As you can see from the quote above, George Washington was an angry white male.

 And for good reason.  It was for lack of funds to acquire necessary supplies that he had watched soldiers who fought for America’s independence suffer and die of exposure and malnutrition.  He had known wealthy men who craved a break with England, along with those pesky taxes her King demanded, but who refused to provide the funding necessary to achieve that end.  He was a man, not unlike the vast majority of Americans today, who fell into the trap of treating as axiomatic a rule of thumb learned in that most revered of educational institutions, the school of hard knocks.  Practical experience, these Americans would have said, is knowledge of the most reliable sort.

 (Unless it’s not.  Few of the citizens of the new US, after all, could have forgotten the very practical experience of paying the aforementioned taxes to the King.  This ordeal left them disenchanted, to say the least, with taxing authorities.  Here was an opportunity for the fledgling government to eschew taxation and offer methods of funding the war that did not require force.  Alas, they were men ahead their times, but not that far ahead.)

 Nearly as painful as Washington’s apparent ardor for taxation was the zeal with which the Constitution authors pressed the foul notion into government service.  The curse resides in Section 2 of Article 1: “…direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States…”[1]  

So, as one might have expected, the confrontation came quickly.   Seven years after the Constitutional Convention, President Washington had become annoyed with the pecuniary recalcitrance of a few tax-dodging farmers in Western Pennsylvania.  These gentlemen, when unfortunate enough to harvest a bumper crop of corn, had turned their overproduction into something that could be more easily shipped over the Appalachians to the east.  Indeed, they had produced the very best commodity that could be made of it: whiskey.  When Congress, at Hamilton’s urging, approved a tax on alcohol in 1791, these small farmers felt badly used.  (Thanks to exorbitant taxes on alcohol sales, those of us who care to imbibe today still feel their pain.)

 By 1794, they were in rebellion against the tax.  (Hooray!)  In response, Washington invoked martial law and led against them a militia force of nearly 13,000 men.  (Boo!)  When the dust cleared, the “rebellion” had dissolved ahead of the well-armed government surge.  Ultimately, only a few rebels were captured and punished, one man actually dying in prison.

 I don’t wish to seem ungrateful for Washington’s better efforts on my behalf.  For more comforting evidence of his humanity, one need only remember this observation attributed to him: “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

 It’s unfortunate that this remarkably prescient viewpoint was not ruling his passions in 1794.  Imagine what a different country (world!) we might inhabit today had this universally admired figure gone to Hamilton’s home for the “chat heard round world.”  In this new and better reality, Washington convinces Hamilton that the problems in Western Pennsylvania would likely be repeated throughout the history of the nation, then asks that he join him in convincing the Congress to pass what at that time would have been the 11th amendment:  “Neither Congress nor any state or local government shall make a law establishing a tax.  Funding for all government entities shall be obtained entirely through voluntary action by the people, or not at all.”

 For whatever inane, bizarre or, in some cases, evil reasons, the vast majority of people – in millions of cases no doubt, otherwise judicious people – have supported mandated taxes as necessary to maintain a government.  But within the tortured reasoning for their approval can be found nothing more than banal avowals of unsubstantiated belief and affirmations of ill-placed faith.  Belief that nothing less than confiscation of money by force will suffice to fund their most coveted government ventures.  Faith in the assurances of the government jackals who avow the necessity of the ventures, their costs, and the attendant confiscation.

 Until a people acknowledge that neither murder, nor torture, nor enslavement, nor conscription, nor taxation, nor the initiation of any other form of force can be an implement of just governance, they must live in a constant state of subjugation.

 Sadly, so must those of us who know better.

- William McAtinney

- Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom – Alexis de Tocqueville

In America, you can quit your job without being forcibly “recaptured” by your former employer.

You can negotiate, in one way or another, a release from any legal contract into which you entered voluntarily, including marriage or a seven sequel book deal.

If you’re in public school, you might, with lots of money in addition to the ceaseless, laborious, soul-shattering efforts of your parents, extricate yourself from the pestilential government school system.[1]

So, it can be said unequivocally that you are not enslaved by your employer, your spouse, or your publisher.

One could make a decent argument in support of the assertion that government school is a form of servitude.  After all, even slaves could sometimes buy their way into freedom, as parents do for their children today in order to place them in private or home schools. Nevertheless, to cast government schooling as a form of slavery would too much condemn the former and forgive the latter.  So, for our purposes here, government schooling must remain a weak but viable example of human endeavor existing on the outskirts of the sphere of voluntary action.

These examples are not meant to suggest that you would under all conditions be free of legally binding obligation.  You may even need to be compelled to keep your promises, if you’re of a thievish nature.  After all, neither your former employer, nor your ex spouse, nor even your publisher is your slave, lacking rights, to be abused at will.  That being said, even under such obligations you otherwise remain nonetheless a free and sovereign individual.

In fact, there are few conditions that exist outside of that sphere, i.e., situations from which you cannot extricate yourself and move on with your life as you see fit, free from any punitive legal measures against you, so long as you have violated the rights of no other person.  I submit that only four such conditions are possible:

1.    legalized slavery
2.    conscription
3.    taxation
4.    the commission of a victimless crime

The price for dodging any of the first three or engaging in the latter could be imprisonment.  This by itself should be recognized as a violation of rights.  And the disgrace is universal; every country in the world abuses imprisonment.  In the US, for instance, one might do time for the victimless crimes of sale or possession of a narcotic, or for failing to report when summoned to jury duty.  Neither of these actions, of course, constitutes a violation of rights.

Conscription lies dormant in some countries, active in others.  But, like a pernicious virus, it still exists in most.

Slavery, happily, civilization has outlawed.  Further, as gilding added to that piece of good fortune, with few exceptions the population of the entire world accepts that slavery is an evil to be unreservedly condemned.[2]

At least, so I think.  What about you?  Do you think slavery is evil?  If so, why?

The most common response I have received to this question is, “Of course, slavery is evil.  No one can own another human being.  It’s just wrong.”

Now, while that equivocation is good enough for government school, it leaves us with no moral substratum upon which to raise vigorous condemnation against such a great evil.  It is, after all, nothing more than a declarative restatement of the question, equivalent to, “Slavery is just wrong.”

Yet, it is what one would likely hear from the anti-intellectual elite in US universities.  It is mere boiler plate, a politically correct banality, devoid of rationale, akin to the prattle of the bossy eight-year-old who presumes to keep watch over the schoolyard, pausing now and then to stamp and scream, “The principal said you can’t do that. That’s wrong!”

The reason for this shameful state of affairs is simple.  The only meaningful answer to the question of why slavery is evil turns out to be the story premise of every collectivist’s worst nightmare:  Each person owns his or her life and no other.[3]

 Sadly, the “collectivist” category has for many decades included the great bulk of politicians and university elites.  In the halls of power and academe, consequently, assertions laying claim to one’s own life have been belligerently received and effectively suppressed.  (These efforts at censorship occasionally become obstreperous.  Such is the case in their promulgation of the doctrine opposing free speech: political correctness.)

The problem for collectivists is that ownership plainly means “control.” If each of us controls his or her own life, out go the laws forcing anyone to give up the product of their efforts through taxation.  Such “efforts,” after all, are a large part of our lives.

With the people empowered to withdraw consent by refusing to provide funding, government will be virtually divested of its ill-gotten, seemingly unlimited income.

So much, then, for forcing anyone to work at government gunpoint for “the common good,” or “community,” or “society,” or “country.”

And out go government options to conscript or send men to war without the explicit consent of each.

And out go the wars against cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, sex, or any other “crime” with no victims.

If self ownership – and its corollary, absolute control of income – were to become universally accepted as the first and most important of human rights, authoritarians of every strain would become, at long last, only a minor annoyance.

- William McAtinney

[2] In contrast, the rate of unjustified imprisonment is growing worse by the year.  There are burgeoning numbers of ways to be imprisoned without ever having violated the rights of another person.  In the US, the insane drug war is the most egregious example.  The measure of additional mayhem that will rain down upon us as a result of such villainies as the wrongly named Patriot Act, et al, I fear is yet to be realized.

[3] For more on this, please see the post, “A Little Societal Evolution” on this site.

At root, it is a question of ownership.

Taxation was conceived, born, and reared within the same family of evil to which slavery and conscription belong. The scourge of abject slavery exists today only outside the official sanction of governments. The depravity of conscription is available to the government of every country with an armed force with the exception of a very few in which it has been officially, if not irrevocably, abolished.

Taxation is in all things, in all places, at all times.** It is, like its cousins, nothing more or less than a method by which those in power use force of arms and threat of imprisonment to lay claim to some part of our lives. Though these oppressors and their allies are ubiquitous and innumerable, only those in government can be held culpable, for it is they who hold their guns at the heads of the people. It is only they, like croupiers at their roulette wheels, who are guaranteed profit from the game.

And so we must ask: Who owns a human life?

Our answer: The possessor and no other.

And with that primary before us, we must pursue our only moral choice: the abolition of all forms of taxation, that most ubiquitous and eternal of despotisms.

Preamble

We will brook no duplicitous pretexts here. We will indulge neither subterfuge nor willful ignorance in defense of despotism by virtue of its putative practicality. Bound by these strictures, we posit these truths as self evident:

1. Human life is the standard of all value. Human life has but one vessel: the individual human being.
2. Each person owns his or her life and no other.
3. Children/charges share control of their lives with their parents/guardians.
4. “Society” is an equivocal conceptualization and as such is not imbued with rights, driven by desires, or burdened with needs. (Those who profess to speak on behalf of “society” speak for no one.)
5. No person has, or can have, an obligation to society (see Principle #4.) No person has an obligation to anyone save those obligations they freely incur.
6. Representation by a democratically elected congress is a founding principle of our democratic republic. In practice, true representation is elusive at best, and rarely more than a sham. The authority to tax and to transfer wealth from the general population to targeted groups of citizens essentially bestows upon every incumbent the means to purchase – and repurchase, and repurchase, insquequo dominatus - reelection. The targeted recipients of this stolen lucre carry with them to the poles a real or imagined personal financial stake in reelection, the incumbent’s general representative competence notwithstanding. This block of “bribed” voters is often large (e.g., unions) but need not be so to swing an election via donations, electioneering, and the ballot box.
7. Election to government office does not imbue the elected with special knowledge, only special powers to enforce edicts which are usually funded by taxation. Thus does tyranny born in democratic process ooze from the bloated belly of a republic constituted on pillage.

Statement of Purpose

The Tax Abolition Society site will…

Argue and demonstrate the moral vacuity of taxation of all kinds.

Call for America to sever the pecuniary arteries of its various corrupt and bloated governments, and with that act once again begin to lead the world out of bondage.

Proffer a view of the world through the eyes of those no longer willing to accept forced indenture, who without exception claim their lives as their own and held without lien.

Bring news of tax battles from the front lines.  For these we must steel ourselves, for they will too infrequently offer respite or nepenthe for our anguish. Rather, they must most often serve as reminders of the freedoms past generations have cast into the sewers and the foul mission we must accept in order to retrieve them.

We should not treat our decendants as our most recent ancestors have treated us.

- William McAtinney

**The first recorded tax began six thousand years ago on a fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (now part of modern Iraq). Inscriptions on clay stones excavated at Lagash revealed not only the existence of a tax but why: to pay for a ferocious war.(From: http://www.howestreet.com/articles/index.php?article_id=6307)