Tax resistance

A tax resister resists or refuses payment of a tax because of opposition to the institution collecting the tax. Often tax resistance comes from pacifists, conscientious objectors or members of religious groups, such as the Quakers, who choose not to fund violent government activities. It has also been a technique used by nonviolent resistance movements, such as India's campaign for independence led by Mahatma Gandhi.

History of tax resistance

Tax resistance has probably existed as long as those in a position of power have imposed taxes. Some notable historical examples of tax resistance are:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• John Hampden was imprisoned for his opposition to the loan King Charles I authorised without parliamentary sanction, and he also refused to pay ship money to the Royal Navy. The attempts to imprison resisters like Hampden led to the English Civil War.http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=13Feb05
• In the mid-18th Century, American Quaker John Woolman led many Quakers to question and refuse the payment of taxes to pay for the French and Indian War.http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=03Sep05
• Perhaps the most famous American example of a tax resister, individualist anarchist and author Henry David Thoreau, was briefly jailed in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes in protest against the Fugitive Slave Act and the Mexican-American War. He identified war tax resistance as the logical civilian counterpart of conscientious objection to the military. http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=rtcg
• The British women?s suffrage movement used tax resistance in their struggle, and explicitly saw themselves in a tradition of tax resistance that included John Hampden. According to one source, ?tax resistance proved to be the longest-lived form of militancy, and the most difficult to prosecute. More than 220 women, mostly middle-class, participated in tax resistance between 1906 and 1918, some continuing to resist through the First World War, despite a general suspension of militancy.?http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=14Dec04
• Mahatma Gandhi?s independence campaign in India used a variety of tax resistance strategies, including attacking the British taxed monopolies on salt and textiles by advocating the illegal production of salt outside of the monopoly system and the home-based spinning of cloth. In 1930 this tax resistance culminated in Gandhi?s famous 240 mile Salt March to Dandi to make sea salt in contravention of British law.
• During World War II the Christian anarchist and pacifist Ammon Hennacy refused to register for the American draft and announced that he would not pay his income taxes. He also tried to reduce his tax liability by adopting a life of simple living and bartering.
• In 1948, a Chicago conference on ?More Disciplined and Revolutionary Pacifist Activity? attracted more than 300 people, and resulted in the formation of the group Peacemakers and its ?Tax Refusal Committee.? This is considered to be the birth of the modern organized war tax resistance movement in the United States.
• In 1965 the United States Congress allowed the Amish to be exempt from the Social Security tax, following a persistent campaign from some Amish who regarded insurance programs as mistrustful of God and therefore against their religious teachings.http://www.amishnews.com/amisharticles/amishss.htm
• In 1968, in the UK case of Cheney v. Conn, an individual objected to paying tax that, in part, would be used to procure nuclear arms in unlawful contravention, he contended, of the Geneva Convention. His claim was dismissed by the court, the judge ruling that "What the statute itself enacts cannot be unlawful, because what the statute says and provides is itself the law, and the highest form of law that is known to this country."
• Beginning in 1972 United States Congressman Ronald Dellums introduced legislation that would allow taxpayers to claim a conscientious objector status and designate their taxes for non-military spending only; this legislation is still periodically introduced in the United States Congress and has a number of sponsors, and the legislatures of other countries are also considering similar legislation. Many war tax resisters support this, but others feel that such a law would not actually address the essential dilemma that leads them to resist taxation.
• In 1988, the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour engaged in a large-scale campaign of resisting the taxes being collected by Israel?s occupation forces.http://www.nwtrcc.org/mtap96-97/mtap0497.htm#3
• More recently, some foes of abortion and/or capital punishment have become tax resisters, refusing to pay taxes that are going to support those practices. In the United States, some gay people have adopted a form of tax resistance to protest the government?s lack of legal recognition of same-sex marriage.http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=19Sep04