Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → how tax resistance fits the bill → isn’t some government worth paying for? → doing without government → what’s good about bad government?

There may be hope after all. Perhaps there is some sort of reverse psychology at work in the current political environment that may turn my pessimism on its head. Stephan Kinsella reports from the Mises Economics Blog:

In , the National Geographic Magazine published an article describing law reform under a Manchu emperor who reigned in . Emperor Kang-hsi decided that [government] courts should be as bad as possible so his subjects would settle disputes by arbitration. Responding to a petition about judicial corruption, he decreed as follows:

Lawsuits would tend to increase to a frightful extent if people were not afraid of the tribunals. … I desire therefore that those who have recourse to the courts should be treated without any pity and in such a manner that they shall be disgusted with the law and tremble to appear before a magistrate. In this manner … good citizens who may have difficulties among themselves will settle them like brothers by referring to the arbitration of some old man or the mayor of the commune. As for those who are troublesome, obstinate or quarrelsome, let them be ruined in the law courts.

In other news:

  • The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict is conducting “a free, seven-week, participant-led online course: ‘Civil Resistance Struggles: How Ordinary People Win Rights, Freedom, and Justice’ ” starting (application deadline ).
  • “Doing the right thing is never futile”: some excerpts from a recent interview with long-time war tax resister Randy Kehler.
  • Suffragist tax resister Abby Kelley Foster is getting some overdue recognition. The Worcester, Massachusetts city council “voted unanimously to honor Abby Kelley Foster (1811–1887) for her long struggle for human rights, setting in motion an effort to erect a monument or statue in her honor,” thereby doing some measure of reparations for the city’s persecution of the woman for her refusal to pay taxes to a government in which she was not represented.
  • Público reports that a third of the households in Zaragoza have refused to pay the ICA tax as part of a resistance campaign there (see ♇ 11 January 2018 for more details about the campaign).
  • Urgente24 reports that businesses in Luján, Argentina are boycotting their electric bills to protest steep rate hikes by the government-authorized monopoly Cooperativa Eléctrica de Luján.
  • The presidency of Donald Trump is dangerous, and his policies are cruel and destructive. But if we survive, the long-term damage he will have done to the prestige of the American government may be a blessing in disguise. The Edelman marketing consultancy firm conducts an annual “Trust Barometer” survey of world public opinion. Here’s what they found this year about America:

    [T]rust in institutions in the United States crashed, posting the steepest, most dramatic general population decline the Trust Barometer has ever measured.

    …The public’s confidence in the traditional structures of American leadership is now fully undermined and has been replaced with a strong sense of fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment.

    Among the informed public, the trust crash is even steeper, with trust declining 23 points, dropping the U.S. from sixth to last place out of the 28 countries surveyed.

    Vast swaths of Americans no longer trust their leaders. Government had the steepest decline (14 points) among the general population. Fewer than one in three believe that government officials are credible.