List of historical acts of tax resistance

Tax resistance has probably existed as long as those in a position of power have imposed taxes. This page describes briefly some notable historical examples of tax resistance.

Jewish Zealots, 1st century A.D.

In the first century A.D., Jewish Zealots in Judaea resisted the poll tax instituted by the Roman empire. 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).

Hutterites

In the 16th century, Hutterites refused to pay taxes for war or capital punishment. One wrote:

For war, killing, and bloodshed (where it is demanded especially for that) we give nothing, but not out of wickedness or arbitrariness, but out of the fear of God (1 Timothy 5) that we may not be partakers in strange sins.

Another wrote:

[When] the government requires of us what is contrary to our faith and conscience — as swearing oaths and paying hangman’s dues or taxes for war — then we do not obey its command.

John Hampden and the English Civil War

In 1627, John Hampden was imprisoned for his opposition to the loan 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.

Algonquin resistance

In 1637, the Algonquin resisted being taxed by Dutch colonialists to pay for improvements to Fort Amsterdam.

John Woolman and early Quaker war tax resistance

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. In 1755, Woolman addressed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting with his concern, saying in part:

Some of our members, who are officers in civil government, are, in one case or other, called upon in their respective stations to assist in things relative to the wars; but being in doubt whether to act or crave to be excused from their office, if they see their brethren united in the payment of a tax to carry on the said wars, may think their case not much different, and so might quench the tender movings of the Holy Spirit in their minds. Thus, by small degrees, we might approach so near to fighting that the distinction would be little else than the name of a peaceable people.

A group of several like-minded Quakers, including John Woolman, John Churchman and Anthony Benezet then sent a letter to other meetings, which read in part:

[B]eing painfully apprehensive that the large sum granted by the late Act of Assembly for the king’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony, we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the said Act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal, which we hope to be enabled to bear with patience.

Tax resistance in the American revolution

Most American colonists used various methods of tax resistance to resist the British in the years leading up to the American Revolution, including the Boston Tea Party, and “spinning bees” in which revolutionary-minded women would make untaxed domestic cloth (prefiguring Gandhi’s homespun cloth campaign) and a boycott of other taxed goods.

See also: American Revolution: Economic disputes, 1760-70

African-American protests against taxation without representation

Main article: Paul Cuffe

In 1780, African-American Paul Cuffe and his brother resisted the state tax of Massachusetts. Cuffe wrote to the state legislature: “While we are not allowed the privilege of free men of the state having no vote or influence in the election with those that tax us. Yet many of our color, as is well known, have cheerfully entered the field of battle in the defense of the common cause.” (In 1783 free, taxpaying African-Americans in Massachusetts were given full citizenship rights, including the right to vote.)

Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps the most famous American example of a tax resister, 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. 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.…

…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. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

The Women’s Tax Resistance League

Main article: Women's Tax Resistance League

The British women’s suffrage movement, in particular the Women's Tax Resistance League, 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.”

British Nonconformists

In 1903, British Nonconformists began resisting the part of their taxes that paid for sectarian schools. Over 170 would eventually be jailed for their tax refusal.

The Russian Revolution

In 1905 a coalition of anti-government groups in Petrograd issued a manifesto calling for mass tax resistance and other economic non-cooperation against Russia’s czarist government. It read, in part, “There is only one way out: to overthrow the government, to deprive it of its last strength. It is necessary to cut the government off from the last source of its existence: financial revenue.”

World War I

Although the decision of whether or not to purchase war bonds to support the United States military effort in World War I was ostensibly voluntary, those who chose not to buy them were subject to strong pressure, and some were nearly lynched. John Schrag was beaten, arrested and prosecuted and he and his property were smeared with yellow paint by a mob for having refused to buy war bonds. One witness said:

[T]hey tried to get him to buy liberty bonds during the war, and he wouldn’t buy none.… They brought him in and he never said a word, and the questions or anything they’d ask him, he never, never complained or never put up no resistance whatsoever.… I never saw so much yellin’ and a cursing and slapped him. And buffeted him and beat him and kicked him. He never offered any resistance whatsoever. One of the fellows went and got a, a hardware store and got a gallon of yellow paint. And pulled the lid off and poured it over his face. He had a long beard, kind of a short heavyset man, had a nice beard, and that run down all over his eyes, his face, and his beard, and his clothes. Of course that was yellow.… He never offered no resistance whatsoever and they, one man went to the hardware store again and he got a rope and put it around, got there, and put around his neck and marched him down to the, close to the city jail, a little calaboose there. Had a tree there and they was going to hang him to this tree.

…I don’t know how many people walked right up to him and spit in his face and he never said a word. And he just looked up all the time we was doing that. Possibly praying, I don’t know. But there’s some kind of a glow come over his face and he just looked like Christ.… (inaudible). Enemies smite you on one cheek, turn the other and brother he did it. He just kept doing it. They’d slug him on the one side of the face and he’d turn his cheeks on the other. He exemplified the life of Christ more than any man I ever saw in my life.

Gandhi and the Indian independence campaign

Main articles: Champaran and Kheda Satyagraha and Salt Satyagraha

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 harvest sea salt in contravention of British law.

American tax resistance during the Great Depression

During the early 1930s, Americans throughout the United States formed thousands of taxpayers’ leagues to protest high property taxes. In some cases, these groups illegally withheld taxes through tax strikes and other forms of resistance. The largest tax strike was in Chicago and led by the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers. At its height, the Association had more than thirty-thousand dues-paying members.

Ammon Hennacy and Christian Anarchism

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. He wrote:

…I [learned] the principle of voluntary poverty and non payment of taxes… from Tolstoy and the [Catholic Worker]. When I was working a man asked me “Why does a fellow like you, with an education, and who has been all over the country, end up in this out-of-the-way place working for very little on a farm?” I explained that all people who had good jobs in factories, etc. had a withholding tax for war taken from their pay, and that people who worked on farms had no tax taken from their pay. I told him that I refused to pay taxes. He was a returned soldier and said that he did not like war either, but what could a fellow do about it? I replied that we each did what we really wanted to.

Tax resistance in Palestine/Israel

Between 1941 and 1948, there was widespread resistance by Jews in Palestine against the income tax imposed by the British occupation, and many Jews instead voluntarily paid taxes to Jewish organizations. A few years after Israel gained its independence, its government became the target of widespread tax evasion and resistance, including a major tax strike in 1954.

The birth of the modern war tax resistance movement

Main article: Peacemakers

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.

The Amish gain exemption from social insurance programs 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. See 26 U.S.C. § 3127 and 26 U.S.C. § 1402(g). (This exemption also covers Medicare taxes.)

A court in the United Kingdom rejects war tax resistance

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 [taxation] 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."

United States war tax resistance during the Vietnam War

In early 1969, 448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the Vietnam War. The signatories included Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Muriel Rukeyser, Thomas Pynchon, Jane Jacobs, Benjamin Spock, Betty Friedan, William Styron, Stanley Elkin, James Baldwin, Nelson Algren, James Leo Herlihy, Sally Belfrage, and Eric Bentley.

Efforts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation

Main articles: Conscientious objection to military taxation, National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act

In 1972 United States Congressman Ronald Dellums introduced legislation that would legalize conscientious objection to military taxation, allowing some taxpayers to designate their taxes for non-military spending only. Advocated by National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, this legislation is regularly reintroduced in the United States Congress and has a number of cosponsors. 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.

Beit Sahour

See also: Tax resistance in Beit Sahour

In 1988-9, during the first Intifada, the Palestinian resistance urged people to resist paying taxes to Israel. The people of Beit Sahour responded to this call with an unusually organized and citywide tax strike. As a result of the tax strike the Israeli military authorities placed the town under curfew for 45 days and seized goods belonging to citizens in raids.

Israel’s occupation military forces had the authority, independent from the rest of Israel’s government, to create and enforce taxes in occupied areas. As a result, they would impose taxes on Palestinians as collective punishment measures to discourage the intifada, for instance “the glass tax (for broken windows), the stones tax (for damage done by stones), the missile tax (for Gulf War damage), and a general intifada tax, among others”

Among those prominent in Beit Sahour’s tax resistance were Ghassan Andoni and Elias Rishmawi.

Tax resistance for same-sex marriage rights

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.

Tax resistance to protest rises in the U.K. council tax

In the United Kingdom, senior citizens in opposition to steep increases in council tax, claiming that increases of as much as 30% are not affordable to those living on a pension, refused to pay the tax in full or in part (some paying the previous year’s amount plus an inflationary rise). One of these, Sylvia Hardy of Exeter, was jailed for seven days.

Organized resistance to paying Mafia

In 2006, after the arrest of Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, 100 shopkeepers in Palermo, Italy declared publicly that they would stop paying taxes to the Sicilian Mafia. They encouraged consumers to support the resisters by buycotting their stores.