He does apparently refuse to pay his income taxes and my hat is off to him. I don’t know how he’s pulled it off for so long without getting caught. Karl Hess had to become a hermit or something.

Well, what happened is that Hess was classified as a tax resister in the course of an already-existing audit in the mid-1960s. He had been targeted for a retaliatory audit by Lyndon Johnson for his time as a Goldwater speechwriter, and ended up getting pissed off enough with the process that he sent the IRS a “fuck you” letter along with a copy of the Declaration of Independence. At that point they reclassified his case as a “tax protest” case (not surprising, since they were already ill-disposed to him and he declared in the letter that he’d never pay taxes again), then seized nearly all his property and imposed a 100% lien against future earnings.

The back-to-the-land and community technology stuff was mostly a matter of ideological preference and personal taste, which he started getting into later on, during the early 1970s. The most that harassment and persecution from the IRS contributed directly to that lifestyle was that he learned a craft (welding) and used barter to avoid generating taxable income. He said that the experience of learning a craft is part of what led him to think about community technology, and using barter to make a living probably made him more sympathetically inclined towards survivalist ideas and non-monetary forms of exchange than he otherwise might have been.

I don’t see how the rest of you are that different from me in your actions though, but maybe there’s something you’re doing (or not doing) I’m unaware of.

I could be mistaken, but my impression is that most of the bloggers here don’t disagree very much with Billy Beck about the attitude that you should take on matters of principle. What they disagree with him on is the specific content of the principles that he sticks on, especially the notion that individualists should feel obliged to confront the State over tax resistance.

TGGP:

Birthright citizenship,

The fuck do you care whether or not an arbitrary gang of usurpers, thieves, and swindlers does or does not issue an Official Membership Card for the children of complete strangers living on land that you’ve never even seen and have never done anything to earn a proprietary interest in?

use of social services.

The fuck do you care whether or not they use government-monopolized “social services”? If you’re concerned about your money being taken for purposes that you disagree with, why don’t you take that up with the people that are actually robbing you, rather than complete strangers who had nothing to do with it and couldn’t have stopped it if they tried?

To me the entire of idea of “preferences that ought to have priority” doesn’t make any sense.

I’m sure it doesn’t make any sense to you.

Nevertheless, why should immigrants or anyone, really, other than yourself, give a damn about your personal preferences about whether or not they can pass through or exist on land that you’ve never seen and that you’ve never personally done anything to earn a title to? What do you think made it your business to go around telling them, or the landlord, what to do with it?

TGGP:

The trespass is across the border which is said to be collectively owned by the citizens of the U.S. You can say such a notion is unlibertarian and I’ll agree. My opposition to open-borders is unlibertarian and results from my belief that libertarianism by itself is insufficient …

Well, yes, I suppose that if one of your goals is to violently control who can or cannot pass through land that you’ve never even seen and that you’ve never done a damned thing in your life to earn a real title to, you will eventually find that libertarianism isn’t “sufficient” to meet those goals.