The Heroism of Tax Evasion
Tax evasion is one of those crimes governments around the world will cooperate on. For example, Switzerland will happily destroy its reputation of banking secrecy to placate its neighboring government.
And while many of us privately feel like we could pay fewer taxes, tax evasion is portrayed as something that only crooks do.
The truth about tax evasion
Tax evasion is actually a supremely moral and ethical thing to do. The more you evade taxes, the less the State has resources with which to abuse and kill people.
Think about it for a moment.
If a whole lot more people were evading taxes, rather than blindly submitting to their government, how many Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, etc., would have lived, rather than died, at the hand of U.S. imperialism?
If your government had a lot less money, would it really be giving financial powerhouses and corporations bailouts, or would it be desperately trying to stay afloat itself?
Would illegal immigrants be getting health service and unemployment benefits from your government - services you paid for - if you stopped paying your taxes, and if everyone stopped paying so many taxes?
Tax evasion is a heroic action - and paying taxes is enabling crime
If governments around the world can only censor, torture, corrupt, abuse, destroy, murder, intimidate, and regulate people with YOUR money, then aren't you subsidizing them? Aren't you paying for all the evil they do?
But not tax evaders. Tax evasion is dangerous, sure. If done wrong, it could backfire and cause jail time (translated: if you don't pay tribute, you will be punished).
But for every bit of taxation you withhold from your government, you give innocent people in the middle east a chance. You give small businesses in your own country a chance.
When a business makes a dangerous or bad product, its customers don't try to reform the business and change its leadership - they simply stop buying its products! A boycott. The same needs to be done with bad governments (and aren't they all bad?).
Isn't it time to stop subsidizing government crimes?
Starving the beast
The concept I'm advocating is called starving the beast. The idea is simple - governments don't produce value of their own. Governments only have guns, which they can use to steal value from others.
As Nietzsche put it:
But the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies -- and whatever it has, it has stolen.
Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth.
Even its guns it obtains with your money.
If enough people stop paying taxes, and do so in a way governments can't just bully them into its protection money racket again, then governments will have no choice but to scale back their operations.
And the best thing is that you have every personal incentive to do this too - you get to keep more of your hard-earned money!
I'm not advocating you be blatant about it. I've seen what happens to tax protesters; you want to be a tax evader. Stop paying your taxes in a legal way. It's not at all impossible. I would say it sounds pretty exciting too. I'm hoping to become a Perpetual Traveler myself someday soon.
By reducing your tax burden, you're not just benefiting yourself financially, or saving countless lives from government oppression. You're also making a political statement. You're saying that your body and the fruits of your labor belongs to you, and not the government.
Cost of government day annually estimates how long each taxpayer must toil away as a slave to get the U.S. government off his back. In 2012, the number was 197 days a year. It's significantly worse in most European countries.
So if you're having qualms about whether it's worth spending your efforts to reduce your tax burden, think about how many of those 197 days every year you're not even working for yourself.
The best kept secret of the 20th and 21st century
Here it is - ready for it?
Slavery never went away!
Governments just changed their methods of parasitism, but the slavery is as much here today as it ever was before.
If you have to spend 54% of your time and effort working for someone else, and you basically can't do anything about it without forsaking your home country (in other words, you have to run away to stop being a slave), then that is slavery.
But perpetual traveling, if done right, can give you an immense opportunity to discover the world. I realize that many people spent their entire lives in one place, and moving may seem like a big deal - but it really isn't.
"If the world is like a book, those who don't travel read only one page."
Of course, Perpetual Travelling is just one of many ways you can reduce your tax burden.
Here are a list of ideas for legally reducing how much protection money you pay to the government
+ Get an accountant or learn yourself how to reduce your tax burden. + Become a PT, or perpetual traveler. + Use digital currencies like Bitcoin to transact. + Attend as many swap meets and markets as possible, thus avoiding sales taxes. + Inflation is a stealth tax - so take your money out of paper currencies and put them in valuables that cannot be debased, like precious metals.
If you have more ideas, please say so, and I will add them to the list.