How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → reach out to potential resisters at the time and place of payment → Tax Day actions → 2016

There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:

• an invitation to the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in Pennsylvania
• a discussion of U.S. citizenship and war tax resisters — both getting citizenship and giving it up
• notes on the Jeju naval base and the Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy
• actions by Don Schrader, Don Timmerman, and Phil Runkel
• a profile of war tax resister Kathy Labriola

In other war tax resistance news:

• NWTRCC is keeping a list of nationwide war tax resistance protest actions taking place between now and tax day.
• Here’s a graphic and write-up from a member of Conscience Canada, the peace tax / war tax resistance group from the great white north, as found in Canadian Mennonite.
• Paper Money carried an article on the “Thoreau Money” banknote-like leaflets that were used by war tax resistance groups in the United States during the Vietnam War. The article goes into unusual detail about the history and structure of the war tax resistance movement in that period.
• War tax resistance season has begun in Spain, too. Here’s the announcement from Derecho de Rebelión.
• The group Conscience, from the U.K., has finalized its version of “peace tax” legislation, which it hopes to get Parliament to consider. It differs in some ways from other countries’ versions of this plan for implementing legalized conscientious objection to military taxation.

A few more recent links of note about war tax resistance:

• NWTRCC reports on nationwide Tax Day war tax resistance actions and is continuing to compile reports from its affiliates here and there around the country.
• The Global Days of Action Against Military Spending coincided appropriately with the tax filing season in the United States again this year. War tax resister Jason Rawn shared his thoughts on the international fight against military spending and its consequences.
• Sarah Lazare at Alternet gives us “A Friendly Tax Day Reminder: You Are Spending More to Finance the War Machine Than You Might Realize.”
• The Peace Pledge Union’s “learn peace” site includes a section on poetry and war, including “The Responsibility” by Peter Appleton which touches on taxpayer responsibility for what takes place in war.
• Tim Eisenbeis explains why he won’t pay war taxes. Excerpt:

  As a Christian, I cannot in good conscience look the other way and blindly pay for the death and destruction that military spending buys, especially not when it is so out of proportion to life-giving spending. The US armed forces can get along with even fewer soldiers but not without the people’s money, so it is my tax dollars that actually mean something. Given the options, I feel compelled to do my utmost to avoid paying federal income tax. The simplest legal way to do that is to keep our income below the taxable level, which so far, as a small-scale farmer, has not been very hard to do. Unfortunately, this means that we cannot help pay for the many laudable federal programs we would support.

• In other news: activists who were arrested for blockading the Defence & Security Equipment International trade fair in London were acquitted by a judge who ruled that the prosecutor had not successfully rebutted the defendants’ assertion that they were justified in acting to stop illegal arms sales.

Some other tabs I’ve opened in recent weeks:

• Some Tax Day Reflections from Bryan Caplan, from back when he was a grad student (he’s now a professor of economics at George Mason University). Excerpt:

  Morally, taxation is unjust; practically, it is unnecessary. Yet taxation is unlikely to disappear in the near future; so what is the right thing to do in the meanwhile? Thoreau’s advice is again sound: “It is not a man’s duty’s to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.” Which means: Don’t work for the IRS, never support higher taxes on anything, and never let anyone pretend that you pay taxes of your own free will. Taxation is always theft, and the more people hear this insight repeated, the sooner they’ll see taxation for what it is.

• The war tax resistance campaign has kicked into high gear in Spain. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Jesús Paz of the Mambrú Antimilitarist Collective:

  What is tax resistance?

  It isn’t a model regulated by the Treasury, but a campaign of civil disobedience that has been practiced for more than thirty years in countries like Spain, the U.S., Canada, Holland, Germany, France, or Italy. Simply, it is the use of the tax return as a tool for redirecting to socially useful purposes the portion of military spending from each citizen. Antimilitarist Alternative coordinates a state-wide campaign to help the maximum number of people to participate. We collect data from various peace research centers and we compose a study that adds the Defense Ministry budget to the spending on other armed forces and also other items that are dispersed by other ministries, such as credits to arms companies for so-called research & development of a military character. These credits, in reality, have ended up financing the arms industry, generating along the way €27,000 million in debt. We also include spending that, in our view, tends to a more militarized society: for example, a large part of the prison population is there because the system does not facilitate social integration. So, with all of the global military spending and spending on state repression and social control, we calculate that the military spending per person is greater than €700 this year. In any case, we make it clear that the objective is not to object to a particular amount, but that people take this step of disobedience and demonstrate that we are not going along with this. From conscience, acting collectively, it is an organized political campaign of disobedience. We also make it clear that this is not a campaign for paying less to the Treasury: the tax resister pays exactly the same tax the Treasury asks for, but a part of this money is not allocated to military spending, but to a social project.

  Have any cases of war tax resistance reached the court system?

  We don’t put much stock in the legal process; recognition of the right to tax resistance has already been rejected on two or three occasions in various instances. The philosophy of the vast majority of campaign groups is not to search for a legal body to give us a legal right; it is fundamentally a protest campaign. That said, there is one unusual judgment from the Supreme Court of Catalonia concerning the tax resistance of representative Joan Surroca of the PSC: although the Court rejected the right to tax resistance, it also declared it illegal for the Treasury to fine Surroca for something where he could not be considered to have committed fraud, that is, the intent to conceal money. We consider this a small victory that the Court recognizes that it is not simply an individual matter or a scheme to pay less. There is a space for someone who does not do what the Treasury orders, but who does so in a public way, without concealment.

• War tax resistance groups in Catalonia are redirecting their taxes to groups that are trying to ameliorate the refugee crisis.
• “Divest from Pentagon, invest in people,” headlines the People’s World in their article about a war tax resistance demonstration in San Diego. The resisters there redirected $6,000 in federal taxes from the Pentagon, including a donation to an organization that is trying to build tiny, affordable homes for the homeless. One of these homes was wheeled to the outdoor redirection ceremony to give it some extra splash.
• Raul Perez is going to try to figure out some new angle to get the U.S. courts to recognize a right to conscientious objection to military taxation. He also wants to make a documentary film about the process.
• Erica Weiland, at NWTRCC’s blog, makes note of some recent war tax resistance demonstrations.
• “Is it immoral to evade taxes?” asks a columnist for Tiempo Digital of Honduras. He reviews some of the historical tax resistance campaigns in the service of justice, and then asks: “Can we in Honduras feel morally comfortable and have clear consciences while paying taxes?” Citing corruption, the bulk of government spending compared to national gross domestic product, and the abysmal lack of security and legal protection for citizens, he concludes that Honduran citizens do not owe allegiance or tax to the government.
• Finally, here’s Joan Baez dedicating a song to the IRS:

New Escapologist is giving away PDF editions of their third issue. That happens to be the issue that features my article “Buying my life back through tax resistance.” Excerpts:

I’m through with symbolic, feelgood, bumper-sticker activism; I’ve taken Phil Ochs’s I Ain’t a-Marchin’ Anymore to heart and I’ve left the “peace parade” marches and rallies with their tired chants and terrible speakers behind. I take a practical approach, learning about the tax laws and about how to live well by being down-to-earth and sensibly frugal.

How do I feel about my life now that I’ve gone from a $100,000-a-year urban playboy lifestyle to living on around $12,000? Money Magazine profiled me briefly, for an article they put out on how to avoid paying taxes. They concluded that their readers probably wouldn’t enjoy what they called the “ascetic lifestyle” that comes along with my technique.

If this is “asceticism,” asceticism is very underrated. The life I’m leading now is fuller and more enjoyable than ever; I have less anxiety (and less guilt about my taxes) and I feel like I have integrity, and I’m genuinely living a life of abundance.

For one thing, by being willing to take in less income, I am able to work fewer hours. It turns out that those free hours are much more valuable than the money for which I’d been trading them (and the more practice I get in living vigorously, the more valuable my free time becomes to me). Now, more of what I do with my life is for goals I think are valuable, useful, and interesting; much less is what I have to put up with for a paycheck.

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy for abundance and fulfillment. But what I’ve learned is that by taking a more direct responsibility for your life and your effect on the world, by radically reassessing how your activities relate to your priorities, and by backing away from the consumer and job cultures, you can make your own life better and reduce your complicity in making other people’s lives suck.