FSK, commenting on a Picket Line post at his blog, asserted:
If you pay taxes, you are as responsible for war as the soldier who kills people. If you pay taxes, you are directly responsible for every bad thing government does. Paying taxes is immoral.
This representation bears some resemblance to the legal concept of conspiracy. One set of jury instructions put it this way:
[W]here several persons conspire or combine together to commit any unlawful act, each is criminally responsible for the acts of his associates or confederates committed in furtherance of any prosecution of the common design for which they combine. In contemplation of law, the act of one is the act of all. Each is responsible for everything done by his confederates, which follows incidentally in the execution of the common design as one of its probable and natural consequences, even though it was not intended as a part of the original design or common plan.
Or as another jury instruction said of a hypothetical conspiracy to murder: "the shot of one is the shot of all; they are all responsible."
There are a couple of glaring problems with applying the concept of conspiracy to taxation like this. For starters, it seems hard to take seriously once all of its ramifications are considered. For instance, I don't think FSK really believes what he's saying. He's said elsewhere that he has an above-ground job at which taxes are withheld from his paycheck. Does he really feel "directly responsible for every bad thing government does," and as responsible as the people who directly carry out those bad things? His excuse may be that he has to earn a living, but how is this different from the same excuse given by a soldier, Senator, or bureaucrat -- assuming you believe, as FSK says he does, that a taxpayer is just as responsible as they are for their actions?
Secondly, to prove "conspiracy" in the legal sense, you typically have to show that the parties to the agreement agreed to work together to achieve some common end, and that either the end itself, or the methods they chose to reach that end, were illegal. This isn't as hard to prove as it might sound at first. You don't necessarily have to prove that the conspirators actually met or signed onto a formal plan. As one set of jury instructions put it:
[I]t is not necessary to constitute a conspiracy that two or more persons should meet together, and enter into an explicit or formal agreement for an unlawful scheme, or that they should directly, by words or in writing, state what the unlawful scheme was to be, and the detail of the plans or means by which the unlawful combination was to be made effective. It is sufficient if two or more persons, in any manner, or through any contrivance, positively or tacitly come to a mutual understanding to accomplish a common and unlawful design.
and another:
[A]ll who take part in a conspiracy after it is formed and while it is in execution, and all who, with the knowledge of the facts, concur in the facts originally formed and aid in executing them, are fellow conspirators Their concurrence, without proof of an agreement to concur, is conclusive against them. They commit the offense when they become partners to the transaction or further the original plan.
Do taxpayers meet this sort of qualification? If you're putting on your prosecutor's-hat, you can probably look at this definition and say, sure, you can make it fit. But if you're defending the taxpayer against a charge of conspiracy, you've got a good trump card to play. In short, if your client is accused of conspiring with a government to commit illegal acts by paying taxes to the government -- how can you suggest that there was an "agreement" or "mutual understanding" if the government had to threaten my client to comply? That doesn't sound like an agreement to me.
Notes:
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