Tax resistance

[2] The earliest and most widespread forms of taxation were the corvée and tithe, both of which can be traced back to the beginning of civilization.

[3] Low taxes helped the Roman aristocracy increase their wealth, which equalled or exceeded the revenues of the central government.

An emperor sometimes replenished his treasury by confiscating the estates of the "super-rich", but in the later period, the resistance of the wealthy to paying taxes was one of the factors contributing to the collapse of the Empire.

[3] It has been suggested that tax resistance played a significant role in the collapse of several empires, including the Egyptian, Roman, Spanish, and Aztec.

[7] In Britain income tax was introduced in 1799, to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars, whilst the US federal government imposed their first income tax in the Revenue Act of 1861 to help pay for the American Civil War.

For example, Henry David Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison drew inspiration from the American Revolution and the stubborn pacifism of the Quakers.

[8] Tax resisters have been violent revolutionaries like John Adams and pacifist nonresistants like John Woolman; communists like Karl Marx and capitalists like Vivien Kellems; solitary anti-war activists like Ammon Hennacy and leaders of independence movements like Mahatma Gandhi.

[8] Leo Tolstoy, a Christian anarchist, urged government leaders to change their attitude to war and citizens to taxes: If only each King, Emperor, and President understood that his work of directing armies is not an honourable and important duty, as his flatterers persuade him it is, but a bad and shameful act of preparation for murder—and if each private individual understood that the payment of taxes wherewith to hire and equip soldiers, and, above all, army-service itself, are not matters of indifference, but are bad and shameful actions by which he not only permits but participates in murder—then this power of Emperors, Kings, and Presidents, which now arouses our indignation, and which causes them to be murdered, would disappear of itself.

Others pay in a protesting form—for instance, by writing their cheque on a toilet seat or a mock-up of a missile.

Such refusal is relatively safe: because this tax is typically small, resistance very rarely triggers significant government retaliation.