List of historical acts of tax resistance
[3]: 1–7 Jesus was accused of promoting tax resistance prior to his torture and execution ("We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar, saying that he himself is Christ a King" — Luke 23:2).
[1]: 145–51 Under the leadership of his chief minister Thomas Wolsey, England's King Henry VIII repeatedly raised taxes and imposed forced loans in the 1520s to pay for his large-scale wars in Europe.
In 1654, an English merchant named George Cony refused to pay customs duties that had been established by Oliver Cromwell's government without its having bothered to go through Parliament, and thereby called into question the legal underpinnings of the whole regime.
[21]) On 22 August 1687, John Wise met with some of the other "principal inhabitants" of Ipswich in New England, and decided that a new tax that had been imposed by governor Edmund Andros, without consulting the colony's General Assembly, was illegitimate and "that it was not the town's duty any way to assist that ill method of raising money."
On 18 April 1689, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution in the home country, a "Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston" was issued, which proclaimed the assault on the rights of dissenting English colonists to be part of the same plot of "the great Scarlet Whore" to crush Englishmen under the thumb of the papists (that is, James II of England) again.
[1]: 229 In 1715, thirty-six New Jersey residents pledged to refuse to pay taxes "Because wee have been Illegally Assessed by an Asseser who being a Known & open profest Roman Catholick which is Utterly Repugnant to the Laws of Great Brittain & Contrary to ye Rights & Liberties of his Royall Majties faithfull Subjects.
"[27] A similar outbreak took place in Bristol in 1749, in which self-styled Jack o’ Lents, "many naked with their faces blacked ... destroyed the gates at Bedminster, Ashton, Don John's Cross, Dundry, Backwell, Nailsea, Redcliffe, Totterdown, Teasford and Bath Roads, Hanham, Kingswood, Stoke's Croft, &c., &c."[28] Rioters, sympathetic to condemned smugglers who were resisting excise taxes, managed to free one, but in an attempt to free another several were killed by the Edinburgh city guard, commanded by John Porteous.
The Tithe War, as it came to be called, had both a nonviolent, passive-resistance wing, led by James Warren Doyle, and a violent one, in which bands of paramilitary secret societies enforced the strike and attacked tax collectors and collaborators.
In his essay on civil disobedience, he wrote: I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year, no more, in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then....[55]: ¶21 ...If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.
[citation needed] In 1850 Lothar Bucher, leader of the radical democratic party in the Prussian national assembly, and others of similar views, were convicted for encouraging citizens to stop paying taxes to the autocratic government.
[59] Similarly, in 1864 the delegate Johann Jacoby served six months behind bars for a speech calling for tax refusal, delivered in the presence of the King, an early manifestation of opposition to the rule of Otto von Bismarck.
[1]: 360–61 In 1861, travelling bards of the Bhat caste, complaining that they had been traditionally exempt from taxation, reacted to being subjected to an income tax in an extreme demonstration that accompanied their refusal to pay: [T]hey cut themselves with knives, cursed the Assessors, bespattering them with their blood, and declared they would rather die than surrender their birthright.
So it had to nurture a tax resistance movement and encourage solidarity among its members by offering some protection of its own (including judges who reduced fines against people arrested by the police in extortion attempts to near-nothing).
Julia and Abby Smith, Annie Shaw, Lucy Stone, Virginia Minor, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were among those who practiced and advocated tax resistance as a protest against "taxation without representation.
[138]Herman Bausch was imprisoned for 28 months by the state of Montana for seditious statements he allegedly made while being held captive by a violent mob who were enraged at him for his unwillingness to buy liberty bonds.
[223] The signatories included James Baldwin, Robert Bly, Noam Chomsky, Robert Creeley, David Dellinger, Philip K. Dick, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Leslie Fiedler, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Todd Gitlin, Paul Goodman, Edward S. Herman, Paul Krassner, Staughton Lynd, Dwight Macdonald, Jackson Mac Low, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, Milton Mayer, Ed McClanahan, Carl Oglesby, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Ed Sanders, Peter Dale Scott, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Lew Welch, John Wieners, Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn.
[237] American Michael Bowman began refusing to pay federal taxes for reasons of conscientious objection to abortion funding in 1997, and has been fighting in court for the right to legally resist such payments since then.
[239] In 2009, Randall Terry, a prominent American anti-abortion activist, wrote: As we pour our hearts and souls into the battle to keep the slaughter of the innocent by abortion out of any health care bill, the discussion has emerged as to whether it is an ethically viable option to refuse to pay part or all of our federal taxes.
I think the answer is self-evidently, “No!”[240] In 1972 United States Congressman Ron Dellums introduced legislation that would legalize a form of conscientious objection to military taxation, allowing some taxpayers to designate their taxes for non-military spending only.
[269] New Zealand farmers protested a livestock tax that was ostensibly designed to discourage and ameliorate methane emissions by announcing they would refuse to pay and by sending packages of manure to government ministers.
A group (including Teachtaí Dála Joe Higgins, Clare Daly, Joan Collins, Richard Boyd Barrett, Mick Wallace, Thomas Pringle and Séamus Healy, European Parliamentarian Paul Murphy, and councillors Ruth Coppinger and Ted Tynan) promoted a campaign of resistance against the "stealth tax" of increased household and water rates.
[334] When the Mexico city government hiked transit fares by two-thirds, frustrated commuters started leaping the turnstiles, both alone and in organized groups, in a form of protest they call pos me salto ("well, then, I'll jump").
[339] Some business leaders in Apatzingán, a city in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, finding that the government was giving them no protection from the Knights Templar Cartel, decided to stop paying taxes.
[347] Some business owners in Austria, notably Wolfgang Reichl and Gerhard Höller, began paying their federal taxes into escrow accounts rather than turning them over to the government, largely in protest over the Hypo scandal.
[354] Police brutality, discrimination, and mistreatment towards Israel's Ethiopian Jewish minority led Shlomo Molla, one of the few Ethiopian-Israelis to have been in the Israeli parliament, to call for tax resistance, refusal to serve in the army, and other forms of civil disobedience.
Residents also began "posting pictures of damaged public infrastructures such as roads, schools, and hospitals on social media to make a point that taxes collected are simply embezzled [rather] than used to improve people's lives.
[398] Macron's government held firm until December, attempting to crack down on the movement with measures that Amnesty International characterized as including "rubber bullets, sting-ball grenades and tear gas against largely peaceful protesters who did not threaten public order and... numerous instances of excessive use of force by police.
[405] Some residents of the "Electronic City" tech zone in Bangalore, India, have been refusing to pay property taxes to protest the government's broken promises regarding infrastructure and trash disposal.
[412] They were joined towards the end of the year by thousands of businesses in Tuscany, led by the Tuscan branch of Confcommercio (the Italian General Confederation of Enterprises, Professional Activities and Self-Employment), whose president announced: Bars and restaurants in Cesena launched a tax strike soon after and publicized their protest by symbolically opening their establishments and having their staff wait on empty tables.
Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem launched a tax strike along with other civil disobedience actions to protest an accelerating campaign of "harassment and aggression" by Israeli police under the Thirty-seventh government of Israel.
