We all know that paying taxes suck. A large chunk of your productive work taken away with most of it sucked up by a power hungry bureaucracy. But that alone does not make paying taxes immoral.
While there is a lot of valid criticism of these trials, a few useful key guidelines were established. Most importantly the fact that any individual is responsible for the crimes that they commit and that following government orders is not a valid excuse. People have a personal responsibility to reject actions that are clearly immoral.
From the Nuremberg Principles:
source
Principle I
'Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.'
Principle IV
'The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.'
Obviously, as an anarchist, I do not think that these principles are sacred. But anarchism already relies on the idea that everyone is responsible for themselves. The Nuremberg Principles however state the same for people that do believe in the authority of states.
According to the anarchist philosophy or the Nuremberg trials, everyone is responsible for their own decisions and given the option should not participate in immoral activities, including immoral actions authorised by the state.
While being a soldier and killing innocents is clearly immoral, paying taxes is fundamentally different. The taxpayer is not committing any crimes. But just as hiring an assassin is immoral, paying somebody to commit crimes is a crime in itself.
The question if paying taxes is immoral therefore depends on what the money is used for. If the taxes are redistributed to the population, that is may be annoying, but the only persons violated are the taxpayers themselves. There is no moral dilemma. The same is true when the taxes disappear in a bureaucracy.
But when the taxes are used to pay for wars and result in the death of civilians, this is no longer so simple. Paying less taxes would result in less military funding and in less violence and destruction. Therefore lets look at what US taxes are being spent on.
Out of the roughly 3.5 trillion dollars the government collects via taxes it spends about 750 billion directly on the military. But this is not all. There is an almost equally large overhead of other defence related spendings such as veterans, homeland security and interest payments of past defence expenses. In total this makes about 1.5 trillion. And this does not yet include the costs for some secret operations.
In addition the tax money also funds other questionable projects such as the NSA and massive spying on citizens. Using a rough estimate one can say that half of the tax money is used to fund the military and related branches. A part of that money is then used to fund criminal activities around the world. Not criminal under national law, but from a moral perspective.
And by paying taxes everyone is supporting this system. In my opinion this does make paying taxes fundamentally immoral.
Does this mean that we all need to stop paying taxes?
Let's make a thought experiment:
Suppose the government turns up at my door and orders me to pilot and kill some people without any legal process via a drone.
Now suppose they turn up and tell me to pay for a drone so that someone else can fly it and kill people.
Does that make a difference? Should I react any differently? And what are the alternatives if I refuse. Am I in a position where I can realistically make a moral choice?
In the end, we need to make our choices for ourselves and live with them. And I think that for me paying taxes is still better than going to jail. Nothing is black or white and fundamentalism is almost always misguided.
For me the moral choice is to try to pay as little taxes as possible, because I do not want to fund wars. I try to use all the possible tricks, not because every dollar I save is good for me, but because they don't get it. By paying them the minimum I can continue my work and this is a better moral choice than sitting in a cage and doing nothing. I hope that my actions cause more good in the world than my tax dollars cause harm.
