Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
how tax resistance fits the bill →
isn’t some government worth paying for? →
can libertarians, peaceniks, anarchists, environmentalists, paleocons, and lefties get along? →
Karl Hess
You may remember these words:
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America establishes a bill of particulars in regard to intolerable infringements, abuses, and denials of political power which belongs to the people.
The Federal government of the United States of America today is guilty of exactly every sort of infringement, abuse, and denial stated as intolerable by the Declaration of Independence.
I cannot, in conscience, sanction that government by the payment of taxes.
Further, the Federal government of the United States of America has established as a principle, and ruthlessly by the power of its officials enforces as a practice, that it can demand the primary loyalty of the people, that it can exercise all political power on their behalf, that it can wage war without their approval, and that it can and should establish the standards of their behavior and the goals of their lives.
I could not in conscience sanction such a government by the payment of taxes.
Finally, the Declaration of Independence, in the clearest possible language, tells Americans that when a government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that it is the right and the duty of the people to abolish such government, to “throw off such government.”
It is in the spirit of that Declaration, and in comradeship with men everywhere who seek freedom and to throw off such governments, that I now refuse to pay the taxes demanded by the government in the attached form.
The American colonial rebels anticipated Gandhi’s homespun cloth campaign by over a century.
Here’s part of a poem — “American Daughters of Liberty” — written in by Milcah Martha Moore, a Quaker from Philadelphia who was advocating nonviolent resistance techniques against the British:
Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise; And though we’ve no voice but a negative here, The use of the taxables, let us forbear:— (Then merchants import till your stores are all full, May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)
Stand firmly resolv’d, and bid Grenville to see, That rather than freedom we part with our tea, And well as we love the dear draught when a-dry, As American Patriots our taste we deny— Pennsylvania’s gay meadows can richly afford To pamper our fancy or furnish our board; And paper sufficient at home still we have, To assure the wiseacre, we will not sign slave; When this homespun shall fail, to remonstrate our grief, We can speak viva voce, or scratch on a leaf; Refuse all their colors, though richest of dye, When the juice of a berry our paint can supply, To humor our fancy — and as for our houses, They’ll do without painting as well as our spouses; While to keep out the cold of a keen winter morn, We can screen the north-west with a well polished horn; And trust me a woman, by honest invention, Might give this state-doctor a dose of prevention.
Join mutual in this — and but small as it seems, We may jostle a Grenville, and puzzle his schemes; But a motive more worthy our patriot pen, Thus acting — we point out their duty to men; And should the bound-pensioners tell us to hush, We can throw back the satire, by biding them blush.
After increasingly punitive restraints climaxed with the Stamp Act, women ardently supported the boycott of British goods by alleging that “naught but homespun” would cloak their bodies and that spinning wheels and knitting needles would doom “foreign manufactures.”
Formation of the Daughters of Liberty, the female “auxiliary” to the more radical Stamp Tax resisters, the Sons of Liberty, presaged an effective instrument for hardening resistance to British measures.…
New Englanders, eager to confirm their boldness in dressing only in domestic threads rather than anticipating arrival of modish bolts and bales from England, restructured the social form of the “spinning bee” into a public outcry against British goods.…
…at the first commencement exercises of Rhode Island College (later Brown University), the president proud-spiritedly wore wholly homespun clothing.
At Harvard, the faculty and students had all taken to homespun in support of their women spinners, of whom the Boston Chronicle had bragged “[T]hey exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country, rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience.”
Fierce competition between congregations, between married and unmarried women, between towns and cities and between old and young converted proceedings into such festive social occasions that hundreds of merry spectators milled around the grounds, augmented in the evening by men who joined the spinners and knitters for picnics and boisterous Sons of Liberty ballads.
The bees’ bountiful harvest of thread and yarn inspired others to imitate their fervor, and newspapers identified patriots by airing individual production records…
With the passage of England’s increasingly obstructive measures (such as the Coercive Acts in retaliation to the climactic Boston Tea Party), calls for boycotting tea and wearing homespun and handknit were even more strident.
Since women were the purchasers of what was served and worn in their homes, speakers, writers and preachers insisted that the “ultimate power” of saving the country reposed in their hands.
Even discounting the hyperbolic prose, women whose previous job descriptions had included little outside the family circle must have been astonished at the new perimeters of their responsibility.
Since noncompliance fell on their shoulders, their consequent focus on home production laid the groundwork for clothing their men when war actually came.
What would be a good equivalent of the patriotic knitting bee for today’s sons and daughters of liberty?
What commercial transactions does the government tax that it would have a harder time taxing if they were the fruits of household industry rather than the marketplace?
I’ve already discussed home-brewed beer as one good candidate.
Avoid the federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages, learn a craft, and drink good beer!
It’s a winning proposition any way you look at it.
I can easily imagine tax resister “brewing bees” or better yet “drinking bees” at which songs of liberty are sung with gusto.
But excise taxes are a minor portion of most people’s tax bill, and of the money the government takes in each year.
Most of the government’s revenue comes from taxing income and profit.
What are the homespun, untaxed equivalents of income and profit?
Enter Karl Hess, the Goldwaterite Republican Students-for-a-Democratic-Society anarchist libertarian, who published a provocative essay on barter .
Excerpts:
… constant harassment by the Internal Revenue Service caused me to snap my twig and just stop paying taxes altogether.… [M]y tax collector informed me that a lien would be placed against all my property — that they would take every cent, literally 100 percent, of every penny I might earn and that they could discern.
I asked, then, how they would handle it if I decided to just barter for a living.
They had a ready answer: “If you get some turnips for your work, we’ll take the turnips.”
Fortunately for me, either the IRS is surfeited with vegetables, or turnips are a good deal more difficult to track down than cold cash.
And so I survive.
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington, D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply of smoked fish.
At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation.
He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop.
Part of my pay for a lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop, to make some metal sculptures.
Three such sculptures have paid my attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason barter has become such an integral part of my life.
The War Tax Protesters from Time, .
Prompted by the war tax resistance of Jane Hart, wife of Senator Philip Hart of Michigan, this article gives a short summary of the Vietnam-era movement and notest that “their harassment has forced the IRS to assign someone at each major center to the task of ‘Viet Nam Protest Coordinator.’ ”
This movie, which won a Best Documentary Oscar in , lets Hess informally narrate his own evolution from being Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter in his presidential campaign, to his fleeing the corridors of power for life on a farm advocating small-scale “appropriate technology” — and there’s a brief stop along the way to visit his tax resistance:
Right after the campaign the Internal Revenue Service went into its quadrennial song-and-dance of auditing and otherwise harassing everybody who lost.
One of the worst things about losing a presidential campaign is: they get ya!
I went through an experience with them that I found sort of unbelievable.
And I got to thinking, and I got angry, and I read the Declaration of Independence while I was angry.
And I sent them a copy and I said “this document calls to my attention the fact that when you guys exceed all of your authority, begin acting like a bunch of colonial troops, that I should abolish you.”
And so I said “I hereby abolish you — I won’t pay your taxes anymore.”
Well, they don’t think that’s very funny. And they certainly have no interest in the historic significance of the statement.
One thing about being dispossessed of income and possessions is that you begin to understand that there’s a difference between money and the economy, or an economy.
Money may be part of an economy, but it’s not the whole thing.
An economy involves exchanges of goods and services, and that means barter.
For more on Karl Hess’s tax resistance, see The Picket Line for:
A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation.
In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.
Here are some of the examples I found:
Tax resister “insurance”
For instance, the Breton Association in
France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”
Another example was the Association
of Real Estate Taxpayers in
Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal
battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty
Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the
IRS.
The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal
amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina
colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up
[the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any
confinement.”
Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities.
Whiteway Colony
was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the
Bijou and
Agape communities live below a taxable
income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Supporting resisters as an employer
Some members of the Restored Israel of
Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal
taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were
resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold
taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American
citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans
to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn
withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a
voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or
half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several
months.”
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also
used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and
crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction
house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke
out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized
for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way
communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse
to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment
of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to
a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown
in’ by the auctioneer.”
Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail
Jessica Ramer and a
Claire
Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash
whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether
or not to declare the income.
Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was
told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the
government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged
meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the
charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government
calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when
you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even
leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t
tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is
the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but
still give the nice server what they have earned.
Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging
IRS
seizures:
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington,
D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply
of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation.
He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a
lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop,
to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my
attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason
barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic
control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth,
alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India
made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition,
and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed,
non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on
alcoholic beverages).
Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses
One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used
by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in
Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and
Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that
his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn
many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty
Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on
the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan.
The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda,
reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of
Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they
would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with
the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable
persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their
moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the
duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and
half Gentile.… among the Jews the words
“tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,”
“tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting
combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were
accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all
social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of
the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost
son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose,
and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their
testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit
at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests
especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of
pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful
receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic
regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might
easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and
necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials
to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the
refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before
the American revolution. John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes,
the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland,
have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet
high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains,
in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and
have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence
every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to
“have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to
him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the
spirit of liberty everywhere.
Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey
Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:
[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of
virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept
offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as
unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them;
withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life
which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to
each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they
deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to
the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after
the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent
technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of
violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this,
governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently,
percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which
only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned
by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce
their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a
wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers
who complied in paying the excise tax.
Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade
people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people
who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of
taxed British imports by declaring that
…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods
of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public,
shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation
takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer:
and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence,
with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer;
and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country,
and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics
In
Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by
offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show
that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at
the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the
democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as
non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from
those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter
of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes
that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as
previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of
individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings,
you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for
establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which
tax collector.
Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the
social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax
resisters. In , for instance,
448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New
York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the
Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K.
Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman
Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan
Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many
large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic
friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their
names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister
alternative funds function
partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs
as he was picketing the
IRS
office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax
debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this
sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
Keep in contact with resisters and express support
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the
IRS
as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across
the country.
Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making
Here there are too many examples to list.
Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that
“The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure
eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may
be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they
have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry
to its knees.”
Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real
needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put
it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they
thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had
been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to
learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted
to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was
uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed?
They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I
sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me
to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about
the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They
were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly
nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and
readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my
clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The
older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the
clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that
in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more
courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief
deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me
and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged
the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the
men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to
have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I
had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.
You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel
like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that
score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was
deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to
try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that
I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to
greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about
wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
Support the families of imprisoned resisters
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in
India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake
to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”
Study the law, give legal support
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for
women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is
certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation,
and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by
their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”
Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and
Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the
interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable
television on United States involvement in Central America, and a
people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community,
however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf
of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”
Back in , Karl Hess was a true believer of the right.
As a speechwriter, aide and ideologue to Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, he packaged the slogan that may have helped lose the campaign: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” , at 51, Hess is a welder.
He now opposes war, government in general and most U.S. Government activities.
He has become, in fact, an anarchist and a tax resister.
As much out of sheer angry cussedness as conviction, he admits, he refused to pay the Internal Revenue Service a penny in ; nor has he given them any money since then.
The IRS, in response, slapped a 100% lien on any money Hess earns and any property or savings he may have.
So Hess lives mainly by barter, trading his welding skill directly for food, clothing and shelter.
…and further along…
As Time Correspondent Arthur White learned when he visited Hess recently, the man seems to be practicing the classical, nonviolent anarchism he advocates.
Hess owns little more than welding tools and the blue denim clothes on his back. “I had a bicycle,” he admits, “but it was stolen.”
He owes the
IRS
some $15,000, and to outwit them he has even sold the rights to
Dear America to a community organization for which
he works. “I can’t own anything,” he explains in a soft voice. “Those
IRS
people are like a gang of thugs.” … He exudes what a friend has described as
“the ethereal, inexplicable cheerfulness of a nun scrubbing floors.”
I checked out the documentary Anarchism in America from the library and gave it a watch last night.
As an overview of American anarchism, it’s pretty superficial, and too deferential to the halloween-costume anarchism of punk rock.
But the movie has its moments, and includes good interviews with a couple of tax resisting anarchists: Karl Hess and Ed Hedemann.
As it turns out, I could have spared myself a trip to the bookmobile.
The documentary is on-line:
This is not to say, of course, that totalitarianism is right around the
corner or that we have already passed the corner. That particular corner is
one of the most difficult of all political landmarks to recognize. History
strongly suggests, as a matter of fact, that the time when most persons
recognize it is precisely the time when it is too late to do anything about
avoiding it.
For that reason, among others, it strikes some that it would be better to
stand up and appear even ridiculous and alarmist right here and now than to
be calm, cool, and collected, properly docile, and politically acceptable — while it became too late to do anything else!
The Tax Rebellion
Direct resistance may be the course others will select. Taking every
available legal course to harass or even halt government programs is one
avenue. Forcing the government to take, in its turn, legal action to compel
the individual to comply with a government rule, rather than just voluntarily
going along, is another course. Along such lines, of course, for those able
to afford it, may lie many useful tests of the legality of government
actions, particularly in the high-handed area of executive orders and
regulatory law.
Ultimately, of course, every American holds in his hands the most explosive
weapon that possibly could be turned against such a government as that of the
United States as it has developed. That weapon is the sword of tax refusal.
It is clearly illegal, of course, to defy the government in regard to the
payment of taxes. But prior to the clearly illegal areas of tax refusal there
are many steps close to the borderline.
In this area, the unbounded imagination of Americans already has given the
revenuers a massive migraine headache. Tax resistance is a fact. It is a
growing reality. It worries the government. Their concern shows most
evidently, as they take harsher and hastier action to dampen the flames of
this honest, grassroots revolt.
Many will be frightened off by the toughness and the ruthlessness of the
revenuers. Understandably. Yet, there is ample evidence to show that the
spirit of resistance overall is rising, despite the repressive and
retaliatory lashings of the revenuers.
Part of that spirit may feed on the earthy American feeling that “they can’t
put everybody in jail!” Or, in short, there is safety in numbers when it
comes to fighting City Hall, or the White House itself.
The issue of the
anarcho-libertarian zine The Abolitionist carried an
article about a “tea party” in Washington,
D.C., sponsored by the
National
Taxpayers Union. The article is notable for showing how libertarian
anti-tax sentiment and anti-war activism were much more closely allied then
than now.
Reflections in a Polluted River
by John Brotschol
On , a number of
RLA
libertarians including myself went down to Washington,
D.C. to attend a “tea party” sponsored
by the National Taxpayers Union. The
NTU’s
brochure cites some impressive statistics to justify the creation of their
group: each year Congress and local governments continue to spend 10% more
than the previous year, right now, the taxpayer is spending 44% of his working
time just earning enough to pay all his taxes and
state and local taxes have risen
1700% (WOW!). The
NTU
hopes to mobilize enough support by the creation of local groups and
cooperating with already existing tax groups to exert political pressure on
politicians from Capitol Hill down to the local township committee to reduce
taxation. The conference drew a relatively small crowd of 50 people but it was
the best libertarian gathering, I have yet attended. The speakers included
Ernie Fitzgerald who was fired from his position in the Defense Department for
exposing the two billion dollar cost increase of the C-5A transport plane,
Brad Lyttle of the War Tax Resistance, free market economist Murray Rothbard,
author Harry Brown whose book “How you can profit from the coming devaluation”
is currently on the best seller list, Karl Hess and
WKCA radio commentator Jeffrey
St. John. The speakers’ main
target was the military industrial complex who they blamed as the primary
cause for today’s oppressive taxation (over 70 billion dollars is allocated to
the Pentagon). Brad Lyttle who gave one of the best addresses stated that his
group is not paying telephone taxes (passed by Congress solely to support the
Vietnam War) and income taxes in their attempt to put a dent into the war
machine. The Executive Director of the
NTU,
James Davidson said his group will work closely with the War Tax Resistance
people.
This conference brought home to me the excellent possibilities tax
organizations offer to libertarians fighting both
mic and its
Vietnam War and the welfare mess. Here’s our chance to sock it to both
liberals and conservatives, so let’s get in there and start pitching.
Some links from here and there:
The Center for a Stateless Society has reprinted an interview with Karl Hess from a edition of Mother Earth News in which he describes his transition from Republican speechwriter to homesteading tax resister.
The britishprotest.com site covers Sophia Duleep Singh of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Imagine taking a dyed-in-the-wool Goldwater Republican and then beaming enough Jack Kerouac, “man in the gray flannel suit,” Betty Friedan, Masters & Johnson, Marlon Brando, Abbie Hoffman, and so forth into his brain that he flips out and becomes as passionately anti-establishment, anti-corporate, anti-Babbitt as he had been conservative.
That’s Karl Hess.
I found a copy of his Dear America (1975) via our inter-library loan program.
It’s got plenty of interest throughout, but I’ll restrict myself here to excerpting some of what he has to say about his tax resistance:
I am a tax resister.
I refuse to support a predatory government which wastes the work of the citizens on welfare programs which debase, harass, and regiment the poor into a special political constituency — without even scratching the surface of a solution to poverty, a solution which, common sense tells us, is to be found in work.
I refuse to support a government which wastes the work and lives of citizens in war programs which do not defend the citizens, which make some rich and others dead, which reflect dreams of empire rather than the good works of democratic life.
If everyone took that attitude, I have been told, democracy would fall.
The rulers say that.
The rich men say that.
The women in the social clubs say that.
The professors say that.
The labor bosses say that.
The factory bosses say that.
The professional patriots say that.
Common sense says something else.
If everyone took the attitude of refusing to support government which offends them, which transgresses their own good sense and morality, we would have democratic life in the fullest, most participatory sense.
Government which could not find the loyal support of people would fall.
Government which could find the support of only some people would have to move with modified respect to those who would not support it.
And everyone would be absolutely responsible themselves for what government did not do and did do.
Perhaps it is true that government of the absolutist, winner-take-all kind we have today would fall.
But in its place would rise a system of governance rooted firmly and absolutely in the will of the people and not in the whims of their representatives.
One result of resistance is that I cannot own property (aside from clothes and tools) and I do not.
It is a lesson which, although it seemed harsh for a time, is in fact wonderfully useful and gently strengthening.
With property removed as a major consideration, at least the sort of property for which we are taught to strive, for which we are prepared to kill others or ourselves — with that sort of property legally denied me, I have attended more carefully than ever to other sorts of things: to friendships and to skills, to self-reliance and to active performance rather than obsessive accumulation.
The thugs and bullies of the Internal Revenue Service, as properly befits their disposition, consider the tax rebels, the tax resisters, the worst of all criminals.
They are prepared to wheel and deal, of course, with any gangster or any millionaire, any ordinary felon who wants to make a deal.
Presidents who stray, politicians who connive, businessmen who chisel, can all, without exception, make deals, settle for so much on the dollar, hire great attorneys, even have the laws rewritten.
Ordinary people cannot.
The marauders of the Internal Revenue Service, with strict quotas for how much they have to squeeze from taxpayers, descend on ordinary working people like locusts and plague them even unto death.
But the treat the rich with kid gloves and they deal, deal, deal.
But tax resisters!
That is something else.
Millions are spent to recover the piddling war tax on phone bills which so many war opponents have refused to pay.
And with full-fledged resisters, the “revenooers” have virtual seizures of fury, go blind with rage, and sow the whirlwind.
In my case, in the half-dozen years I have resisted them, they have applied a 100 percent lien to everything they can get their hands on.
I cannot own a car, have a bank account, receive a salary.
But the lesson learned is better than the angers aroused.
I am a competent commercial welder.
I can work for people on a barter basis, taking an exchange for my work on the spot.
I tell the “revenooers” how much of that I do, for I understand that not to tell them would give them a grand chance to clap me in jail for an ordinary crime.
I know, of course, that they must be planning to try to get me there anyway, but if they do it will be simply because of principled resistance to their power and to the corporate system it represents.
This is not an ordinary crime.
It is a resistance, precisely the same sort of resistance that some of my ancestors mounted against the power of the British Crown and the corporate colonizers who were treating Americans as nothing more than work animals, to be flogged for all they were worth and bled for all they could stand.
So are the citizens generally today regarded by the spenders and the wheelers and the dealers in Washington and, in particular, by their most bullying agents, the tax collectors.
They need to be resisted.
And they need to know that in that resistance is the same spirit that overthrew the bureaucrats once before.
Something needs to haunt those people.
Certainly their consciences never haunt them.
Well enough.
Let the traditions of this country, this country of resisters and rebels, haunt them.
I hope the same spirit eventually will do more than haunt them.
During the same period [in which Hess was living in a semi-spontaneous, non-hierarchical houseboat cooperative] I began a small act of resistance which has had large repercussions in ways I could not imagine when the resistance began.
I decided to stop paying taxes.
It was not for an heroic theoretical reason or for any other reason which, in the long run, could be called effective or well thought out.
While working as a welder, I was called in by the Internal Revenue Service to be audited for returns filed while working in politics.
The auditing of the losers in a political campaign has by now become simple routine for the victors.
On point after point, it seemed to me, the adding machine person doing the auditing would almost angrily reject any discussion of whether or not a particular decision was just or fair.
Instead, the phrase “it’s the rule” was a constant rejoinder.
Now I am sure that there are people who get themselves so heavily involved in a job that they cannot, in fact, ever act counter to the rules of their superiors.
But even in such cases, at least at an industrial level, you find people who will bitch mightily and discuss lengthily the morality or sense of a rule, even if and as they obey it and force it on others.
Not so with the little, pinched people of the Internal Revenue Service.
In the course of a long audit of many years of returns, I met many of these people.
Not one of them seemed to have retained a shred of human decency in the way they worked.
They were totally subservient to the corporate demands of their agency, extensions of corporate machine planning, and absolutely thing else.
The easy, sophisticated habit of castigating soldiers for being robots has never really been justified, to my mind.
Throughout the Indo-Chinese war there were resistances by soldiers.
Every war is full of stories in which ordinary decency breaks through the most incredibly barbarous situations to turn soldiers into human beings, if only for an instant.
But never has it come to my attention or been part of my experience that a revenue agent, a tax collector, has put humanity above regulation.
They are, again in my own experience, the most abjectly humorless, dehumanized, order-taking, weak-charactered, easily vicious, almost casually amoral people I have met.
If you want to look for a fascist constituency in America, I would suggest that you turn away from ordinary working people, from the small towns, from the neighborhood bullies even, and focus with prudential fear on the hollow men and women who are the cold cogs of federal bureaucracies such as the Internal Revenue Service.
At any rate, to deal with them is to loathe them.
And it was while dealing with them, and loathing them, that the most stubborn part of my conservative background hammered its way to the surface.
After years of writing against the creeping, creepy power of the federal bureaucracy, after years of theory about the nature of bureaucrats and the dynamics of bureaucratic organization, I suddenly found myself (1) in a face-to-face, significant confrontation with actual, not theoretical, bureaucrats and (2) at a point where I could actually take an action in relation to the bureaucrats rather than just strike a rhetorical pose in regard to them.
Several things about such a moment.
It comes, like anger, quickly and without much warning.
It usually reflects your general disposition and not any particularly exact need of that disposition.
It is not, in short, a utilitarian anger, it is simply an anger.
And so, without urging that it is something everybody should do (though I wish they would) and certainly without claiming that it’s the best action a person can take (it actually causes the rebel more trouble, I suppose, than it causes the bureaucrats, since they use the rebellions to justify expanding their own power), without making any extravagant claims for the practice, I can only say that I chose, face-to-face with these prime agents of the state, to tell them “No.”
I became a tax resister, not simply because of war, not simply because of corruption, not simply because of wanting to emulate the tax-free status of so many corporations, and certainly not because of a precise political position.
I became a tax resister, at that particular moment, because I got mad and because somewhere in everybody’s life there probably is a line in the real world which you will not or cannot cross and which, often with the sort of sudden anger I felt, you balk at, stand on, and fight on.
In a world of power and command and regimentation and regulation these lines appear with greater frequency.
The rate at which they offend people is the rate of movement toward revolutionary change, I suppose.
Although aware that the decision to stop paying taxes grew out of general anger, I did think that there were particular and publicly responsible reasons for doing it.
The Declaration of Independence spells out some of those reasons.
I referred to it in the first of my letters to the IRS, refusing to pay taxes assessed in the past or demanded in the future.
We all talk about it.
But here, as I said, was a time of being face-to-face with it.
And so the Declaration did seem appropriate.
I sent a copy of it to the IRS and pointed out that I had concluded, in all conscience, that the tax money was used for a warfare system that killed to preserve the power of the privileged few and a welfare system that regimented the poor for the same purpose, all within a federal system that had absolutely taken over and overpowered every right of individual or community-based freedom that had been envisioned in the settlement of the country.
I have done that now for seven years.
The results have been predictable in one way, astonishing in another.
The predictable is that the IRS would not be interested in a declaration of conscience.
(Interesting contrast: people who, for reasons of conscience, will not kill are exempted from military service.
But no one is exempted, through taxes, from general service to the very state that orders the killing in the first place!
The state, it seems, takes money more seriously than life.)
Over the years, in pursuit of its many pounds of flesh, the IRS has systematically slapped a 100 percent lien on every piece of my life they could locate.
First came bank accounts.
They got very little because I have very little.
Then came salaries.
For a time I was making a salary as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
The IRS confiscated it all.
So I quit, preferring to remain close to the Institute as a friend rather than as a full-time worker for the government.
Once, when I asked the IRS how I might handle a situation in which they took 100 percent of everything I earned while the corner grocer still demanded a smidgen for rutabagas, the IRS robot facing me at the moment replied, with simple clarity: “That’s not our problem.”
It quickly became apparent that the only way to survive at all is to work in ways by which labor can be swapped directly for sustenance.
I have done that ever since, even while dutifully filing with the IRS an annual statement refusing to pay taxes.
The unexpected results of all this have to do with financial convenience and with property.
Not having a checking account, for instance, is an inconvenience.
It also is an education and the basis for, I believe, alternative ways of handling money altogether.…
Property is another thing.
I now understand that, because of my tax resistance, I can never legally own a single piece of property beyond the simplest personal items. If I did, the IRS, with its insistence that 100 percent of everything I might own or ever earn is rightfully theirs, would confiscate it.
So, no property.
[But] the deprivation of property has led me to the most meaningful sense of my own life and skill and my own relationships with other people as being superior to my old concerns for property simply as property.
