You are cutting your support of The Gov whilst loving Our Land.
And your best way is to live beneath the economic radar above which all are taxed and threatened if not compliant.
Granted, you are in your small and moral way taking resources [but] if money is #1, what is #2?
What is the next biggest way that you allow, support, yield to The Power.
Or, by omission of action, do you give The Power freedom to be?
Do you have a moral obligation to evangelize?
To write for common papers, to take your soap box to the street, park or Embarcadero?
To write letters of wallet tightening to every address at your disposal?
Further, since you are unemployed, you could take the issues of injustice, paint ’em on your sign and park outside the White House.
Would that do more good than blogging?
Heh heh. Sounds like you’ve called my self-righteousness and raised me.
The money bit is pretty obvious and up-front.
It is positive, direct, measurable support.
But that does beg the question: to overuse an overworked political metaphor, could I congratulate a German who lived through the Reich managing to avoid taxes the whole while but not in any more active way interfering with its activities?
I’ve stopped my active support of the government, but I could certainly be doing more to actively oppose it.
As for education and propaganda, these Picket Line pages have a pathetically small readership given the amount of energy I put into them, but what I hope to accomplish is to leave a trail that folks can follow should they so choose.
I think I can see where you’re going with your line of argument, but you’re just sort of hinting at it.
It sounds like what you’re saying is something like this:
“If you’re going to live your live according to some sort of altruistic-like ethics, how can you go half-way?
How is any inefficiency or luxury justifiable when the alternative would be to help to further your cause?
And if your answer is that you’ve got your priorities and sometimes your personal luxuries take precedence, then would you please shut your pie hole and stop with your sermons about responsibility and ethics, because the rest of us have got our priorities too and we’re doing the best we can?”
I’d like to see you wrap your criticism up a little tighter and throw it at me again, ’cuz this sounds like an interesting nut to crack.
In a way, I’m questioning myself, using your actions as a measure.
There is a risk of committing, in the Hollywood All-The-Way sense.
If I was to let nothing stop me, how far would I go?
What limits would I reach?
I think that I’m hoping to appeal less to a desire for moral purity, and more to just a reexamination of how you (or anyone else) is actually living in relation to the more nuanced and smudgy principles you (or anyone else) already operate under.
I’m not going for purity, myself. At least not in this project.
What I did instead was just to bring my life into sharper focus and realize that I wasn’t living it the way I wanted to.
Specifically, I was giving a great deal of actual material support to an organization whose actions were abhorrent to me.
, I gave a few hundred dollars to Amnesty International, a few to the EFF, a few to the Drug Policy Foundation.
And I felt pretty happy about that.
But it took me a long time to even acknowledge that I gave fifteen thousand dollars to the IRS .
I didn’t have to take a vow or pursue sainthood or anything like that, I just had to honestly come to grips about what I was doing with my life.
Then I saw that it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with it, and I started doing something else.
Taxes are so cleverly hidden away — swiped from your paycheck before you even have time to miss ’em — so gradual and so ubiquitous, that it’s easy to pretend they’re not really aspects of your life so much as they are natural phenomena or something.
But there’s a weird double-consciousness about them.
Ask someone what their salary is, what they “make,” etc.
They’ll almost always tell you their before-taxes salary.
They’re able to believe almost simultaneously that it’s their money, they can take credit for earning it, it belongs to them and it was never their money in the first place, they have no blame for where it goes or how its spent, and they don’t miss it.
I hope to help provoke people to reintegrate this double-consciousness, to feel wholly the actual facts of their situation.
Then I hope to fight the temptation to hide from this by making explicit the various justifications people use to pretend the truth away.
Then I hope to demonstrate
that to the extent that you are paying taxes you are actively and positively and willfully supporting the government,
that if you feel that the government is doing rotten you should consider withdrawing that support, and
it’s not all that hard, see?
I ponder the human question of what is balance.
How does one reconcile Right Life with the many comforts and compromises made available for a few dollars from the many vendors at each street corner and web site, ignoring the cost to my fellow life forms or future generations?
Here’s what I try to tell myself:
“When you’re making a decision about something (say, whether to get a pitcher of beer down at Zeitgeist) — try to estimate the actual effects of your decision, as well as you are able, and without trying to sweep under the rug any of the facts about it.
Then decide whether given the totality of that, what you actually want to do, and do it.
Then, in your spare time, work on reducing as much as possible the convenient justifications and fact-hiding methods you use, educate yourself more about the way the world works, and become more honest with yourself about your actual ethical beliefs as opposed to the ideal ones you like to think you have but don’t actually practice with consistency because they don’t in fact match your desires.”
Usually these fact-hiding things come in two flavors:
One: A flaw in your reasoning or perceptual skills — there are a gazillion of these (optical illusions are a category).
Marketers exploit ’em by the handful.
Humans are full of cobbled-together reasoning methods and sensory kludges that are easy to exploit.
You just gotta keep your skepticism up and keep testing out and examining your ideas.
(The book Inevitable Illusions is a fun catalog of some of these flaws.)
Two: Self-dishonesty about motives and ethics and such.
You believe that you’re motivated by X, yet you do an action Y that seems to contradict that motivation.
Rather than honestly integrating the two, you lie to yourself about the nature of action Y to make it fit.
The best cure for this is relentless self-criticism, which can be done painfully and involuntarily through a bad trip or some sort of life crisis, expensively and painstakingly slowly with psychotherapy, or steadily with practice and enough self-esteem to put up with how goddamned humbling it is.
Is it worth Right Life to give up friends and move to outer Peoria, to be a purist?
I don’t think so.
Is it even vaguely Right Life to reduce my enormous eco-foot print by 25%?
So I ponder the balance.
In no way do I suggest you should shut your pie hole.
I think if all you do is experiment on the tax front, you serve a good purpose, you probe a mysterious boundary and like any good scientist you open up the possibility of discovering A New Way.
I’m very curious how much you will compromise.
You already miss your conveniences, you are learning that you’re not all the way into your new lifestyle and you’re reluctant to drop your New Yorker subscription, to steal them from doctor’s offices.
I predict when you reach business as usual with your budget that you will look to the next step at reducing your planetary asshole quotient.
Chances are you’re right now living roughly the life you want to be living.
In the areas you perceive it to be in conflict with your ideals, you probably just plain don’t have those ideals, or you do have them but they’re superseded by other ones you don’t want to acknowledge as such.
In some other areas, you’re probably hiding from facts you’re afraid are there because they either do conflict with your ideals in frightening ways, or they don’t conflict with your actual ideals but do conflict with the ideals you’d like to think you have and you’d rather not notice the contrast.
Or not. But that’s one way I fool myself, anyway.
Question: what if we had a new president (and cabinet and cronies an’ all that) which apologized for Bush and his ilk, changed military aid to domestic aid, righted wrongs, signed Kyoto Protocol and was in your opinion Good.
I know your imagination stretches this far.
Would you give up your Frugality and support The Government again?
Hmmm… what would make me go back to being a government supporter?
I don’t know.
I think I’d know it if I saw it.
I don’t much support government at all in the abstract, so it would come down to a cost/benefit sort of thing.
If the government was harmless enough, even though it was stealing money from me and my friends, I might still throw taxes at it if that’s what it took to make enough money to do something cool enough to offset the uncool things the tax money was doing.
On the other hand, the government could force me to support it, either by literally putting me in irons with a whip at my back or by forcing me to pay taxes even on the first dollar I earn.
I guess in the second case, there’d still be the option of trying to evade the gov’t in the underground economy or some such.
But you see what I mean — at some point the gov’t can make not supporting it sufficiently painful that supporting it would become the better option.
So I could be brought back into the system either way, I suppose.
Claire Wolfe said something like “we’re at an awkward point where it’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”
But we’re also at a point where the state is too evil to actively support, but not so evil that support cannot be withheld.
As a result, there’ve been a lot more visitors here in the last few days, and a lot more email to respond to.
Welcome! I’ve put some excerpts from these emails below:
It is very common when people are being urged to go to war and to surrender additional power to the government that frightening threats are invented, that the enemy’s awfulness is exaggerated, and that comical lies about pure and altruistic motives are spoken over patriotic background music.
It is very rare that the people who perpetrate this sort of fraud are called to account for it, unless it should result in an unmistakable military defeat (and even then, there are ways to turn military defeat into political victory).
The mountains of lies about the war in and around Vietnam eventually buried the executive branch in an avalanche.
But that took years.
It has been less than a year since the Dubya Squad lied us into Iraq and they may yet suffer for it.
I’d like to be able to say that this is because people have become more skeptical and less trusting of authority, but I don’t think this is the case.
Sadly, people remain willing and eager to jump on command when the President goes over the plot with us, looking across the oval office desk from over his power tie.
The difference this time is that the Dubya Squad has run into a string of bad luck.
They confidently piled up false assertions to support one big lie that they never expected would fall over quite so loudly and completely.
The famously short attention span of the public wasn’t quite short enough.
The media hasn’t been distracted by a big enough competing spectacle and so has continued to slowly worry the story.
The internet made it harder to sink down the memory hole the many unequivocal assertions that now sound like baldfaced lies.
The more-or-less unified face of the Dubya Squad lies well enough to suit the frighteningly large percentage of Americans who’d rather believe a good lie than be troubled with the truth.
“Tell us again, Dubya, how we, a proud and noble people, stood head and shoulders above the hesitant and cowardly nations of the world to selflessly take on the task of making innocent people safe from a maniacal, clever and deceptive evildoer — we love that story!”
But it’s looking more and more like this constituency of morons, as large as it is, won’t be quite enough to win the next election, and this is forcing the Dubya Squad to change strategy at an uncomfortable time, to reach out to other voters with more subtle and more fragile lies.
The short-term question is whether the Dubya Squad will be able to finesse this well enough to stay in power.
The long-term question is how to encourage the moron constituency to remove their blinders and come back to earth, as this won’t be the last time they’re asked to give a standing ovation to a well-decorated atrocity.
The discussion continues over at the Claire Files Board, much of it about whether people are morally obligated to evade taxation (for reasons above and beyond simple self-interest), or whether on the contrary because the money is essentially being taken from you at gunpoint, only the people holding the guns bear the moral responsibility for how the money ends up getting spent.
One person asks me:
What would you think of working in an above-the-radar business that diverted money away from the public sector and into the private?
An obvious example would be a tax consultant.
Suppose you made a hundred grand showing people how to legally cut their taxes.
You could only do so by saving them far more than a hundred grand in income, you’d be diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars away from the public coffers and into private hands.
Even though you’d have to pay substantial taxes to do this efficiently wouldn’t you actually be doing more to defund government than if you simply prevented them from getting anything out of your own pocket?
I’m actually doing a version of this.
But I’m not a qualified tax professional, so rather than making a hundred grand helping people divert hundreds of grands away from the government, I’m doing something a bit more modest.
I’ve volunteered at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites in San Francisco to help lower-income folk fill out and submit their tax forms.
A lot of people who qualify for tax credits like the EITC don’t bother to file tax returns for various reasons (they don’t know about the credit, don’t know they qualify for it, can’t be bothered with the paperwork, etc.).
The VITA program does outreach to lower-income folk and helps them get their EITC claims.
This is a program in which everyone is working hard to take money away from the government and give it back to some of the people it was stolen from.
“Do what you love” is my motto!
It requires that I work arm in arm with people from the IRS.
But the end result of my efforts is that money is taken out of the government’s trough and handed back to people who’ve had it taken from them in the form of FICA.
It makes me feel a bit like Robin Hood.
I’m not objecting at all what you’re doing but you do know that EITC is simply a government program for forced wealth redistribution, right?
Well, I haven’t done all the math on this, so correct me if I’m wrong, but the EITC is only available to people with earned income, which is by definition people who have been paying taxes via FICA.
So at least some of the money they’re getting back via EITC is money they’ve paid in via FICA.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get back more than you paid in; maybe so.
So as far as I’m concerned, this isn’t wealth redistribution so much as the recovery of stolen property.
So I took a bit of a spontaneous vacation from The Picket Line to take care of some things off-line.
Some of what I was up to was working with some people who are planning a protest action for — I’ll have more on this later, when there’s more solid news to report.
The protest is a coordinated effort of a group of war tax resisters and an assembly of groups that have organized around opposition to the war in Iraq and to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
The groups have some ideological and style differences, but are putting those aside and working well together so far.
I’m trying to push this incipient solidarity even further and see if we can also bring in the local Libertarian Party activists, who also traditionally do an demo.
It’s an uphill battle.
I haven’t been very successful at convincing the leftish core of our demonstration planners that they have much in common with the Libs — and I haven’t even started trying to convince the Libs that they’d be interested in going to a protest organized by a bunch of lefties.
Myself, I see a lot of advantages in such an alliance, but I’m not the one who needs convincing.
The local Libertarians are a small group that barely registers on the political radar.
They might gain from an alliance with the much larger leftish coalition.
Also, if they crafted their message well, they could reach out to and influence a Left that libertarian activists have sadly abandoned in recent years.
(I’m not the only one to mourn the stubborn association of libertarianism with the American right-wing.
For instance, there’s been a discussion over at Liberty & Power this week on the subject.)
The San Francisco peacenik left could also gain from such an alliance.
We often talk about bringing a broader group of dissatisfied Americans into the active opposition, but if we can’t even reach out to Libertarians — who are already with us, by and large, on the war and aid-to-Israel issues, and who have already given up on business-as-usual — what are the odds we’ll ever reach Joe Sixpak?
And for that matter, the libertarian critique of coercive state power is a good one and the Left would gain from confronting it honestly, addressing it well, or (dare I hope?) adopting it for its own.
Too many people on the Left think that the state is on our side — that it can be tamed and turned into our defender and our helper.
In all times and all places, the state has been a mechanism to give money and power to unethical people who already have more than their share — it’s about time that the Left recognize that the state isn’t their friend and isn’t going to be.
(As a tax resister, I’m also interested in reaching out to the Libs because they seem like good candidates for tax resistance — they already hate taxes but might benefit from a little practical assistance in learning how to put their money where their mouths are.
The leftish war tax resistance movement knows what it’s talking about in this regard, and libertarians would be smart to listen-up.)
A friend read my Picket Line entry from about why libertarians are frequently caricatured as ideologically rigid, self-centered greed-heads, and to what extent this caricature is a hard-earned reputation and to what extent it’s a stereotype.
He asked why I hadn’t given up on libertarianism yet:
Once thing I find a little weird though, is that since your criticism of the SS Libertarian is so spot on, why you bother identifying with the libertarian community at all.
Despite that I have a lot in common with libertarian thought, every time I delve into the libertarian community, I leave with the same conclusions: what a bunch of self centered, adle brained, intellectual poseurs.
And I too read Ayn Rand at an impressionable age.
I told him that there were two reasons I haven’t given up on libertarians yet:
1) The lefties can also be a bunch of difficult-to-get-along-with people (in other words, mavericks and freaks like me) with simplistic political views — if I can’t get along with libertarians or lefties, I’m gonna get mighty lonely on the barricades.
2) The folks who most seem to “get” what I’m doing with tax resistance, culture jamming, and such have been from the individualist anarchist and libertarian traditions: folks like Wendy McElroy and Claire Wolfe, for instance.
Thanks to Patri Friedman at the No Treason Metablog and to Claire Wolfe at Wolfesblog for pointing folks in this direction.
Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman tear into the “Fair Tax” proposal — legislation that would replace the U.S. federal income tax, payroll tax, and estate tax with a national sales tax:
They’re also kind enough to quote me as “an alert critic” and fellow-skeptic.
Another intriguing article from Claire Wolfe: How to Avoid Work.
By “work” she doesn’t mean effort, or labor, but “Jobs” of the on-the-clock, working for the corporation variety.
Wolfe speaks from an individualist libertarian space, which is an unusual place to find an argument that contains echoes of anarchist Bob Black and the neo-luddites and of the various pinings for pre-industrial cottage industry and tight-knit family that are more often found in certain conservative and leftist strains of thought:
[H]ow do we call a screeching halt to this crazy, abnormal culture of mad rushes, gridlock, headaches, clock-watching, repetitive-motion injuries, and Prozac-and-Ritalin gobbling?
And if we do climb out of the job mess, do we have to go back to some sort of primitive living?
Does health, happiness, and prosperity, as we’ve been told all our lives, really rely on big (but efficient!) corporations, inexpensive mass-produced goods, production lines, high-tech medicine, and things made out of plastic?
You can almost hear Ayn Rand’s ghost screaming in anguish from beyond the grave: “Whooo is denigrating corporations and plastic?”
Wolfe promises some practical steps for climbing out of the job mess in future installments:
In the next column or two, let’s go out there and look at individual non-traditional options for surviving the 21st Century — without jobs, but without privation, either.
And then let’s go even further out on that limb and start considering ways that whole societies full of individuals might — if the people in them really wanted to — reclaim their time, their lives, their children, their communities, and their work from this too-weird, frantic-manic, stomach-churning, post-industrial grind.
Claire Wolfe has published her promised follow-up to the How to Avoid Work article I wrote about at .
In this one she offers a vision of how we get from a world full of Work to a world where we’re getting done what we need to get done, and we’re getting by just fine, but we don’t consider it inevitable that we’ll all be orienting our lives around a Job.
“So how do you change that, Claire?” big, bald Carty challenged me.
“You’re the ‘let’s do something about it’ gal.”…
“The first step is just for more and more people to take their work into their own hands.
Take an honest, open-eyed look at what our jobs are really costing us — in fuel, clothes, day-care costs, taxes, lunches out, dinners we buy because we’re too pooped to cook, extra car payments, the gift exchange down at the office.
Lotta people might find that their jobs — especially the second job in one household — are actually costing them money when they look at all the associated spending.…”
I finally got my hands on a copy of Claire Wolfe’s inspiring book The Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook.
It’s subtitled “179 things to do ’til the revolution.”
I’m happy to report that my experiment here on The Picket Line makes the list as Thing #29:
“Let them march all they want, so long as they continue to pay their taxes.” ―Gen. Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan.
…I look at that quote from Alexander Haig, and it says 10,000 times what I could say.
As long as we obey and pay, our masters don’t give a flying Philadelphia you-know-what about any of our worthless little opinions.
And that goes double for our quaint little petitions, letters, and pleas in public forums.
No.
If you don’t like what government does, you’ve got to stop supporting what government does.… ¶ The most sure and certain way to break the system is to refuse to be the system.
If enough refuse to give their cooperation, the system falls.
But even if you stand alone, you can live more easily with your own conscience if you do what you know to be right.…
29. An experiment in legal non-payment of taxes (but really much more than that)
, Dave Gross went on strike.
He quit his job, lowered his income to a level at which he shouldn’t have to pay any income taxes — and began detailing the entire experiment on his Web site (http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/) as a guide for others.
His is a safe but adamant form of tax resistance — and he’s discovered that not only are there fewer problems than he anticipated, there are surprising lifestyle blessings, as well.
Tax resistance isn’t merely tax resistance.
It’s about the moral and ethical choices we make every day when we accept individual responsibility for freedom.
It’s about putting our beliefs into action in our everyday lives, rather than sitting snug in ivory towers, making up philosophies we never bother to apply.
Even if you have no intention of resisting taxes, but face other dilemmas trying to live free in a world where freedom’s outlawed, Dave offers insights.
I also manage to claim Thing #132 for the monkeywrenching techniques and examples I’ve cataloged at sniggle.net.
Some days I feel a little foolish making all this noise, yelling into the vast abyss that is the internet, spending so much time and effort on things that most people seemingly couldn’t be bothered to pass up a chance to see another picture of Paris Hilton with her shirt off for.
Today is not one of those days.
I’d just finished reading Carl Watner’s interesting voluntaryist-oriented summary of the beliefs, practices and history of the Amish (“By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them:” Voluntaryism and the Old Order Amish, ), and I was hoping I’d find time to write up a little something for The Picket Line about the successful legal battle that the Amish waged to be exempt from the Social Security program — taxes and all.
, I pointed readers to two articles that Claire Wolfe had written about “work” and “jobs” — pleas, basically, that people reconsider their decisions to trade their lives for paychecks and decide instead to aim for a more rewarding and ennobling life.
(♇ and )
[W]e’ve got to try to perceive, understand, and (I believe) ultimately reject the Job Culture for the sake of our own sanity and our humanity.
The Job Culture — a parasite so deeply attached to the culture that it’s virtually impossible to distinguish between the two — is extremely unhealthy for individuals, families, and communities.
And catastrophically — despite intense cultural conditioning that constantly hammers the exact opposite message into our heads — the Job Culture is destructive to freedom, as well.
The Job Culture isn’t just jobs, work, and business institutions.
It’s a comprehensive way of life in which millions of people place institutional paid employment at the center of their world.
“What do you do?” is immediately understood to mean, “What kind of paid employment do you have?”
In the Job Culture, family life, recreation, deep personal interests, and desires all must be structured around and subordinated to The Job.
She acknowledges that American libertarianism has, at least in the Ayn Rand era, fetishized corporations, cubicles and CEOs, but she’s eager to try and retake the critique of corporations from the left:
The traditional case against jobs and the Job Culture comes from the left, which warns us of exploited workers, mindless consumerism, and environmental destruction.
Meanwhile, the right cheers what it mistakenly calls free enterprise.
But if anybody should rail against the Job Culture and endeavor to bring it down, it should be libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and true conservatives.…
A true system of free enterprise is one in which the largest number of individuals are free to engage in the widest possible variety of enterprises, in the widest possible variety of ways.
In a system of genuine free enterprise, millions (perhaps even billions) of people could lead highly self-determined lives.
Millions of free enterprisers could choose to set their own hours, make products of their own choice, trade with whom they wished, close up shop when they didn’t care to work, bring the kids and dogs into the business, work from home, bring in helpers as needed, follow the rhythms of the seasons, or otherwise structure their own lives as they saw fit.…
Free enterprise isn’t anything like big-corporate capitalism.
We’ve been told the two are equivalent, but that’s just another bit of cultural brainwashing.
Think about it.
Job holders by definition aren’t capitalists.
Job holders, no matter how well paid they might be, function merely as the servants of capitalists, just as medieval serfs functioned as the servants of lords.…
They function in a climate of diminished responsibility, diminished risk, and diminished reward.
A climate of institutional dependency.…
The daily act of surrendering individual sovereignty — the act of becoming a mere interchangeable cog in a machine — an act we have been conditioned to accept and to call a part of “capitalism” and “free enterprise” when it is not — is the key reason why the present Job Culture is a disaster for freedom.
The beatings and other abuses served mainly to relieve stress, according to the three soldiers.
“On their day off people would show up all the time,” said one sergeant.
“Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent.
In a way it was sport.”
The soldiers blamed the abuses in large part on the failure of civilian and military leaders to clarify what was and was not permitted, particularly in light of the administration’s position that the Geneva Convention, in which the unit had been trained, did not apply to detainees captured in Afghanistan.
Where does everybody get this?
Are we honestly supposed to believe that people with decent hearts and common sense torture people routinely — simply because no leader steps forth to say, “No, no!”?
Come off it.
No doubt there were and are “leadership failures” — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the treatment of the 500 endlessly “detained” prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, many of whom are now starving themselves before an uncaring media.
Hell, the Bush administration is an ongoing, rolling wreck of a “leadership failure.”
The concept of political leadership is ultimately a failure, in and of itself.
The very notion of expecting “leaders” to determine everyone else’s behavior by command and control is obnoxious and ought to be rooted out of the human consciousness.
But however responsible the leaders are for tolerating, encouraging, and especially covertly making policy of torture, the do-ers still have the power to say no and f**k no.
Individuals who beat or otherwise abuse others for amusement, release of tension, peer pressure, or just because they imagine that’s how things ought to be done are warped individuals — even if they’re twisted in a sadly common way.
Orders on high might be able to curb their Lord of the Flies devolution.
But “leadership” doesn’t change their nature or make them any less responsible.
In defense of the “leadership failure” school of thought, I would make two points:
that abuse and torture of prisoners of war is the norm in wartime, and in order to prevent it you have to institute vigorous anti-abuse policies backed up by a zero-tolerance brand of authority (and the Dubya Squad did pretty much exactly the opposite), so in this sense, this is a “leadership failure,” and
soldiers who have been engaging in the sort of vicious, remorseless terror that has characterized the war in Iraq (the levelling of Falluja, the aerial bombardment of civilian areas, etc.) are living in an ethical Bizarro world in which any familiar ethical guideposts have been destroyed or inverted — is it any wonder to hear them complain that, having been praised for murdering a family in a car at a checkpoint yesterday they had no way of knowing that they shouldn’t take a baseball bat to a prisoner today unless someone told them that those were the rules?
(Someone with “rank,” since moral authority doesn’t exist in Bizarro world.)
The right thing to do is never to go into this Bizarro world at all, which means never to go into the military or any other organization that insists that you surrender your moral autonomy.
Joining the military is not an honorable thing to do, despite all of the propaganda and adventure novels to the contrary.
Volunteering to kill strangers on the orders of politicians — I’d rather break bread with kiddy porn aficionados or telemarketers than with people who wear a military uniform with pride.
So where is everybody?
The Iraq war drags on and is being quietly expanded, and that other war here at home continues to chew up Americans at a steady pace.
The outraged?
Are they really all sitting around the television hoping that Patrick Fitzgerald will put everything right?
For that matter — where am I?
Don’t I know that Dick Cheney’s trying to get torture legalized by Congress?
Don’t I see the next invasion on the horizon?
Haven’t I noticed the growing militarization of our own police, and how the eyes of our national intelligence apparatus are increasingly turning back on those of us inside the borders?
Yeah… I know. But I’m not going to talk about all of that here.
This blog is for people who’ve already heard the news and are ready to take the next step.
If you don’t think things have already gone too far, I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you otherwise.
I’ve far from given up. I’ve just moved on to another phase of life.
I know that virtually everything the federal government does is going to be horrible.
Why remain in a perpetual state of lather?
Why be in reactive mode through the course of an entire existence?
There is life to be lived — live aside from politics, even if that life must often be lived in spite of the worst efforts of politicians and bureaucrats.
And there is freedom to be won.
Not just talked about, but snatched directly from the jaws of the vicious total-control beast.
…outrage must have a purpose.
And that purpose is eventually to do something productive with your righteous anger.
And that’s what I’m doing these days.
And that’s what I hope (and believe) thousands of other freedom lovers are doing.
If we’ve stopped waving our arms and shouting, it’s not because we’ve given up.
It’s because we’ve moved on to the next stage of opposition to tyranny.
And that next stage is, of necessity, much, much quieter.
Of course, this can be a bluff, or an excuse.
Why aren’t you raising a ruckus about these outrages?
Because I’ve moved on to the next, more serious, more hush-hush stage of opposition!
Uh huh. Sure you have.
But it seems even more common to confuse being noisy with being productive.
Some of the government’s most dependable supporters have radical bumper-stickers on their cars and laugh loudest when The Daily Show comes on.
Myself, I never feel like I’m doing enough.
But I keep doing what I am doing, I try to honestly evaluate what matters and what’s just blowing smoke, and I try to keep my eye on what my next step is going to be and prepare myself to take it.
[T]he thing we have the greatest power to change — our own lives — is the thing we’re often most resistant to change.
This is a good-old/bad-old human trait in general; we don’t want to give up our grudges or our self-destructive habits (because after all, they’re ours).
But especially we don’t want to practice our “political” ideals in our own lives because it’s risky and uncomfortable to personally resist the evils we claim to oppose.
We want to stop the war but we won’t do it by refusing to finance the war.
We want to stop the invasion of our privacy, but we won’t do it through non-cooperation with the database makers or through smashing the surveillance systems. We don’t wish to reduce our dependence on heavily regulated and taxed products.
We cooperate, we collaborate, then we complain.
It’s so comfortable to complain.
So familiar.
So us.
And it is so easy just to blame the entire loss of freedom on them — whoever they may be today.
So the one part of the world that we’re best positioned to “do something” about is the one thing we often do the very least to change.
The one place we really, truly can oppose evil — right at our own doorsteps, right in our own hearts — is the one place where we perpetually surround ourselves with excuses for inaction.
I wake up to the news that the voters of San Francisco have boldly passed a non-binding resolution declaring that the people of San Francisco disapprove of military recruiters in the public schools.
This pairs up nicely with ’s Proposition N, in which San Franciscans boldly voted to declare their absolutely powerless opinion that U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Iraq.
When it comes time for empty gestures, San Franciscans can be counted on to disapprove of the war.
When it comes time to send representatives or money to Congress, however, these scolding peaceniks seem to have other priorities.
The people, united, will pass a non-binding resolution disapproving of their defeat!
I gave a phone interview to a journalist working on a short piece about tax resisters for a local newsweekly.
She said she was taken by my light-hearted short-hand description of the four dimensions of tax resistance: poverty, persecution, prevarication, and paperwork.
“So you’re doing the ‘poverty’ method, right?”
I’m glad I could set the record straight.
If this is poverty, poverty is very underrated.
I’m living much more frugally relative to my fat lifestyle before I started resisting taxes, it’s true, but I’m far from impoverished.
In fact, in terms of the ratio between my wants and my ability to fulfill those wants, I don’t think I’ve ever been richer.
My salary dropped but my life rose to surpass it, and I hope it never relinquishes the lead.
Claire Wolfe takes a look at the other side of this see-saw, and sees a nation of people who are prosperous on paper and in the cost of their possessions, but impoverished in their lives, having sold their hopes of genuine prosperity in exchange for mass-produced trinkets and baubles.
I’ve said before that I’m the richest poor person I know.
But the truth of that didn’t really strike me until I found myself flooring the gas pedal in my eagerness to escape whichever McMansionland, AutoMall, Theme-Park Shopping hell I was passing through that day.
To trade the glorious view from my own hand-built Cabin-Sweet-Cabin for what passes for life in such a place … It would be unthinkable. Inconceivable.…
Someday people are going to wake up in their McMansionized cities with their views of grand but homogenized AutoMalls and PlaylandMalls.
And — I hope — they’re going to feel revulsion at how cheaply their spirits were bought — how they mistook plain old money for real prosperity — and how very, very poor they allowed themselves and their communities to become because they bought into the world’s biggest lie.
Wow. On one fifth of an acre, sandwiched between freeways in Pasadena, California, the Dervaes family home is hosting what they call “a homegrown revolution, using our hands as weapons of mass creation”:
The yard has over 350 varieties of edible and useful plants.
The homestead’s productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of organic produce annually, providing fresh vegetables and fruit for the family’s vegetarian diet, along with giving a source of income.
The family operates a viable & lucrative home business that supplies area restaurants and caterers with salad mix, edible flowers, heirloom variety tomatoes and other in-season vegetables.
The income earned from produce sales offsets operating expenses and is invested in appropriate technologies, such as solar panels, energy efficient appliances, and biodiesel processor, to decrease further our homestead’s reliance on the earth’s non-renewable resources.
And you can read all about it on Path to Freedom, their informative, interesting, and inspiring web site.
Thanks to Claire Wolfe at Wolfesblog for the link.
Thanks to Claire Wolfe for plugging The Picket Line recently.
Claire Wolfe has begun a serialized story in Backwood Home Magazine that’s got my attention.
The plot thus far is inspired by the Pepperell High School students who held an uprising a few months back when the school tried to force them to take the ASVAB military aptitude test (see The Picket Line ).
There’s also a mysterious Trickster lurking at the margins with a gleam of mischief in his eyes.
Thanks to Claire Wolfe at Wolfesblog for plugging The Picket Line.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Claire Wolfe has written a good meditation on the dangers of lifestyle purity perfectionism.
I have a lot of admiration for folks who go to eccentric extremes to root out even the tiniest vestages of collaboration from their lives.
I also think that keeping our faces turned in the direction of always becoming a little better in this regard is good exercise in staying conscious and conscientious (at least that way if you decide to compromise, you won’t do it unconsciously or with self-deception).
That said, I think it’s probably true that there are diminishing returns after a while from this approach and it can become a sort of self-indulgent ethical yoga.
The website Financial Integrity is holding a writing competition.
“Around the world people are aligning their spending with their values.
They’re trusting their own choices more than what the advertisers put forth.
People are emphasizing financial integrity.
Stories are being made, as real people make real choices and experience the bumps and bruises and triumphs of transforming their relationship with money.”
Perhaps the story of your conscientious tax resistance is the winner they’re looking for.
Human minds are subject to predictable optical illusions, which can turn concentric circles into apparent interlocking spirals, make still things appear to be moving, and so forth.
There are also auditory illusions, like the Shepard Scale, which appears to be constantly ascending or descending in pitch while in reality it just cycles through the same set of notes:
People are also vulnerable to regular, predictable, remarkable flaws in the ways we predict events, handle statistical data and uncertainty, remember our own lives, assess the quality of our information, anticipate what will make us happy, and so forth.
These cognitive illusions are only recently undergoing rigorous exploration, and Daniel Kahneman is one of the top names in the field.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman introduces his model for understanding these illusions.
Roughly: people have two cognitive systems for evaluating information and making decisions — System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, subconscious, and automatic, but is prone to some easily-exploitable biases and illusions.
System 2 is slow, must be deliberately invoked, works consciously, and saps mental energy; while it can fill in some of the gaps where System 1 fails, it has some blind spots of its own, and can be over-reliant on the snap judgments of System 1 as the basis for its own decisions.
The ways in which our minds can be persuaded to fail to make the right decisions are not at all subtle.
For instance, people who hold one hand in a painfully-cold container of water for 60 seconds before removing it, and at another time hold the other hand in a painfully cold container of water for 90 seconds that gets slightly less-painfully cold during the last 30 seconds, will later report — more often than not — that they would prefer to repeat the second of these painful experiences over the first one, even though the second one includes just as much pain and even adds to it.
Then there is the “halo effect” by which if we find something to be good or bad in some quality, we tend to bias our beliefs about its other qualities in the same direction whether or not we have any good reasons to do so.
For instance, when Claire Wolfe reports:
When I was a kid during the cold war, I had this image of the Soviet Union as a place that was always gloomy — perpetually leaden skies, perpetually leaden people, gray and brown garb, no joy.
Even as a young adult I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that even in darkest Siberia they had sunny days.
Or that Russians loved their country.
Or wore bright colors.
Or that they sometimes sang and laughed and danced and joked.
Even now, I have to make a conscious mental adjustment to picture unfree places having sunshine or joy.
Or residents who burn with love for them.
Wolfe is describing this “halo effect.”
Her perception of the Soviet Union as a repressive tyranny subconsciously colored her ideas of its beauty, colorfulness, and the capacity for joy in the people who lived there.
The converse of this is that when we suffer from this illusion, we may look around at our beautiful, colorful, joyful surroundings and blind ourselves to the potential of unseen tyranny.
There are many such illusions, and Kahneman describes several in detail.
Many more, one suspects, remain to be mapped out.
The marketing and propaganda industries are of course eagerly studying this new research into the various ways in which they can trick us into parting with more of our resources or doing more of their bidding while receiving less in return.
(I was not surprised, but a little alarmed, to learn that much of Kahneman’s research has been done with the support of the Israeli military, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the [U.S.] Department of Defense.)
We, the intended victims, are much slower to educate ourselves.
Perhaps books like this will help.
I hope to have some big news to share with you soon, but until then here are some links of interest to tax resisters that have accumulated during my absence:
Claire Wolfe, on the downhill slope of her recent book project Basics of Resistance, gives me a shout-out over at her Practical Freedomista blog:
In addition to being a personal inspiration, he’s written about other tax resisters like Ammon Hennacy, who conducted a One-Man Revolution and Henry David Thoreau, who wasn’t the pacifist some imagine.
If you’re looking for helpful information from a man who has walked the walk, David’s blog is a good place to start.
Barakaldo Digital reports on the outreach actions
of war tax resisters from Barakaldo, Biscay.
“They have protested that the ‘diversion of public resources’ to military
expenses or bank bailouts ‘translates into a town like Barakaldo, with high
rates of unemployment, poverty, and precariousness, with many deficits in
social services.’ ” The Spanish government, under pressure from the
U.S., says it
plans to double its defense spending so as to take on a higher percentage
of the total NATO
budget. Concerned Basque taxpayers are encouraged to contact their Office
of Tax Resistance in Bilbao.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)
is a technique for applying economic pressure to states, usually from
without, by trying through multiple avenues to deny them economic
resources. The tactic was famously applied to apartheid South Africa, and
is now enjoying a resurgence in the attempt to curb Israel’s oppressive
policies towards Palestianians. But isn’t it overdue to BDS the U.S.?
