• If you have the choice between contributing to evil and suffering harm, does it change the calculus if the evil you're contributing to is committed by someone else, and the harm is inflicted by someone else (as opposed to, say, contributing to an evil inflicted by nature or the law of averages rather than suffering harm inflicted by more of the same)?
  • Is it really taxation by compulsion or merely the threat of consequences that requires you to weigh consequences of your decision just as you ordinarily would (cf. Arendt's comment about holding a gun to someone's head)
• Karl Jaspers quote (importance of taking personal responsibility for nation's actions)
• Me: "The government demands taxes from me and doesn’t say I have the option to pay them or not.  But it’s not that simple.  I’m choosing to earn income, knowing that for every dollar I earn, I’m turning over certain of its cents to be spent by the U.S. government." http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=19Mar03

You can't be blamed for doing something that is either your duty to do or something you had no choice whether or not to do.  So, if you are duty-bound to pay taxes, you can't be blamed for doing your duty even if that leads to an avoidable harm; and if you are compelled to pay taxes, you can't be blamed for doing something you couldn't avoid doing.  So does tax-paying really fit into either category?

"Paying taxes is like paying a valid debt, a duty, regardless of what the recipient does."

• Joshua Maule gives this argument, but says that if someone asks for money expressly for the purpose of doing evil then that's an exception.  For this reason, he believes paying explicit war taxes is wrong (or percentages of mixed taxes explicitly designated for war), but paying undesignated mixed taxes is okay.
• Samuel Allinson attacks the paying-your-debts analogy.
• T.S. Grimke works with this argument: "I am indebted to another. He demands payment. I am not at liberty to refuse, because I happen to know, or have reason to believe that he will employ the money, when paid, for unlawful or immoral purposes... My duty is very clear, to pay the debt: the use of the money, when paid, is at once his right and responsibility."
• Swaine goes into this argument at some length.  E.g. "...when the tax-gatherer comes..., he comes, not for a contribution, or subscription, or aid, but for property no longer the subject’s to give or towithhold, and no longer under his rightful control to do with otherwise than as the law directs....", "...As a person legally taxed, he has no right of private judgment on the subject other than a man has on the subject of paying his just debts...." "the tax is not the subject’s any more than the debt is the debtor’s to help with or to withhold. The payment therefore is his duty, for he is not morally free to decline it, although it will help evil."

"Paying taxes is like handing over your wallet to a stick-up man."

• William Lloyd Garrison touches on this argument, saying we should pay our taxes only grudgingly, but shouldn't resist.
• Tolstoy: "A religious man may not resist by force those who take any of the fruits of his labour— whether they be private robbers or robbers that are called 'the Government;' but a religious man cannot of his own accord assist with his property those evidently evil deeds which are carried out with means taken from the people in the guise of taxes."
• J.G. James touches tangentially to this: "It may well be questioned if the payment of rates or taxes is voluntary at all, since the account is presented in the form of a demand, and not a polite request. Inasmuch as payment is compulsory in any case, is not Passive Resistance merely an awkward, expensive, and an inconvenient mode of payment for all concerned?"

"What Caesar does with the money after I give it to him is his problem"

• Thomas Story gives this argument.
• Joshua Maule refines it,
• G.W.Gillespe makes this argument: "The Lord will not hold me accountable for the mischief that money, taken from me by force, would do when employed by others."
• John H. Dadmun: "if he makes a bad use of it, he is responsible; as I have no further control of it."
• T.S. Grimke argues this at length.
• Swaine also takes this line: "He who violates [God's] law must answer, and that is not you who pay the tax, but he who levies it if a bad one. It is he who misapplies the National Funds, not you who had no rightful command over them to apply or misapply."
• J.G. James has a related argument: "it is the duty of a conscientious citizen to pay an unjust charge if he has tried in vain to prevent the measure passing into law, on the ground that he is no longer responsible for the expenditure of public funds, after he has done his utmost to control that expenditure by legalized means" (note that Thoreau addressed this head-on in Resistance to Civil Government).
• Carl Watner turns this on its head, and says that taxation itself is evil, whatever the money gets spent on: "the ends (whatever Congress decides to spend it on) do not justify the means (the coercive collection of funds)"
• Juanita Nelson notes that a U.S. Marine used the same sort of excuse for killing in a war: “I’m not helping to murder,” he said. “I’m carrying out the orders of my government, and the sin is not mine.”

See also: mixed taxes