Personally, I am still in the coward department, but it bugs me daily.
I’ll admit that on this topic I tend to use the term “coward” more than is probably fair. My mom and dad “pay their taxes” and always have done so with a sense of this just being yet another chore to be seen to. I’ve had this precise same dispute with them since I was maybe seven or eight, when in some childhood springtime it was explained to me that this business of “filing” was simply a thing that had to be done, or else.
Or else, what? has always been my question. They deport me back to the England of thirteen generations before the beginning of my own American heritage? They take away, what, exactly, from me, when I have never held any assets worth more than a few hundred dollars in my life? They bring suit against me in some federal court? Gosh, that might be interesting, actually: I’d love to hear a federal judge explain to me why Amendments I, IV, V, VI, X and XIV suddenly no longer apply when some tiny wad of cash is at stake not even worth the cost of one desk for one overpaid bureaucrat to sit at while meddling in people’s lives for no good reason.
They revoke my citizenship? Gosh, I don’t remember ever asking any official permission to live in my own country to begin with.
I’ve heard these horror stories all my life about what the IRS might allegedly do or has done in the face of alleged breaches of compliance. The stories all have two things in common:
- one is that they are always related by some third or fourth party, and yet never once have I met anyone who personally could attest to what being in hot water with IRS had really meant in their own life;
- the other, is that the official backlash as told is always tied to some act of fraud or misrepresentation or falsification.
It simply doesn’t seem to ever to occur to anyone, that to stop filing and paying and disclosing and capitulating openly, unapologetically and through no device of deception or concealment, is a thing anyone can just decide to do and do it. I am the only person I ever knew who merely told a rogue agency of government that my business with it had been concluded and that it could respond in whatever way it saw fit but that I would no longer be any party to the affair by any means. I don’t think these brain-dead functionaries have any idea what to do about such a position taken: that I am not seeking to defraud or deceive them, but that nonetheless I will no longer take any part in their practices nor acknowledge any jurisdiction upon me of their policies.
I’m convinced that what really motivates people to “pay their taxes” (which really means to file the paperwork and pay as little as possible to get them off their backs for another year), is not any sense of civic duty at all, but simple FEAR. And not even any fear of imprisonment nor any other form of legal sanction, rather simply a fear of having to give up some advantageous element of a lifestyle.
I chose long ago, around the same time I realized that everyone around me was entrapped in the same comfortable prison of income taxation and saw no way of escaping it, to pursue a life of as little need for money or indebtedness as I could manage. The old bumper sticker said “live simply that others may simply live”, but what never seems to occur to anyone, is that to live simply, is the best way to keep bureaucrats off one’s back. The things people are afraid of losing, their pretentious suburban homes and their miserable vacations and their expensive cars and their ridiculous socializing habits based on their ability to spend, are things I never wanted in the first place.
The real addiction, is the compulsion to demonstrate prosperity visibly no matter what it might cost either in terms of finance or freedom. By rejecting those values wholesale, I have chosen instead to measure my prosperity in terms of my own personal liberty to be left alone by officials and debt collectors. I don’t know what it is that people find so attractive about the absolute delusion of an “American Dream” to continue mounting debts and multiplying obligations in order to be able to merely appear prosperous outwardly, but that dream was always my worst nightmare and I never wanted anything to do with it. I’d rather live as I do, in a fifty-year-old mobile home paid for free and clear and working when I feel like it, than spend my life jumping through hoops sustaining an illusion that has nothing to do with what I truly value for myself.
But if middle-class America thinks it has to keep posturing about “I pay my taxes, therefore…..” while doing everything it can NOT to pay any taxes but subjecting itself to official scrutiny nonetheless, they can have it.
Just don’t point it at me.
