised to help fund war spending, and because it was a small and easily-resisted tax, so that people could start resisting quickly and without having to fear terrible government reprisals. The small amounts resisted also meant that government action against any particular resister would be unlikely to be cost-effective.
  • War tax resisters in Denmark have a similar campaign of refusal to pay a small portion of their radio and TV tax (equivalent to the military spending percentage of the Danish budget). Individuals pay this tax, while income taxes are withheld automatically under a pay-as-you-earn scheme, so this is a concrete way war tax resisters can resist.
  • Gandhi’s salt march and the salt-tax resistance campaign is now recognized as momentous, but at the time, many commentators ridiculed all of the fuss being made over a piddling little tax. War tax resister Joanne Sheenan notes:

    Gandhi’s Salt March initially involved only 80 people, but the act of picking up the salt from the sea and making their own salt in defiance of British taxed salt was revolutionary. The power of the Salt March was that it became a massive campaign — there was something everyone could do. Some packaged the salt, some sold it, all could refuse to buy the taxed salt and buy the alternative.

    The British occupation government knew that this piddling little tax had big symbolic value. At one point they hired hundreds of people to destroy natural salt deposits on a beach near Damni where Gandhi planned to try to harvest salt in violation of the ban.
  • There are periodic attempts in the American war tax resistance movement to try to get people to resist at least some tiny, symbolic part of their income taxes. For instance:
    • In , the group War Tax Resistance encouraged people to withhold and redirect $10–$50 from their income taxes — a small amount because “the expense to collect the tax that is not being paid is far greater than the additional penalty imposed for the delinquent action.”
    • In , a set of anti-war groups tried to get people to withhold and redirect at least a single dollar from their taxes.
    • More recently, a “$10.40 for Peace” campaign asked people to withhold $10.40 (a sort of tribute to the IRS 1040 form used by people to file their income taxes) as “a small act of witness against war and for the rights of conscience.”
    • Most pathetically, a group of Quakers is now begging people to, if they are going to pay their taxes, at the very least “Pay Under Protest.”

Some links from hither and yon:

And here is some more news about the ongoing troubles at the IRS.

  • This CNN Business story goes in some depth into how a loose coalition of activists forced the IRS into an embarrassing and costly retreat from its plan to use facial recognition technology to verify the identity of taxpayers using its online account portal.
  • This note from the National Taxpayer Advocate gives more details about the IRS plan to stop issuing certain enforcement action notices while it tries to deal with the enormous backlog of unprocessed returns and other correspondence. For example: “If a taxpayer’s account has been assigned to one of the IRS’s automated levy programs (ALPs), the IRS is also suspending the levies made by those programs…” The agency will also not be able to pursue many new levies because in order to do so, it must first send the taxpayer a letter informing them of their right to request a Collection Due Process hearing, and they’ve temporarily stopped the automatic sending of those letters.
  • The New York Times took a dive into the woes at the IRS: “Decades of Neglect Leave I.R.S. in Tax Season ‘Chaos’.”
  • Politico did the same: “ ‘They went down hard’: IRS’ tax season woes rooted in pandemic, long funding slide.” Excerpt:

    Some 53,000 IRS employees are still on remote work — about two-thirds of the agency’s workforce, which an IRS spokesperson characterized as “a maximized telework posture.”

    But privacy rules prevent remote processing of the millions of paper tax returns mailed to the IRS, as well as the examination of returns with discrepancies from IRS records, the issuance of refunds and dealing with other taxpayer mail.

  • The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University issued a report showing that the IRS audits the poorest American households at five times the rate as the rest. This seems to be an effect of the agency’s plummeting rate of audits of the well-to-do combined with its increasing use of cheap-and-easy “correspondence audits” against low-income taxpayers who apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. As the National Taxpayer Advocate puts it:

    The IRS correspondence audit process is structured to expend the least amount of resources to conduct the largest number of examinations — resulting in the lowest level of customer service to taxpayers having the greatest need for assistance.

  • Last Summer, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a spending bill that would have boosted the IRS budget. That bill got bogged down in Congress before anything could come of it. A recent appropriations bill resurrected the IRS budget boost, but pared it way back, so now the agency budget will only rise by 6%. These days that’s hardly enough to keep up with inflation. And the appropriations bill restricts how various parts of the increase can be spent, so some parts of the agency budget — tax enforcement for example — will see even smaller increases.