Before the last discussion
got out of hand, there seemed like there was a possibility of discussing the merits of an approach to a moral dilemma. I still want to do that. The question, simply posed, is this: given that this country is hopelessly fucked, what is a boy to do?
You might not be on board with the assumption. I'm slightly more interested in the moral issue, but I understand if you first feel the need to figure out what is so fucked and why it is so hopeless. I've explained this somewhat in
this post, which also dealt with the question of what to do about it. Read all the links from that post if you want to try to understand where I'm coming from. Beyond that, authors whose writing has influenced my opinion on the matter are most notably Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. The scholarship of Jared Diamond and Howard Zinn has also contributed.
Arthur Silber and
Chris Floyd have blogs that relentlessly document how fucked everything is. My arguments are their arguments.
Now, given all of that... now what? Well on more than one occasion Floyd has looked to Thoreau for guidance on the matter, and found an answer that I find convincing: "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." Also in that comment thread I link to three items containing ideas that I also find convincing. I'd recommend reading them. Here they are again:
(1) Fuck (2) the (
3) system.
Based on all of this, I put forth the idea that refraining from working when I don't need to for my immediate survival, thus minimizing my association with the government by avoiding income tax, is some kind of noble form of principled dissent. I fully acknowledge the possibility that there might be convincing arguments against this line of thinking, I don't see that any of them found their way into that discussion, but that doesn't mean they can't exist.
Here is my version of the argument offered against my idea (as opposed to arguments against the underlying assumption, or arguments about details along the way, or various invective):
But some of the theoretical tax dollars I would be paying to the government would have helped people. Needy people.
I'll assume that it is true that some tax dollars pay for things that help people, but I reject that as a compelling argument against my position on a variety of grounds, some of which I mentioned in the comments:
- Illegitimate acquisition of funds
- Immoral use of funds
- violence
- coercion
- torture
- racist behavior
- environmentally destructive policies
- energy
- transportation
- agriculture
It was pointed out that this method of weighing the good against the bad is a utilitarian approach (at least considering everything but the first bullet, to which I'll return later). In spite of repeated dismissals of the value of measuring utility only in "dollars that help" versus "dollars that hurt," there was extended discussion about how the budget is allocated. It isn't that the information about where tax dollars are spent is useless, but that those values need to be weighted in such a subjective way, and with such disparate coefficients, as to render the actual figures trivial values in the moral calculus.
To translate that to an easy example, consider an organization that collects money from its members, and uses 99% of it to give pennies to people on the streets, and 1% of it to fund the murder of small children. Giving people money helps them, and killing hurts. I don't think anyone would argue that tweaking the percentages even by a orders of magnitude would change the moral righteousness of buying into the organization. No matter how many acts of goodness they do, it will never add up to enough to surpass the evil of murder. Lots of little goods don't outweigh a bit of heinous wrong.
Going back to reality, it is obviously my contention that the way our national budget is spent does more harm than good. Whether we spend 40% or 55% or 80% of our tax revenues on social good doesn't really matter as long as we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain an illegal and immoral occupation of a nation we illegally and immorally invaded and destroyed, as long as we're holding people without charges, as long as we're torturing people, as long as we're conducting warrantless domestic surveillance, as long as millions of nonviolent drug offenders are imprisoned, as long as we're massively subsidizing unnecessary crops that ravage our environment and our health.
And on top of all that, much of the spending that on the surface may appear to be good is actually significantly less good than it appears, if not outright bad. I consider this to be the case for much of our education spending, as I mentioned, and I suspect that it would be the case for just about everything, including the State Department's involvement in the recent World Radiocommunications Conference, which was mentioned in the comments. I imagine this effect is worse than normal under Bush, whose administration has looked at absolutely every agency, program, and crisis as an opportunity to enrich their supporters, bolster their own power, and bludgeon their opposition, all while purporting to help people. Take, for example, two other purported good efforts mentioned - nuclear nonproliferation and environmental protection programs. It is true that money spent in ways that genuinely advance those causes would be doing good, but any money we spend on them and good that results is completely undermined by the way our "defense" policies and arms manufacturing and sales escalate arms proliferation and the way a multitude of our national policies wreak havoc on the environment. Those "good" programs, placed in proper context, are then nothing but pathetic fig leaves for our leaders to point to and pretend they're doing something to help fix the problem.
So, yeah, I don't think the math adds up favorably for the good of the way our tax dollars are spent. But you can even put every bit of all of this utilitarian rambling aside*, because I don't even think there's any justification for this government taxing my income to begin with, because I basically have no say in how they use it. This goes right to the heart of why everything is fucked about this country: because it is no longer the representative democracy it claims to be, though it still goes through the empty motions. Many of the authors I've mentioned have made this case quite convincingly.
This essay is one of the best. I don't recognize any right by which an organization can forcibly take my money and give me effectively no say in how it is used. Even if the utilitarian calculus added up in favor of good, taking my money at gunpoint is wrong. Give your government that power, and sooner or later the people running it will start to use it for their own selfish purposes, not the beautiful noble ones they'll claim. A few centuries into the American experiment, and we're well past that point. I'm not sure that any government has ever stayed on the good side of it for long.
I can't imagine someone putting forth a case that substantially undermines the thrust of what I'm saying here, but I'd much prefer to live in a world where they could. But the idea that my opinion is some immobile monolith is hard for me to take seriously, given how wildly my opinions have changed over the last few years. I'm open to good argument, and I've found it from the authors I've cited. I don't like the idea that I live in a country and world that is so hopelessly fucked, but when someone makes that case convincingly, I'm going to accept it. And then at that point I'll try to figure out something to do about it.
And the last point here is to point out that the tragic absurdity of
this quote from the comments:
"what really bothers me about your little plan of not working, and your modus operandi in general, is that if you're so convinced that everything is so fucked then do something positive to fix it, or just remove yourself from it entirely and live in a shed in the woods in Canada."
What on earth do you think I'm doing? I can't magically fix everything by myself, and my whole point is that the whole system is impossibly fucked beyond the point of fixing. The only conceivable way, in my estimation, to make anything better is by tearing the system down, and what I can personally do about that at the moment is minimize my contribution to the system, which is what I'm trying to do by avoiding income (I could also consider taking some of the measures mentioned in the "fuck the system" links above). And beyond that all I can do is try to spread awareness and urge more people to do the same.
Given that I'm doing all I can about it, what is really being said in that quote? "Either fix it or go away" reduces to "get the fuck away and shut the fuck up" The very act of acknowledging the unpleasant reality bothers people, so much so that they prefer not to hear it. This creates a pretty fucking vicious natural support for the abhorrent system to which I'm objecting. That would be funny if it weren't so fucking sad.
And yeah, rarely does a day go by when I don't think about running away from all of it.
* - If you wanted, you could structure this point into the utilitarian framework as well, and that might even be implicitly what I'm doing here. I just think it gets to complicated to write about it that way, because then you're talking about one utilitarian decision set depending on the range of possible outcomes of various possible subsequent utilitarian decision sets.
, the brilliant linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky writes that "social action must be animated by a vision of a future society, and by explicit judgments of value concerning the character of this future society." One who finds the vision of an anarchist society attractive can then engage in social action inspired by that vision, and guided by anarchist principles.
