"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
This is one conclusion of a 2014 Princeton study on the power of elites, interest groups and average citizens to influence policy in America. A fantastic video made by Represent.us in 2015 summarizes it well:
While I very strongly support the mission of Represent.US and think they're doing great work to restore justice and equality to our political machine, I also want to advocate for another, easier method to convince Congress that they should start working for us again: stop paying federal income tax.
Big corporations like Amazon already pay zero federal taxes(from the Institue on Taxation and Economic Policy) while making billions of dollars each year in profits. So, they're NOT being taxed, while at the same time they are allowed to use their immense wealth - gleaned from us, their consumer base - to buy political power, further solidifying the legality of not paying their fair share of taxes, or any at all.
The action I am suggesting is not without precedent. The infamous "Boston Tea Party" of 1773 was a protest by the early colonial settlers of the U.S. who refused to pay taxes to England on imported Chinese tea while having zero representation in the English parliament. If they were going to be taxed, they at least wanted it to be by representatives that they elected themselves, and not by the empire whose tyranny they were trying to escape. While we have a nice illusion of representative democracy in the United States, the study from Princeton exposes the facade for what it is. An oligarchy.
More recently, the phrase "no taxation without representation" has been used to argue that Washington, D.C. needs a congressional representative (or two); they've even put the phrase on the city's license plates. Mark Weston, author of "The Runner-Up Presidency", also citing the Boston Tea Party slogan, wrote in Time that the 65 million Americans who voted for Hillary should threaten to stop paying their federal income tax, as the electoral college nullified the extra 2% of the popular vote that she received. I'm calling partisan bullshit on this. Electoral fraud is an American tradition, exit polls can't be trusted any more, and unless you're a sizable business interest group or billionaire, your ability to influence U.S. policy is nonexistent, regardless of whether you cheer for Team Red or Team Blue.
Like Weston, I'm not advocating that people start refusing to pay all taxes (yet), just federal income tax. Unlike him, I'd rather not limit it to the 65 million of us who were okay with another corrupt puppet in the White House solely because they were Y-chromosome deficient. Spoiler alert: Trump and Hillary are both garbage, thanks for attending my Ted Talk. But imagine if 100 million or more of us simply refused to support the corrupt system any longer. It would probably get Congress's rubber stamp on the reforms sought by Represent.US in a hurry!
The libertarian concept of agorism advocates for starving the state of tax revenue as a means to peaceful revolution and a society based on voluntary exchanges rather than imposition of state law through violence. When you consider that the U.S. is $22 TRILLION in debt and STILL spending our tax money bombing brown people halfway across the world for their oil, a peaceful, profitable civil disobedience starts to look pretty appealing. I don't know about you, but I would be fine with more of our taxes going to important investments in society like health care, infrastructure, education - unfortunately those are basically afterthoughts in the congressional budget these days. Let's fix it.
