James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Not Ballots, Not Bullets: Wallets

I get the impression that many individualists have violent fantasies, kind of hoping for the day when it is time, as Claire Wolfe put it, to shoot the bastards.

I suspect that the revolution won’t transpire that way. Rather, I suspect a massive tax protest, against not just the federal government but the states as well. Probably in an age of runaway inflation and unemployment. And it won’t be due to enough people finally being persuaded of the virtues of liberty, anarchism, or small government. It will come largely through massive fraud, as people will feel they have no choice but to under-report income and over-report deductions, just to put bread on the table. People who pay taxes through payroll confiscation will try to get as much money back as they can; others will cease filing altogether. The more who do this, the less chance any one gets caught.

A couple of years ago I would have suggested that this will happen a full generation from now - accompanying Social Security insolvency; now, I’m suspecting it could be within a decade. Whenever it happens,if the President is a Gorbachev or a de Klerk, he will eventually concede reality. The transition to whatever comes next will not be pretty, but should be generally peaceful. But if the President decides instead to point his guns at the American people, THEN it will definitely be time to shoot the bastards.

1 comment:

  1. Your scenario has a truthful ring, and i believe that civil disobedience will play a large part also - the enforcers will push and encounter resistence back. Both thoreau and ghandi described pathways to peaceful change through non-coercion. It relies on community involvement with enough character in the characters acting to build relationships and solve problems in local reality, rather than watching character actors play their fictional problems out on television.

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