Tax Resistance - Views and Aims

Views and Aims

Tax resisters come from a wide range of backgrounds with diverse ideologies and aims. For example, Henry David Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison drew inspiration from the American Revolution and the stubborn pacifism of the Quakers. Some tax resisters refuse to pay tax because their conscience will not allow them to fund war, whilst others resist tax as part of a campaign to overthrow the government.

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.

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.