M. Sartre: Police, whether ‘good’ cops or ‘bad’ cops, tend to reply, when asked why they are spraying pepper spray in your face, beating you with a baton, or giving you a ticket for handing out free food, that they are only enforcing the law. So the fact that there is no law to be enforced in this case is actually very important.

If you want to think about this on the practical rather than the moral level (a bit odd, unless you are actually involved in the Brown’s case, but whatever), then I have to wonder whether you have ever succeeded in getting a pig not to pepper-spray, beat, or ticket you by getting out a law-book and showing him or her that it would be against the law to do so? Is this a strategy well justified by its success?

robfindlay: Even an anarchist must accept the social-compact on some level, i.e. a group of people decide to do X, Y and Z by some means.

If “a group of people” decide to X, Y, and Z by some means, then the group of people who decided to do it are welcome to get out their wallets and pay for it themselves. Or to find comrades who agree with them and persuade those comrades to pony up some of the costs, too. What they have no right to do is come up to me and demand that I pay for it, even though I never agreed to pay for it, was never even asked whether or not I wanted it, and was given no chance to opt out of it after they decided it should be done.

Anarchism means a consensual society, and consensus means that EVERYONE who is expected to pay for some project must have freely committed themselves to paying for it. Otherwise you don’t have anarchy; you have hierarchy being imposed from the barrel of a gun.

Gavin,

I agree with you that nobody in the Federal government (or any other branch of government) has any right to extort taxes from Ed and Elaine Brown, or from anyone else who refuses to pay them. I agree that doing so is morally equivalent to slavery. I also agree with you that passing a law doesn’t make it one bit more just to engage in this form of robbery.

So my question is: why waste time on legalistic arguments like Russo’s and the Browns’ when you are arguing against the Feds’ right to demand taxes?

You seem to have just said that it wouldn’t matter to you whether or not the Feds ever passed a law requiring individuals to pay income tax. So why dwell on whether or not they did pass such a law? If they did, people have every right to ignore, evade, defy, and/or resist such a law–since it is nothing more than usurpation and highway robbery. If they didn’t pass a law, then the injustice of extracting taxes still doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that they didn’t pass it. After all, as I think we just agreed, even if they did pass such a law, it would still be unjust to treat people that way.

In either case, why not focus on what you seem to think is the real issue–i.e., the obvious injustice of tax laws, and the right of folks to ignore, defy, evade and resist unjust laws?

Here is a story of yet another couple standing up for workers/citizens rights in this country. There exists no law in the United States requiring an individual to pay a tax on his/her labor, also know as “income tax.”

The laws on the books can always be changed. For example, if a critical mass of people came to accept Russo’s or the Browns’ arguments that there is no legal obligation to pay income tax, the Congress could pass a new law or even a new constitutional amendment, in a matter of days, that would unambiguously authorize a tax on individual income and demand that each individual worker pay it.

Supposing that they did pass such a law, would you then support the Feds’ efforts to extract the tax by force, and to fine, besiege, jail, and/or kill those who refuse to pay it, since there would then be a law that “required” workers to pay up? Or would you continue to view income taxes as an injustice?