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Next Left Notes Is A News Magazine Devoted To Direct Action
By Eric Bagai, DAT Western District
In response to a proposal by the leadership of Veterans for Peace to make it possible to legally refuse to pay taxes used for purposes we don't like, I wrote:
War-tax resistance is a difficult subject, and the many tax resisters that I know have strong feelings about their commitment and what it means, just as you do. I'm therefore reluctant to bring this up, but I think you have mischaracterized at least part of the issue, and missed at least some of the point on other bits.
While there is a legal right to apply for CO status and other deferments, there is no legal right to not pay taxes. One can choose not to pay, and to accept (or hide from) the penalties for not paying. But this is not a "right" in the same sense as other legal rights, even though one may feel morally obligated to resist paying. Not paying taxes is a criminal act, even when it is an act of conscience.
There are further problems with tax resistance. When Henry David Thoreau established civil disobedience in American thought, the tax structure was considerably different than it is now. Each tax was levied separately, even when the duty of collection was performed by a single individual or agency within a community. He refused to pay a poll tax to support the Spanish American War, and offered that individual conscience and personal responsibility were of greater weight than national law. As a consequence, he willingly spent one night in jail.
Today there are tax resisters who feel morally obligated to not pay taxes for education, for the national arts, for public assistance, etc. Avoiding taxes in general is a national pastime, and is even a recognized political position. So the issue of war tax resistance becomes confounded with the issue of resistance to pay for things that, for whatever reason, one disagrees with.
The danger here is of confusing a consumer issue with a moral and ethical issue, and of bringing those moral and ethical issues down to the level of what people are willing to pay for them. Already the US Supreme Court has confused the ability to buy air time with the ability to exercise free speech, the result of which is that those with the most money have the most freedom of speech. If we do the same thing with taxation, we make our willingness to pay some taxes rather than others the determiner of which moral and ethical issues our government addresses and how well it does so. The result of which would be that national principles would become commodities whose value is determined by the marketplace, and we would only get the justice or programs that we paid for.
Considering that the majority of Americans are now willing to pay for the War on Terror, and not willing to pay for much of anything else that doesn't immediately concern them, the results of differential taxation would be to make taxes extremely regressive, and to cease to fund most of the programs designed to help the least able, least rich, and least aggressive among us. A progressive income tax (which came about to redress the ill-gotten earnings of war profiteers after WWI, as well as a means of national wealth redistribution) is a necessary part of progressive government. Without it, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but much faster than even the current breakneck pace allows.
That's the problem with messing about with the structure of things. Rather than attempt to change tax law to an uncertain end, do as Thoreau did: refuse to pay and go to jail. Going to jail, not just willingly but gladly, is as much the essence of Thoreau's civil disobedience as refusing to pay a tax. Instead, you want your activism reduced to a check-off box on your 1040 form. Your proposal would do more than just spoil the current system, bad though it oftentimes is. It would begin the process of changing a tool for the redistribution of wealth into a tool for radical libertarians and neocons to transform the government into a free-market catastrophe.
Those of us who, like Thoreau, simply cannot face the idea of funding the deaths of other human beings, should follow their conscience. But we must also recognize that the problem is not the tax, but the war. Destroying the means to tax does not destroy the means to make war, it just destroys the government.
This would all be more meaningful if I thought your (the Veterans For Peace) plan had a snowball's chance -- it doesn't. It will be a major drain on the energy and resources of veterans and activists, and cannot succeed in its goals. What it does do is arm the right-wing and radical libertarian economists with another means to destroy the republic and replace it with a corporate state.
Please reconsider.
Yours truly,
Eric Bagai
VFP72 Chapter Contact
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