Tax resistance in the United States

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Tax resistance in the United States has been practiced at least since colonial times, and has played important parts in American history. 

Tax resistance is the refusal to pay a tax, usually by means that bypass established legal norms, as a means of protest, nonviolent resistance, or conscientious objection. It was a core tactic of the American Revolution and has played a role in many struggles in America from colonial times to the present day.

In addition, the philosophy of tax resistance, from the "no taxation without representation" axiom that served as a foundation of the Revolution to the assertion of individual conscience in Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, has been an important plank of American political philosophy.

Theory

The theory that there should be "no taxation without representation," while it did not originate in America, is often associated with the American Revolution, in which that slogan did strong duty. It continues to be a rallying cry for tax rebellions today. American Henry David Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience has proven to be extremely influential, and its influence today is not limited to tax resistance stands and campaigns but to all manner of refusal to obey unjust laws. These are among the theories of tax resistance that have taken on a particularly American flavor and have animated and inspired American tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns.

No taxation without representation

In English political philosophy of the late 18th century, the theory was prominent that in order for the sovereign to exact a tax on a population, that population must be represented in a legislature that had the sole power to levy the tax. That theory was made axiomatic in the form of the slogan "no taxation without representation" (and similar expressions).

The American colonies did not have representatives in the British parliament, and so this axiom became a useful platform for colonial rebels to justify their rebellion against direct taxes imposed by the crown.

The standard-issue District of Columbia license plate bears the phrase, "Taxation Without Representation".

 

The "no taxation without representation" slogan was brought to bear in the arguments for tax resistance by African-Americans and by American women who did not have the right to vote or serve in the legislature. It is used today by the District of Columbia as part of a complaint that residents of the district have no (voting) Congressional representatives. 

The phrase has such potent currency in American thought that it is frequently used today in the context of tax debates that have little to do with legislative representation, at least in the way that the original coiners of the phrase would have understood: For example, complaints that Congressional representatives only represent certain special interests, or that the complainer doesn't feel that his or her point of view is represented in legislative debates or actions.

Civil disobedience

Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay On Resistance to Civil Government — now usually referred to as Civil Disobedience — is part of the canon of American political philosophy. It was prompted by Thoreau's refusal to pay a poll tax because of unwillingness to support a government that was enforcing the slavery of Americans and what he felt was an unjust war against Mexico.

Thoreau argued that obedience to government is often misplaced, and that people should develop and trust their own consciences rather than use the law as a crutch.

Thoreau's philosophy has inspired many tax resisters since, especially those who have acted individually (not as part of a tax strike or other large-scale movement) and from motives of conscientious objection.

Conscientious objection to military taxation

The theory that taxpayers become complicit in the actions of their government when they pay for the government's functioning and requisitions through their taxes, and that therefore one must scrutinize the actions of the government and refuse to pay for them if they become grossly immoral, is key to the war tax resistance practiced by American Quakers since colonial times. It also forms an important philosophical basis for other religious and secular American war tax resisters down to the present day. 

War tax resisters in the United States pioneered the idea that conscientious objection to military taxation ought to be a legally protected right: that is, taxpayers who are morally opposed to taking part in war should not be forced to fund war, just as governments often permit such people to avoid military conscription. 

This theory has been extended by people who oppose other aspects of government funding. A few have refused to pay taxes on the grounds that some government health spending goes to institutions that provide abortions. A number of Amish people refused to pay taxes for government social insurance programs on conscientious grounds.

Taxation as theft

A demonstrator at a "Tax Day" demonstration in Cincinnati, Ohio, holds a sign reading "taxation is theft"

 

The theory that taxation is ethically indistinguishable from robbery is a staple of American anarchist and (often) libertarian thought. American anarchist philosopher Lysander Spooner put it this way:

Taxation without consent is as plainly robbery, when enforced against one man, as when enforced against millions… Taking a man's money without his consent, is also as much robbery, when it is done by millions of men, acting in concert, and calling themselves a government, as when it is done by a single individual, acting on his own responsibility, and calling himself a highwayman. Neither the numbers engaged in the act, nor the different characters they assume as a cover for the act, alter the nature of the act itself.

— Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1869)

The original U.S. Libertarian Party platform (1972) agreed that taxation was always a violation of the rights of the individual:

Since we believe that every man is entitled to keep the fruits of his labor, we are opposed to all government activity which consists of the forcible collection of money or goods from citizens in violation of their individual rights. Specifically, we support the eventual repeal of all taxation. We support a system of voluntary fees for services rendered as a method for financing government in a free society.

Tax protester theories

An enduring mythology of tax protester arguments asserts that the tax system operating in the United States is unconstitutional, illegal, or doesn't actually apply to most of the people currently being subjected to it. 

These arguments, though they often take the form of "totally discredited legal positions and/or meritless factual positions," are often persuasive to people who have an unsophisticated understanding of the legal system and who are susceptible to look uncritically on arguments that appeal to their financial self-interest. For example, in the early 1980s, an epidemic of tax protest swept General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as thousands of employees there told GM to stop withholding income tax from their salaries after they attended seminars or listened to lectures on tape from the tax protester group “We The People ACT.”

Practice

The following sections briefly describe some of the more prominent examples of tax resistance in colonial America and the United States:

Quaker conscientious objection to military taxation

The Society of Friends (Quakers) had a tradition of refusing to pay tithes to the establishment church, and of refusing to pay explicit war taxes, from the early years of the establishment of the sect.

When Quakers were permitted to establish an American colony, Pennsylvania, that they could run to some extent on their religious principles, the Pennsylvania Assembly often offered some resistance to attempts by the crown to exact money from the colony for the purposes of military defense.

During the French and Indian war, the Pennsylvania colonial assembly conceded, and began raising a tax from Pennsylvania residents for military fortifications. This led to some, including influential Quakers John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, refusing to pay such taxes for reasons of conscientious objection.

This stand, and the eloquence the resisters employed to explain it, proved influential, and a Quaker tradition of war tax resistance has waxed and waned through American history to the present day.

Colonial resistance

A typical American colonial government was headed by a governor, who was appointed by the Crown and meant to represent the interests of the home country, and a colonial assembly, elected by the colonists themselves. The two not infrequently came into conflict over issues of taxation, and when the governor assumed the right to tax colonists without the consent of their legislature, this conflict might result in tax resistance. 

This happened for example in 1687 when New England governor Edmund Andros attempted to assess a new tax. Colonists declared their unwillingness to pay such a tax, were imprisoned on orders of the governor, and this ultimately led to the 1689 Boston revolt in which Andros was overthrown. This muscle-flexing by American colonists was an important precursor of the American Revolution, such that Ipswich, where a declaration defying the tax was signed, bills itself as "The Birthplace of American Independence 1687".

The War of the Regulation in colonial North Carolina was another important precursor of the American Revolution. Colonists, fed up with what they viewed as a corrupt and unrepresentative colonial government, stopped paying taxes and ultimately rose in an armed revolt. In this case it was the entire government — the governor, the assembly, and the corrupt bureaucracy — that was the target of the rebellion.

Independence-minded colonials used a variety of tactics to increase the economic independence and self-reliance of the colonies while denying economic resources to the Crown. This included rampant smuggling and attacks on British customs ships (as in the Gaspee Affair), the refusal to allow British monopoly products to be brought to market (as in the Boston Tea Party and Philadelphia Tea Party), boycotts of British-manufactured goods and the encouragement of local production of replacement goods, and sanctions ranging from social boycott to violent attacks aimed at tax collectors and collaborators. The success of measures like these led John Adams to assert that the American Revolution had already been accomplished before the Revolutionary War began — that the war was less a revolution than a failed counterrevolution.

Resistance in the post-revolutionary period

After the success of the American Revolution, the independent United States government of the former colonies was confronted by its own tax resistance campaigns. Three were suppressed militarily by the fledgling United States government:

Shays' Rebellion

Massachusetts farmers were motivated in part by increased taxes and heavy-handed tax enforcement when they rose up in Shays' Rebellion. They took action against government agencies that were enforcing tax seizures, preventing their operation, until the suppression of the rebellion.

The Whiskey Rebellion

Farmers far from coastal ports and population centers would often ferment and distill their grain into whiskey locally because it was more economic to bring whiskey to market than grain, from the point of view of transportation costs. Thus, when United States government put an excise tax on whiskey, this was seen as an imposition by coastal elites at the expense of rural farmers and was widely resented and resisted.

While resistance in the form of refusal to pay the excise tax or to cooperate in the enforcement of excise laws persisted and largely succeeded in some areas, in Western Pennsylvania this resistance erupted into attacks on tax collectors and eventual armed revolt — the Whiskey Rebellion — which was violently suppressed by federal government troops under the command of former revolutionary war commander in chief George Washington.

Fries's Rebellion

Fries's Rebellion began in opposition to a federal window-tax instituted by the Adams administration, with resisters impeding the tax assessors and refusing to pay the assessed taxes. This resistance movement, too, was successfully suppressed by the federal government when it rose to the level of armed rebellion.

Native / immigrant conflicts

The United States government is largely run by and on behalf of the European immigrant community, while United States territory also encompasses the land of native people, some of whom live in separate sovereign or semi-sovereign nations. Conflicts periodically erupt over who could tax whom.

In the late-19th century, such conflicts led to tax resistance, for example from thousands of people of part-native ancestry in Dakota territory who forced the tax collector to retreat without his prize, from Crow in Montana who refused to pay for several years until the government there confiscated their livestock, or from non-native residents of Oklahoma Territory who wanted to be free from Cherokee Nation taxes.

Such conflicts continued into the 20th century. For example Wallace "Mad Bear" Anderson led a tax resistance campaign of the Tuscarora Nation in 1959 in which they refused to pay state income tax, publicly destroyed tax summonses, and engaged in sit-ins and other such protests. Members of the Seneca Nation blocked the Southern Tier Expressway in New York to protest the state's attempt to extend a state sales tax to them in 1992. When members of the Iroquois Confederacy blocked roads in a similar conflict in 1997, law enforcement responded with brutal violence (the state would eventually pay out $2.7 million to victims).

African-Americans

Tax resistance has occasionally been deployed in the battle for civil rights for black people in the United States. For example: 

The "no taxation without representation" argument was evoked by African-American businessman Paul Cuffee, who refused to pay his state taxes and petitioned the legislature in 1780 and 1781 on behalf of himself and other African-Americans, saying "we apprehend ourselves to be aggrieved, in that… we are not allowed the privilege of freemen of the State, having no vote or influence in the election of those that tax us."

Robert Purvis refused to pay a school tax in Philadelphia in 1853, on the grounds that his children were not allowed to attend the whites-only schools the tax supported. "I object", he wrote, "to the payment of this tax, on the ground that my rights as a citizen, and my feelings as a man and a parent have been grossly outraged in depriving me, in violation of law and justice, of the benefits of the school system which this tax was designed to sustain."

Undermining Reconstruction state governments

After the American Civil War, the United States government established Reconstruction era governments in the states of the former Confederacy that included black and carpetbagger representatives. The loss of political power by the formerly dominant white supremacists led to resentment, protest, and the formation of paramilitaries and parallel governments. Occasionally, tax resistance was used as a tactic to withdraw financial support and political legitimacy from the reconstruction governments in favor of the white supremacist parallel governments. 

For example, tax resistance was used as a tactic by South Carolina Democrats in the months leading up to the collapse of the carpetbagger administration of Republican Daniel Chamberlain and his replacement by former Confederate Army officer Wade Hampton III.

White supremacist gubernatorial candidate John McEnery established a parallel government in Reconstruction Louisiana, in opposition to the carpetbagger government of governor William Pitt Kellogg, and urged sympathetic citizens to pay taxes to his government rather than the Kellogg "usurpation."

Railroad bond shenanigans

In the 1870s a number of American localities were victims of railroad bond swindles. Promoters would ask the residents to vote to issue bonds to pay for the running of a railroad line to their area, these bonds being backed by the local tax base. In theory the economic growth that would come from the new rail line would more than pay for the bonds by the time they were mature and the bondholders needed to be paid off. In fact, the railroad never materialized and the bond promoters vanished with the money. 

Some of these localities organized and refused to honor the bonds they had issued. Because by the time the bonds had matured they had likely been sold to new owners who did not participate in the original fraud, the court system was not usually very sympathetic to the defrauded taxpayers. 

But this led to some notable examples of organized tax resistance in the United States.

For instance, in Cass and St. Clair counties, Missouri, local judges were elected who refused to enforce higher court rulings in favor of the bondholders that would have forced the County to inflict a tax in order to pay off the bonds. For a time, the judges held court in a cave in order to evade their eventual jailings for contempt of court.

In Steuben County, New York, the bondholders succeeded in forcing the community to create a property tax to pay off the bonds, but property owners refused to pay the tax and rallied to the support of those whose property was seized for failure to pay, successfully disrupting tax auctions.

In Kentucky, refusal to assess or pay taxes to pay off the bond swindle persisted for decades. Some towns refused to elect sheriffs or public officials of any kind (or no candidates could be found for the positions) so that nobody was legally qualified to assess taxes or engage in property seizures for failure to pay taxes. Local judges went into hiding to evade the rulings of higher courts. Armed citizens intimidated outsiders who tried to come and collect taxes by force.

Women's suffrage

Tax resistance was a less important part of the women's suffrage struggle in the United States than it was in the United Kingdom, but it still played a role and had some notable practitioners.

At the 1852 National Women's Rights Convention, Susan B. Anthony brought forward a tax resistance resolution:

Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of those States, in which woman has now by law a right to the property she inherits, to refuse to pay taxes. She is unrepresented in the Government…

Lucy Stone refused to pay her tax in 1858, on the grounds "that women suffer taxation, and yet have no representation, which is not only unjust to one-half the adult population, but is contrary to our theory of government."

Abby and Julia Smith were landowners in Glastonbury, Connecticut, who found in the 1870s that their property tax assessments kept rising relative to those of the male property owners of the area who could vote in local elections. They responded by refusing to pay taxes on "no taxation without representation" grounds, and their battle soon became a cause célèbre among suffrage activists and sympathizers throughout the country (in part thanks to the sisters' knack for publicity).

Anna Howard Shaw's automobile was sold at tax auction in 1915 in a celebrated tax resistance case. "Dr. Shaw has always believed in the contention of the Colonies that 'taxation without representation is tyranny' and has consistently protested along this line when paying her taxes," she explained.

Tax resistance by newly-enfranchised women in Pennsylvania

As women won the right to vote in the United States, they sometimes also became vulnerable to taxes that had previously only applied to men. When this happened in Pennsylvania, the shock was accompanied by resentment that the school tax in question applied mostly to women living in rural areas and not to those living in the largest Pennsylvania cities. 

This example of American tax resistance is particularly interesting because although it involved thousands of women in many parts of the state and persisted for several years, there is little evidence that the resistance was formally organized, and it wasn't accompanied by much in the way of open protest — no rallies, picket marches, petitions, manifestos, named organizations, political coalitions, or things of that nature. It seems to have been a form of leaderless resistance.

At first the women were emboldened by a quirk in the law that forbade "the arrest or imprisonment for non-payment of any tax of any female or infant or person found by inquisition to be of unsound mind." It took the state legislature a couple of years to update that law after the women's tax resistance began, and several women were eventually jailed, briefly, for their resistance.

"Bond Slackers" during World War Ⅰ

Although the U.S. government raised some of its war budget via taxes, the most visible public war funding measure during World War Ⅰ was the Liberty Bond program. Citizens were encouraged to loan money to the government for its war effort through the purchase of bonds. 

Although the purchase of bonds was ostensibly voluntary, strong coercive pressure — up to and including mob violence — was directed at those who would not buy. "Bond slackers" (the popular term at the time for people who did not buy war bonds, or did not buy them in sufficient quantity) could be run out of town, might lose their jobs, have their property stolen or vandalized, might be tarred-and-feathered, otherwise tortured, coated in paint, threatened with murder, or subjected to hours of questioning by hooded interrogators in impromptu star chambers in the hopes of prompting them to say something that would incriminate them under the Espionage Act.

Those who resisted such pressure and refused to buy war bonds included conscientious objectors to war such as Jehovah's Witnesses and members of traditional peace churches such as Mennonites, anti-capitalist radicals, and European immigrants from countries the U.S. and its allies were fighting. 

Herbert Lord, Director of Finance for the War Department, considered this "an organized effort to discourage and defeat the loan," and it was attributed to a conspiracy of "pro-German agents."

Property tax strikes during the Great Depression

The Great Depression introduced unprecedented tax burdens to Americans. While real-estate values plummeted and unemployment skyrocketed, the cost of government remained high. As a result, taxes as a percentage of the national income nearly doubled from 11.6 percent in 1929 to 21.1 in 1932. Most of the increase took place at the local level and especially squeezed the resources of real estate taxpayers. Local tax delinquency rose steadily to a record of 26.3% in 1933.

Many Americans reacted to these conditions by forming taxpayers' leagues to call for lower taxes and cuts in government spending. By some estimates, there were three thousand of these leagues by 1933. Taxpayers' leagues endorsed such measures as laws to limit and rollback taxes, lowered penalties on tax delinquents, and cuts in government spending. Partly as a result of their efforts, sixteen states and numerous localities adopted property tax limitations while three states instituted homestead exemptions.

While taxpayers' leagues usually favored traditional legal and political strategies, a few promoted tax resistance. Probably the best known of these was the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers (ARET) in Chicago. From 1930 to 1933, it led one of the largest tax strikes in American history.

ARET functioned primarily as a cooperative legal service. Each member paid annual dues of $15 to fund lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of real-estate assessments. The suits, when finally filed, took the form of a 7,000-page, two-foot-thick book listing the names and tax data for all 26,000 co-litigants.

The radical side of the movement became apparent by early 1931 when ARET called for taxpayers to withhold real-estate taxes (or "strike") pending a final ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court, and later the U.S. Supreme Court. Mayor Anton Cermak and other politicians desperately tried to break the strike by threatening criminal prosecution, revocation of city services, and the seizure of property.

The Association's influence peaked in late 1932, with a membership of near 30,000 people, a budget of over $600,000, and its own radio show. A failed legal suit, government counter-measures, and infighting took their toll and the movement, having in large part accomplished its goals, declined thereafter.

The emergence of a non-sectarian war tax resistance movement

Tax resistance motivated by conscientious objection to war had traditionally been practiced in the United States under the Christian theory of nonresistance as extrapolated by the historic peace churches, and its development had largely taken place within the context of those churches. Rare exceptions included the brief flowering of tax resistance among the New England Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau, a small war tax resistance contingent in the late-19th Century pacifist movement, and a few war tax resisters in small sects like the International Bible Students and Rogerenes. 

After World War Ⅱ, a non-sectarian war tax resistance movement began to come together, and would develop its own practices of war tax resistance under a more secular theory of pacifism. 

Some of the figures in this early movement were members of the historic peace churches, such as Mary Stone McDowell, a Quaker who had resisted the Liberty Bond drives during World War Ⅰ, but many others were not. Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy were from the Catholic Worker movement, Ernest Bromley was a Methodist, Walter Gormly and Maurice McCrackin Presbyterians, Juanita and Wally Nelson non-religious, for example. 

In 1948, the group Peacemakers formed to (loosely) organize this movement. This group would develop a pacifist theory of conscientious objection to military taxation that was not tied to a particular religious doctrine. They published a guide to war tax resistance in 1963 and developed tactics of resistance practice and of publicity that would lead to the growth of the movement, to a new resurgence of war tax resistance among the traditional peace churches, and to the establishment of nonsectarian war tax resistance as an ongoing part of the American scene.

Foes of social security taxation

The United States Social Security program had its share of critics and faced political opposition. It also evoked some tax resistance against the payroll and self-employment taxes that funded it. This came from two factions in particular: conservatives who opposed the government program for ideological reasons, and Amish who had religious prohibitions against participating in insurance programs in general.

Conservative opposition

American conservatives who refused to pay payroll or self-employment taxes for the social security program expressed their opposition in terms of opposing government overreach into private lives and contracts, and opposition to socialism. "For those of us who still have confidence in our own ability," one wrote, "such a socialistic thing should not be forced upon us."

About a dozen women from around Marshall, Texas organized in 1951 to refuse to submit Social Security taxes on behalf of their domestic help. "It's not the money, it's the principle," said spokesperson Carolyn M. Abney. "That law is unconstitutional."

It is a violation of the sanctity of the American home. The law violates a basic American freedom. Already business has been socialized and the American home is the last stronghold against socialism. This may sound dramatic, but we are fighting to preserve the freedoms our forefathers gave to us.

— Carolyn M. Abney, in "Texas Housewives to Press Social Security Test Case". Reading Eagle. 1952-07-01.

The "Texas Housewives" (as they were invariably called in the newspapers) lost a court case in 1952. They appealed on 13th Amendment grounds; that's the amendment that bans involuntary servitude — their attorney explained that the law "forces these housewives to be unpaid tax collectors for the government." They lost this case as well, and in 1954 they failed in an attempted Supreme Court appeal. Meanwhile the government seized the resisted money from their bank accounts. 

The women continued to defy the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) for some time after, claiming that the courts had not answered the Constitutional question but had only verified the tax statute. They eventually gave up the fight and began to pay the required quarterly taxes for their employees.

Mary Cain refused to pay $42.87 in self-employment tax in 1952 and hid her assets to make sure the government would have to make it a criminal matter (and thus a possible test case) rather than a simple civil asset seizure. In the case that eventually resulted, Cain's arguments were turned down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and she had no luck with a Supreme Court appeal, but the government eventually dropped the case anyway. When the government padlocked the office of her newspaper as part of a seizure process, Cain sawed the lock off the door and mailed it to the I.R.S. defiantly. "I’ve had enough of the New Deal. I’m sick of the whole Truman administration," she said.

Vivien Kellems, who had previously tangled with the government by refusing to withhold income taxes from her employees, refused to pay the self-employment tax on her income in 1952, and recruited a small group of other businesspersons (including Mary Cain) to join her protest. She wrote in a letter to Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder that she felt she already had "adequate insurance" and she urged the government to indict her so that she could be a test case to the Supreme Court.

Conscientious objection from the Amish

The Amish have a strong tradition of mutual aid and believe that purchasing insurance betrays distrust in God's providence and in the community of believers. The original name of the Social Security system was "Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance," and Amish people interpreted it as a forbidden form of insurance.

Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

— 1 Timothy 5:8

Because of this, when the U.S. government extended the Social Security system to cover farmers in 1955, many Amish refused to participate, and the government responded by seizing their property. After some farmers had bank accounts seized, others closed their accounts. When the government tried to levy checks due to the resisters from the milk processing cooperatives they sold their milk to, the cooperatives (also in Amish hands) refused to hand over the checks.

The government was then reduced to seizing livestock. In a celebrated case in 1961, the government seized Valentine Byler's horses during Spring plowing. Asked about this insensitivity to Byler's livelihood, the district I.R.S. Chief of Collections answered, "Plowing never occurred to me. I live in an apartment." Byler received messages of support from around the country, and the press took up his cause.

What kind of "welfare" is it that takes a farmer’s horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a whole community into a "benefit" scheme it neither needs nor wants, and which offends its deeply held religious scruples?

— "Welfarism Gone Mad". New York Herald Tribune. 1961-05-14.

The struggle would continue for a decade. Legislation that would exempt the Amish from the Social Security program was introduced in Congress at least as early as 1959, and some of the resisters took the unusual step (unusual for the Amish) of petitioning the government in 1961. In 1965, the United States changed the Social Security law in a way that exempted self-employed Amish people from having to pay into the Social Security program.

War tax resistance during the Vietnam War

The American war against Vietnam led to strong opposition in the United States. 

Inspired by the use of civil disobedience in the civil rights movement and by an earlier generation of conscientious objectors to war tax payment, a new generation of resisters created a version of war tax resistance that was more oriented toward protest than conscientious objection. 

In 1966, A.J. Muste circulated a tax refusal pledge meant as an advertiement for the Washington Post that 370 people signed, including the singer Joan Baez, on the grounds "that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted."

This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.

— Joan Baez

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson proposed an income tax surtax explicitly to pay for war expenses. This was the first tax in the modern United States that was explicitly a "war tax" and helped to boost the prominence of war tax resistance as a protest tactic. 

In early 1967, a "No Tax for War Committee" organized by Maurice McCrackin circulated a sign-on statement that eventually attracted more than 200 signatures, and that read:

Because so much of the tax paid the federal government goes for poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing thousands upon thousands of people, as in Vietnam at the present time, I am not going to pay taxes on 1966 income.

A "Writers & Editors War Tax Protest" the same year was somewhat less bold in its declaration (not all declaring total resistance, but some refusing to pay only the 10% surtax or only 23% of their total tax) but more impressive in its list of names. The protest, which appeared in New York Post, New York Times Book Review and Ramparts was eventually signed by about 528 people including Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, Robert Bly, Noam Chomsky, Robert Creeley, David Dellinger, Philip K. Dick, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Leslie Fiedler, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Todd Gitlin, Paul Goodman, Edward S. Herman, Paul Krassner, Staughton Lynd, Dwight Macdonald, Jackson Mac Low, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, Milton Mayer, Ed McClanahan, Henry Miller, Carl Oglesby, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Ed Sanders, Robert Scheer, Peter Dale Scott, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Lew Welch, John Wieners, Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn. The ad included a quotation from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience that ends:

If a thousand men would not pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

— Henry D. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

(The Washington Post refused to print the ad "on the grounds that it was an implicit exhortation to violate the law", and the New York Times too, on the grounds that "we do not accept advertising urging readers to perform an illegal action" but thanks to the Streisand effect the word got out even better that way.) 

In addition, by this time thousands of Americans were refusing to pay the federal telephone excise tax on their phone service.

In 1970, five Harvard and nine M.I.T. faculty members, including Nobel laureates Salvador E. Luria and George Wald, announced that they would be resisting taxes in protest of the war.

In 1972, Jane Hart, wife of U.S. Senator Philip Hart, said that she would be resisting the federal income tax. By this time, every major I.R.S. center had a staff member assigned to be the "Viet Nam Protest Coordinator."

American tax resistance in the 21st Century

Tax resistance continues continues to be a background theme in American political discussion, and occasionally tax resistance campaigns break out in the United States. 

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, today's successor of organizations like Peacemakers and the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution, organizes conscientious objectors to military taxation and anti-war protesters who use tax resistance as a tactic. 

The "Don't Buy Bush's War" campaign in 2007–08, organized by Code Pink to protest the U.S. War against Iraq, got 2,000 people to sign a tax resistance pledge.

The Tea Party protests of 2009 were in part a protest against high taxes (in addition to the allusion to the Boston Tea Party, the name was supposed to stand for "Taxed Enough Already"). Code Pink even reached out across the ideological aisle to try to find some common ground.

Tax resistance is used in smaller-scale struggles as well. When 23 county officials in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania were charged with corruption, and the county nonetheless decided to raise taxes by 10%, residents rebelled. One, Fred Heller, recorded a song in 2010 — "Take This Tax and Shove It" — to try to rally people to refuse to pay. When a smoking ban in Lansing, Michigan cut into their business, several taverns there launched a tax strike in 2011. When the Seattle, Washington, City Council introduced a city income tax in 2017, the state Republican Party did not wait for the tax to be ruled unconstitutional, but immediately called for "nothing less than civil disobedience — that is, refusal to comply, file, or pay."

Take this tax and shove it
We ain’t paying you crooks no more
The good ol’ boys stole all our cash
And ran out the courthouse door

— Fred Heller, "Take This Tax and Shove It"

No taxation without representation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"No taxation without representation" is a slogan originating during the 1700s that summarized one of 27 colonial grievances of the American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies, which was one of the major causes of the American Revolution. In short, many in those colonies believed that, as they were not directly represented in the distant British Parliament, any laws it passed affecting the colonists (such as the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act) were illegal under the Bill of Rights 1689, and were a denial of their rights as Englishmen.

 

The firm belief that a government should not tax a populace unless that populace is somehow represented in the government developed in the English Civil War following the refusal of parliamentarian John Hampden to pay ship money tax. "No taxation without representation," in the context of British American Colonial taxation, appeared for the first time in the February 1768 London Magazine headline, on page 89, in the printing of Lord Camden's "Speech on the Declaratory Bill of the Sovereignty of Great Britain over the Colonies."

Prior to the American Revolution

The English Parliament had controlled colonial trade and taxed imports and exports since 1660. By the 1760s, the Americans were being deprived of a historic right. The English Bill of Rights 1689 had forbidden the imposition of taxes without the consent of Parliament. Since the colonists had no representation in Parliament, the taxes violated the guaranteed Rights of Englishmen. Parliament initially contended that the colonists had virtual representation, but the idea "found little support on either side of the Atlantic". The person who first suggested the idea [of Parliamentary representation for the colonies] appears to have been Oldmixon, an American annalist of the era of Queen Anne or George I. It was afterwards put forward with approbation by Adam Smith, and advocated for a time, but afterwards rejected and strongly opposed, by Benjamin Franklin."

The eloquent 1768 Petition, Memorial, and Remonstrance objecting to taxation, written by the Virginia House of Burgesses and endorsed by every other Colony, was sent to the British Government, which seems to have ignored it.

American Revolution

Bronze sculpture of James Otis, Jr stands in front of the Barnstable County Courthouse.

 

The phrase had been used for more than a generation in Ireland. By 1765, the term was in use in Boston, and local politician James Otis was most famously associated with the phrase, "taxation without representation is tyranny." In the course of the Revolutionary era (1750–1783), many arguments were pursued that sought to resolve the dispute surrounding Parliamentary sovereignty, taxation, self-governance and representation.

Representative proposals before 1776

In the course of the 1760s and 1770s, William Pitt the Elder, Sir William Pulteney, and George Grenville, amongst other prominent Britons and colonial Americans, such as Joseph Galloway, James Otis Jr., Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, the London Quaker Thomas Crowley, Royal Governors such as Thomas Pownall M.P., William Franklin, Sir Francis Bernard, and the Attorney-General of Quebec, Francis Maseres, debated and circulated plans for the creation of colonial seats in London, imperial union with Great Britain, or a federally representative British Parliament with powers of taxation that was to consist of American, West Indian, Irish and British Members of Parliament. Despite the fact that these ideas were considered and discussed seriously on both sides of the Atlantic, it appears that neither the American Congress, nor the colonial Assemblies, nor the British Government in Westminster, at least prior to the Carlisle Peace Commission of 1778, officially proposed such constitutional developments. It must be noted, however, that Governor Thomas Hutchinson apparently referred to a colonial representational proposal when he wrote that,

The Assembly of Massachusetts Bay ... was the first which ever took exception to the right of Parliament to impose Duties or Taxes on the Colonies, whilst they had no representatives in the House of Commons. This they did in a letter to their Agent in the summer of 1764 ... And in this letter they recommend to him a pamphlet, wrote by one of their members, in which there are proposals for admitting representatives from the Colonies to fit in the House of Commons ... an American representation is thrown out as an expedient which might obviate the objections to Taxes upon the Colonies, yet ... it was renounced ... by the Assembly of the Colony which first proposed it, as utterly impracticable.

Jared Ingersoll Snr., colonial agent for Connecticut, wrote to his American colleague, the Royal Governor of Connecticut Thomas Fitch, that following Isaac Barre's famous Parliamentary speech against the Stamp Act in 1764, Richard Jackson, M.P., supported Barre and other pro-American M.P.s by producing before the House copies of earlier Acts of Parliament that had admitted Durham and Chester seats upon their petitions for representation. The argument was put forward in Parliament that America ought to have representatives on these grounds too. Richard Jackson supposed that Parliament had a right to tax America, but he much doubted the expediency of the Stamp act. He said if it was necessary, as ministers claimed, to tax the colonies, the latter should be permitted to elect some part of the Parliament, "otherwise the liberties of America, I do not say will be lost, but will be in danger."

The Knox-Burke debates

William Knox, an aide of George Grenville, pamphleteer and subsequent Irish Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, received an appointment in 1756 to the American provinces, and after his return to London in 1761, he recommended the creation of a colonial aristocracy and colonial representation in the British Parliament. He was shortly afterwards appointed agent for Georgia and East Florida, a post which he forfeited by writing in favour of the Stamp Act. In his Grenville-backed pamphlet of 1769, The Controversy between Great Britain and her Colonies Reviewed, Knox suggested that colonial representatives might have been offered seats in the British Parliament if they had sought such representation. Knox submitted that,

whilst [the radical colonists] exclaim against Parliament for taxing them when they are not represented, they candidly declare they will not have representatives [in Parliament] lest they should be taxed ... The truth ... is that they are determined to get rid of the jurisdiction of Parliament ... and they therefore refuse to send members to that assembly lest they should preclude themselves of [the] plea [that Parliament's] legislative acts ... are done without their consent; which, it must be confessed, holds equally good against all laws, as against taxes ... The colony advocates ... tell us, that by refusing to accept our offer of representatives they ... mean to avoid giving Parliament a pretence for taxing them.

Edmund Burke responded to Knox, who had drawn up The Controversy between Great Britain and her Colonies Reviewed as well as The Present State of the Nation (1768) under the supervision of George Grenville, by opining in his political tract Observations on a Late State of the Nation (1769),

NOW comes [Knox's] American representation ... Is not the reader a little astonished at the proposal of an American representation from that quarter [of Grenville's]? It is proposed merely as a project of speculative improvement; not from the necessity in the case, not to add any thing to the authority of parliament: but that we may afford a greater attention to the concerns of the Americans, and give them a better opportunity of stating their grievances, and of obtaining redress. I am glad to find the author has at length discovered that we have not given a sufficient attention to their concerns, or a proper redress to their grievances. His great friend [Grenville] would once have been exceedingly displeased with any person, who should tell him, that he did not attend sufficiently to those concerns. He thought he did so, when he regulated the colonies over and over again: he thought he did so, when he formed two general systems of revenue; one of port-duties, and the other of internal taxation. These systems supposed, or ought to suppose, the greatest attention to, and the most detailed information of, all their affairs. However, by contending for the American representation, he seems at last driven virtually to admit, that great caution ought to be used in the exercise of all our legislative rights over an object so remote from our eye, and so little connected with our immediate feelings; that in prudence we ought not to be quite so ready with our taxes, until we can secure the desired representation in parliament. Perhaps it may be some time before this hopeful scheme can be brought to perfect maturity; although the author seems to be no wise aware of any obstructions that lie in the way of it.

While Knox, Grenville and Burke were not necessarily opposed in principle to direct colonial representation in Parliament, Grenville nonetheless conjectured that Parliament retained a constitutional right to virtually represent the colonial subjects.

On the American Taxation

Burke supported the doctrine of virtual representation in Britain. Yet in his Parliamentary speech of 1774, entitled On American Taxation, Burke responded to the suggestion that America was virtually represented in Parliament by remarking,

What! does the electric force of virtual representation more easily pass over the Atlantic than pervade Wales, which lies in your neighborhood? or than Chester and Durham, surrounded by abundance of representation that is actual and palpable? But, Sir, your ancestors thought this sort of virtual representation, however ample, to be totally insufficient for the freedom of the inhabitants of territories that are so near, and comparatively so inconsiderable. How, then, can I think it sufficient for those which are infinitely greater, and infinitely more remote? You will now, Sir, perhaps imagine that I am on the point of proposing to you a scheme for a representation of the colonies in Parliament. Perhaps I might be inclined to entertain some such thought; but a great flood stops me in my course. Opposuit Natura. I cannot remove the eternal barriers of the creation. The thing, in that mode, I do not know to be possible. As I meddle with no theory, I do not absolutely assert the impracticability of such a representation; but I do not see my way to it; and those who have been more confident have not been more successful ... My resolutions, therefore, mean to establish the equity and justice of a taxation of America by grant, and not by imposition; to mark the legal competency of the colony assemblies for the support of their government in peace, and for public aids in time of war; to acknowledge that this legal competency has had a dutiful and beneficial exercise, and that experience has shown the benefit of their grants, and the futility of Parliamentary taxation, as a method of supply.

However, Burke apparently qualified such remarks concerning America by stating in the same speech that,

The Parliament of Great Britain ... is never to intrude into the place of the [provincial legislatures], whilst they are equal to the common ends of their institution. But in order to enable [Parliamentary] ... superintendence, her powers must be boundless. The gentlemen who think the powers of Parliament limited may please themselves to talk of requisitions. But suppose the requisitions are not obeyed? What! shall there be no reserved power in the empire, to supply a deficiency which may weaken, divide, and dissipate the whole? We are engaged in waar,—the Secretary of State calls upon the colonies to contribute,—some would do it, I think most would cheerfully furnish whatever is demanded,—one or two, suppose, hang back, and, easing themselves, let the stress of the draft lie on the others,—surely it is proper that some authority might legally say, "Tax yourselves for the common Supply, or Parliament will do it for you." This backwardness was, as I am told, actually the case of Pennsylvania for some short time towards the beginning of the last war, owing to some internal dissensions in that colony. But whether the fact were so or otherwise, the case is equally to be provided for by a competent sovereign power. But then this ought to be no ordinary power, nor ever used in the first instance. This is what I meant, when I have said, at various times, that I consider the power of taxing in Parliament as an instrument of empire, and not as a means of supply.

William Pitt the Elder

The views of Knox, Grenville and Burke did not go unchallenged: William Pitt was amongst those who disputed that a Parliamentary right or power existed to levy "internal" taxes "for the purposes of raising a revenue" without the consent of actual representatives of the "Commons of America". "It is my opinion," Pitt said, "that this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies."

Colonial spokespersons

In 1764, the Massachusetts politician James Otis, Jr., said that,

When the parliament shall think fit to allow the colonists a representation in the house of commons, the equity of their taxing the colonies, will be as clear as their power is at present of doing it without, if they please ... But if it was thought hard that charter privileges should be taken away by act of parliament, is it not much harder to be in part, or in whole, disfranchised of rights, that have been always thought inherent to a British subject, namely, to be free from all taxes, but what he consents to in person, or by his representative? This right, if it could be traced no higher than Magna Charta, is part of the common law, part of a British subjects birthright, and as inherent and perpetual, as the duty of allegiance; both which have been brought to these colonies, and have been hitherto held sacred and inviolable, and I hope and trust ever will. It is humbly conceived, that the British colonists (except only the conquered, if any) are, by Magna Charta, as well entitled to have a voice in their taxes, as the subjects within the realm. Are we not as really deprived of that right, by the parliament assessing us before we are represented in the house of commons, as if the King should do it by his prerogative? Can it be said with any colour of truth or justice, that we are represented in parliament?

— James Otis, Rights of British Colonies Asserted

Otis, Jr., attended the Continental Congress of 1765 along with other colonial delegates. The resolutions of the Congress stated that the Stamp Act had "a manifest tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists" and that "the only Representatives of the People of these Colonies, are Persons chosen therein by themselves, and that no Taxes ever have been, or can be Constitutionally imposed on them, but by their respective Legislature." Furthermore, it was declared that, "it is unreasonable and inconsistent with the Principles and Spirit of the British Constitution, for the People of Great-Britain, to grant to his Majesty the Property of the Colonists."

Daniel Dulany, Jr., of Maryland, wrote in 1765 that, "the Impropriety of a Taxation by the British Parliament ... [is proven by] the Fact, that not one inhabitant in any Colony is, or can be actually or virtually represented by the British House of Commons." Dulany, Jr., denied that Parliament had a right "to impose an internal Tax upon the Colonies, without their consent for the single Purpose of Revenue."

In 1766, Benjamin Franklin told the House of Commons that, "an internal tax is forced from the people without their consent if not laid by their own representatives. The Stamp Act says we shall have no commerce, make no exchange of property with each other, neither purchase nor grant, nor recover debts; we shall neither marry nor make our wills, unless we pay such and such sums; and thus it is intended to extort our money from us or ruin us by the consequence of refusing to pay it."

Republicanism

For those sympathetic to republicanism, such as James Burgh, Catherine Macauley, and Richard Price, any tax revenue measures that were voted into effect without the direct representation of Americans were "unconstitutional" and "pernicious". Burgh felt that virtual representation was "subversive of liberty" and "unjust in its principles" and that the House of Commons must include colonial representatives when it voted on colonial matters, or operate by using the consent of the colonial Assemblies.

Heightening of tensions

The Americans rejected the Stamp Act of 1765 brought in by British Prime Minister George Grenville, and violently rejected the remaining tax on tea imports, under the Tea Act passed in May 1773, at the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773. The Parliament considered this an illegal act because they believed it undermined the authority of the Crown-in-Parliament. When the British then used the military to enforce laws that the colonists believed Parliament had passed illegally, the colonists responded by forming militias and seized political control of each colony, ousting the royal governors – with the exception of the American-born Royal Governor of Connecticut, John Trumbull, who was allowed to remain as the new Patriot Governor. 

The complaint was never officially over the amount of taxation (the taxes were quite low, though ubiquitous), but always on the political decision-making process by which taxes were decided in London, i.e. without representation for the colonists in British Parliament. 

Patrick Henry's resolution in the Virginia legislature implied that Americans possessed all the rights of Englishmen, that the principle of no taxation without representation was an essential part of the British Constitution, and that Virginia alone had the right to tax Virginians.

Efforts at Conciliation

This offer of actual imperial representation was likewise re-stated to the delegates of the colonies via the colonial agents in 1774, according to Connecticut-born Reverend Thomas Bradbury Chandler, in his publication A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans. In February 1775, Britain passed the Conciliatory Resolution which ended taxation for any colony which satisfactorily provided for the imperial defence and the upkeep of imperial officers.

Representative proposals after 1776

James Macpherson, a colonial secretary of British West Florida, defended the North administration in an officially sponsored polemic in 1776 named The Rights of Great Britain Asserted. This work replied to the Continental Congress' July 6, 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms by proposing that,

Had the Americans, instead of flying to arms, submitted the same supposed grievance [as the taxed though unrepresented Palatine counties in England had], in a peaceable and dutiful manner, to the Legislature, I can perceive no reason why their request should be refused. Had they, like the County and City of Chester, represented, that "for lack of Knights and Burgesses to represent them in the High Court of Parliament, they had been oftentimes TOUCHED and GRIEVED with Acts and Statutes made within the said Court, derogatory to their most ancient jurisdictions, liberties and privileges, and prejudicial to their quietness, rest and peace;" this Country [of Britain] would, I am persuaded, have no objection to their being represented in her Parliament ... If they are not madly bent on independence, let them propose the conditions on which they wish to continue as subjects ... The Legislature of this Kingdom cannot possibly depart from any part of its supremacy over the Colonies; but it is in the power of the Colonies to share in that supremacy. If they complain of being taxed without having the privilege of sending Members to Parliament, let them be represented. Nay, more: Let their representation increase in proportion to the Revenue they shall furnish. If they wish rather to vote their QUOTA towards the general supply, through their own General Courts and Assemblies, the resolution of Parliament on that subject is still open to their choice. But, as long as they assume the language of a Sovereign State, this Kingdom can enter into no negociation [sic], can meet no compromise."

The noted economist Adam Smith seconded this view in his famous 1776 publication Wealth of Nations when he recommended the Americans "to send fifty or sixty new representatives to Parliament" on the basis of the amount of taxes they would contribute to the Imperial coffers. Writing in October 1776 to Lord North in Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress of the recent Declaration of Independence, and particularly of James Otis, Jr.'s pamphlet Rights of the British Colonies and its endorsement by the Massachusetts Assembly, Governor Thomas Hutchinson said,

The Assembly of Massachusetts Bay, therefore, was the first that took any publick of the [Sugar] Act, and the first which ever took exception to the right of Parliament to impose Duties or Taxes on the Colonies, whilst they had no representatives in the House of Commons. This they did in a letter to their Agent in the summer of 1764, which they took care to print and publish before it was possible for him to receive it. And in this letter they recommend to him a pamphlet, wrote by one of their members, in which there are proposals for admitting representatives from the Colonies to fit in the House of Commons. I have this special reason, my Lord, for taking notice of this Act of the Massachusetts Assembly; that though an American representation is thrown out as an expedient which might obviate the objections to Taxes upon the Colonies, yet it was only intended to amuse the authority in England; and as soon as it was known to have its advocates here [in London], it was renounced by the colonies, and even by the Assembly of the Colony which first proposed it, as utterly impracticable."

Indeed, the resolves of the Continental Congresses of both 1765 and 1774 declared that imperial representation was too impractical on the footing that "local and other circumstances, cannot properly be represented in the British parliament". The British Government, similarly, does not appear to have formally requested discussions with the Americans concerning the issue of Parliamentary seats until 1778. In that year "the commissioners of the king of Great Britain," known as the Carlisle Peace Commission of 1778, made an offer to the Congress of "a reciprocal deputation of an agent or agents from the different states, who shall have the privilege of a seat and voice in the parliament of Great Britain".

Virtual representation

In Britain, representation was highly limited due to unequally distributed voting constituencies and property requirements; only 3% of the population could vote and they were often controlled by local gentry. This meant that spurious arguments had come to be employed in Britain to try to explain away and cover up the iniquities in its political life. Therefore the British government tried to argue that the colonists had virtual representation in their interests. In the winter of 1764–65, George Grenville, and his secretary Thomas Whately, invented the doctrine of 'virtual representation' in an attempt extend the scope of such unjust arguments to America, and thereby attempt to legitimise the pernicious policies of the Stamp Act.

In English history, "no taxation without representation" was an old principle and meant that Parliament had to pass all taxes. At first, the "representation" was held to be one of land, but, by 1700, this had shifted to the notion that, in Parliament, all British subjects had a "virtual representation." "We virtually and implicitly allow the institutions of any government of which we enjoy the benefit and solicit the protection," declared Samuel Johnson in his political pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny. He rejected the plea that the colonists, who had no vote, were unrepresented. "They are represented," he said, "by the same virtual representation as the greater part of England." However, the tradition of greater democracy amongst Americans gave impetus to the well-founded charge, voiced by Britons and colonists alike, that virtual representation was "sophistry" and "a mere Cob-web, spread to catch the unwary, and intangle [sic] the weak." The colonial insistence on direct representation as opposed to virtual representation has thus been seen by later commentators to have "usher[ed] in a profound political and social revolution, which rooted out most of the remaining traces of monarchic rule and feudalism inherited from the only partially complete English bourgeois revolution. The Americans carried through the bourgeois democratic revolution on a scale never before seen in history."

Colonial reactions

Virtual representation was wholly rejected in the colonies also who said the "virtual" was a cover for political corruption and was irreconcilable with their belief that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. In 1765, the American lawyer and politician James Otis, Jr., responded to Soame Jenyns' The Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies, by the Legislature of Great Britain, Briefly Considered. Otis' own publication was entitled Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists, in a Letter to a Noble Lord. He wrote in it, "To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes to the colonists on the cases of Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield, who return no members? If those now so considerable places are not represented, they ought to be." Writing in his 1763 publication The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, Otis declared that,

Every British subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British dominions, is by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of parliament, (exclusive of all charters from the Crown) entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great Britain. Among those rights ... which it is humbly conceived no man or body of men, not excepting the parliament, justly, equitably and consistently with their own rights and the constitution, can take away ... [are that the] supreme and subordinate powers of the legislation should be free and sacred in the hands where the community have once rightfully placed them ... [that the] supreme national legislative cannot be altered justly 'till the commonwealth is dissolved, nor a subordinate legislative taken away without forfeiture or other good cause. Nor then can the subjects in the subordinate government be reduced to a state of slavery, and subject to the despotic rule of others ... Even when the subordinate right of legislature is forfeited, and so declared, this cannot affect the natural persons either of those who were invested with it, or the inhabitants, so far as to deprive them of the rights of subjects and of men — The colonists will have an equitable right notwithstanding any such forfeiture of charter, to be represented in Parliament, or to have some new subordinate legislature among themselves. It would be best if they had both ... [Furthermore, the right of every British subject is that the] supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property, without his consent in person, or by representation.

Otis simultaneously refuted, in The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, a contemporary argument that attempted to rationalise virtual representation on the basis of the colonial agents' alleged influence on British policy. "As to the colonists being represented by the provincial agents," he wrote,

I know of no power ever given them but to appear before his Majesty, and his ministry. Sometimes they have been directed to petition the parliament: But they none of them have, and I hope never will have, a power given them, by the colonists, to act as representatives, and to consent to taxes; and if they should make any concessions to the ministry, especially without order, the provinces could not by that be considered as represented in parliament.

Colonists said no man was represented if he were not allowed to vote. Moreover, even "If every inhabitant of America had the requisite freehold," said Daniel Dulany, "not one could vote, but upon the supposition of his ceasing to become an inhabitant of America, and becoming a resident of Great Britain." The colonists and like-minded Britons insisted that representation was achieved only through an assembly of men actually elected by the persons they were intended to represent.

The argument between the colonies and Parliament sought to resolve how the British 'commoners' of the various part of the Empire were represented most constitutionally – as Daniel Dulaney, an American Loyalist and lawyer, put it "[the] constitutional authority [of Parliament's rights to bind American subjects] depends upon the single question, Whether the Commons of Great-Britain are virtually the representatives of the Commons of America, or not.

Pitt and Camden

The theory of virtual representation was attacked in Britain by Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, and his ally William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham. William Pitt argued in 1766 that the Commons of Britain ought not to tax the '"Commons of America" without gaining consent of their representatives in stating, "even under former arbitrary reigns, Parliaments were ashamed of taxing a people without their consent, and allowed them representatives. Why did [Grenville] confine himself to Chester and Durham? He might have taken a higher example in Wales—Wales, that never was taxed by Parliament till it was incorporated." He then said,

I am no courtier of America. I stand up for this kingdom. I maintain that the Parliament has a right to bind, to restrain America. Our legislative power over the colonies is sovereign and supreme. When it ceases to be sovereign and supreme, I would advise every gentleman to sell his lands, if he can, and embark for that country. When two countries are connected together like England and her colonies, without being incorporated, the one must necessarily govern. The greater must rule the less. But she must so rule it as not to contradict the fundamental principles that are common to both ... let the sovereign authority of this country over the colonies be asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, and be made to extend to every point of legislation whatsoever; that we may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever, except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent."

In his first speeches in Parliament, Lord Camden vigorously attacked the declaratory act which was proposed to mollify the crown on the repeal of the Stamp Tax. After his first affirmation of "no taxation without representation" Camden was attacked by British PM Grenville, Chief Justice James Mansfield, Robert Henley, 1st Earl of Northington, and others. He responded:

[T]he British Parliament have no right to tax the Americans. I shall not consider the Declaratory Bill now lying on your table; for to what purpose, but loss of time, to consider the particulars of a Bill, the very existence of which is illegal, absolutely illegal, contrary to the fundamental laws of nature, contrary to the fundamental laws of this constitution? A constitution grounded on the eternal and immutable laws of nature; a constitution whose foundation and centre is liberty, which sends liberty to every individual who may happen to be within any part of its ample circumference. Nor, my Lords, is the doctrine new, it is as old as the constitution; it grew up with it; indeed it is its support; taxation and representation are inseparably united; God hath joined them, no British parliament can separate them; to endeavour to do it, is to stab our very vitals. ... My position is this—I repeat it—I will maintain it to my last hour,—taxation and representation are inseparable; this position is founded on the laws of nature; it is more, it is itself an eternal law of nature; for whatever is a man's own, is absolutely his own; no man has a right to take it from him without his consent, either expressed by himself or representative; whoever attempts to do it, attempts an injury; whoever does it, commits a robbery; he throws down and destroys the distinction between liberty and slavery. Taxation and representation are coeval with and essential to the constitution. ... [T]here is not a blade of grass growing in the most obscure corner of this kingdom, which is not, which was not ever, represented since the constitution began; there is not a blade of grass, which when taxed, was not taxed by the consent of the proprietor. ... I can never give my assent to any bill for taxing the American colonies, while they remain unrepresented; for as to the distinction of a virtual representation, it is so absurd as not to deserve an answer; I therefore pass it over with contempt. The forefathers of the Americans did not leave their native country, and subject themselves to every danger and distress, to be reduced to a state of slavery: they did not give up their rights; they looked for protection, and not for chains, from their mother country; by her they expected to be defended in the possession of their property, and not to be deprived of it: for, should the present power continue, there is nothing which they can call their own; or, to use the words of Mr. Locke, 'What property have they in that, which another may, by right, take, when he pleases, to himself?'"

In an appearance before Parliament in January 1766, former Prime Minister William Pitt stated:

The idea of a virtual representation of America in this House is the most contemptible that ever entered into the head of a man. It does not deserve a serious refutation. The Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this their constitutional right, of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it.

Grenville responded to Pitt, saying the disturbances in America "border on open rebellion; and if the doctrine I have heard this day be confirmed, nothing can tend more directly to produce a revolution." External and internal taxes are the same, argued Grenville.

Modern use in the United States

Shimer College student holds "No tuition without representation" sign during protest over school governance in 2010.

 

In the 1860s, suffragette Sarah E. Wall of Worcester, Massachusetts invoked the principle of "no taxation without representation", initiating an anti-tax protest in which she encouraged women not to pay taxes until they were granted the right to vote. Soon after she began this movement, the Worcester city tax collector sued Wall for refusing to pay taxes, and the case reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1863. In "Wheeler v. Wall," the court ruled against Wall and held that despite not having the right to vote, women are still obligated to meet their tax burden. Even still, Wall refused to cooperate with the collector, and as a result, officers seized and sold her property in order to raise the money necessary to meet her tax obligation. After several years, Wall's inexorability eventually prevailed, as the collector began to ignore Wall and allow her to abstain from paying taxes. In 1884, Susan B. Anthony cited Wall's audacity and willingness to stand up for women's suffrage, stating, "for the last twenty-five years, [she] has resisted the tax gatherer when he came around. I want you to look at her. She looks very harmless, but she will not pay a dollar of tax. She says when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will give her the right of representation she will pay her taxes."

The phrase is also used by other groups in America who pay various types of taxes (sales, income, property) but lack the ability to vote, such as felons (who are, in many states, barred from voting), people who work in one state and live in another (thus having to pay income tax to a state they don't live in), or people under 18.

To become citizens of the United States, immigrants most often must be permanent residents for a period of time (usually 5 years). Permanent residents must pay taxes on their worldwide income and, in most cases, cannot vote. However, throughout the 19th century, many states did allow immigrants to vote after they had declared their intention to become citizens. This was primarily because these new states were populated in large part by immigrants who had not yet attained citizenship. Throughout U.S. history, non-citizens have been allowed to vote in 40 U.S. states and territories. As of 2005, non-citizens are allowed to vote in seven jurisdictions in the United States: Chicago and six towns in Montgomery County, Maryland.

In 2009, the phrase "taxation without representation" was also used in the Tea Party protests, where protesters were upset over increased government spending and taxes, and specifically regarding a growing concern amongst the group that the U.S. government is increasingly relying upon a form of taxation without representation through increased regulatory levies and fees which are allegedly passed via unelected government employees who have no direct responsibility to voters and cannot be held accountable by the public through elections.

A modified version of the phrase, "no tuition without representation", is sometimes used in disputes over governance in higher education in the United States to emphasize student's rights to a voice in institutional decisions. The term first emerged in a 1977 dispute at Union County College in New Jersey. It has been used more recently in disputes at Dartmouth College, UC Berkeley School of Law, and elsewhere.

District of Columbia

The standard-issue District of Columbia license plate bears the phrase, "Taxation Without Representation".

In the United States, the phrase is used in the District of Columbia as part of the campaign for a vote in Congress, to publicize the fact that District of Columbia residents pay Federal taxes, but do not have representation in Congress. In November 2000, the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles began issuing license plates bearing the slogan "Taxation without representation". In a show of support for the city, President Bill Clinton used the "Taxation Without Representation" plates on the presidential limousine; however, President George W. Bush had the tags replaced to those without the motto shortly after taking office. President Barack Obama announced his intention to use the plates with the motto beginning at his second inauguration. President Donald Trump continued usage of the plates with the protest motto after he was elected, though he has stated he has "no position" on the issue of granting D.C. statehood.

In 2002, the Council of the District of Columbia authorized adding the slogan to the D.C. flag, but no new flag design was approved. In 2007, the District of Columbia and United States Territories Quarters program was created based on the successful 50 State Quarters program. DC submitted designs containing the slogan, but they were rejected by the U.S. Mint.

Modern use in the United Kingdom

British Prime Minister John Major used a modified version of the quote, with the order reversed, in October 1995, when at the United Nations's 50th Anniversary celebrations he said, "It is not sustainable for states to enjoy representation without taxation," in order to criticize the billion-dollar arrears of the United States' payments to the UN, echoing a statement made the previous month at the opening session of the UN General Assembly by UK Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind.

Modern use in Canada

In Canada, Québec politician Gilles Duceppe, former leader of the Bloc Québécois, has repeatedly cited this phrase in defending the presence of his party in Ottawa. The Bloc is a Québec sovereigntist party solely running candidates in Canadian Federal elections in the province of Québec. Duceppe's evocation of the phrase implies that the proponents of Quebec's sovereigntist movement have the right to be represented in the body (which they are), the Canadian Parliament, which levies taxes upon them. He will usually cite the sentence in its original English.

Use in Australia

The first government of South Australia was by a legislative council, whose members were chosen by the Crown and from which office-bearers "Official Members" were selected by the Governor. John Stephens and his South Australian Register were among those who campaigned for democratic reform. Partial reform took place in 1851, when a majority of Members of the South Australian Legislative Council, 1851–1855 were elected.