This particular bit has been taking up two slots in my inbox for a while, and it’s time to purge:

From “Sioux Warrior” at 2:54am:

why did you renounce US citizenship? are you fucking insane?

Um, yes… yes, yes I am?

And from “Sioux Warrior” at 3:02am:

ok you burned your ssa card. wow. You could have simply cut it up. You are still on file at SSA. it does not matter that you burned it. I get SSI income, I agree that the SSA really sucks ass. I want them out of my life. If an illegal alien uses your SSN, they won’t do anything.

I hereby disclaim all liability in connection with your use, storage, processing or retransmission of this information.

Why assume that the amount you’re being assessed really does represent your fair share?

And if that makes sense, why not pay it forward?

If the state is so good at doing the things it does, why not give it more of your income, your wealth and your labor?

Next time a tax reduction comes around, keep paying at the old rate.

When there’s a chance to show solidarity on your income tax or VAT returns, do so by adding a few extra percent on top.

Quit taking exemptions, deductions and credits.

When you’re going to pay for a meal at a restaurant, give the waitperson a few extra of the local currency unit and explain that it’s not a tip, but that you’d like it to be sent to the treasury.

Try those things and see how they feel.

And if you’re not willing to, you really ought to be ready to explain why not.

The short answer, of course, is an emphatic “no”, unless you’re going to adopt the patently insane position that we’re all criminals for doing so, as Francois Tremblay does in saying “We are all war criminals” — a position which I will contest to my last breath.

In exploring the question, FSK links to my first “Educating for anarchism” post, and elaborates on a theme that I’ve heard before — and rejected.

This post was originally going to be a reply comment to FSK’s post, but since it grew so long and was so long ago, I thought it deserved a post of its own, here:

FSK writes:

I noticed this post by Mike Gogulski, where he refused a job for the State. The fallacy in his reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes. Suppose I have two choices. I can do $10k of work directly for the State, or $10k of work in a wage slave job. Suppose my income taxation rate is 50%. In the $10k wage slave job, I contribute $5k directly to the State. Similarly, if I accept the $10k job working directly for the State, I pay $5k directly back to the State in taxes. (In some countries, income on State jobs is tax-exempt. I’m ignoring that possibility here.) If I don’t accept the $10k State job, someone else will take it, still getting paid $10k but perhaps doing marginally worse work. However, by refusing the direct State job, I am forced to accept a marginally lower salary. Overall, the net damage to the State by my refusal to work directly for the State is negligible.

“I refuse to work directly for the State” is an attitude that only works when vastly more than 50% of the population has been convinced “The State is evil!” By that time, the State has already lost anyway. Once a vast majority of people have been convinced “The State is evil!”, then it’s already all over for the State. In the meantime, if you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Hello, FSK! I’m finally circling back on this post, which has been open in a browser tab since, er… last year I’m just gonna reply to the bits that mentioned me.

The fallacy in his [i.e.: my] reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes.

This is true. However, you overlook something here, though you do kindof address it later — though I have a quibble with that as well.

If I earn $10k making sex toys (something which, as far as I know, no state anywhere actually produces, nor desires), and surrender $5k of my earnings to the state, the state receives a net benefit of $5k, minus collection and enforcement costs, which may be held to be negligible.

If I earn $10k making ICBMs for the state and surrender the same $5k in income tax, the state receives a net benefit of $5k cash PLUS whatever benefit the state assigns to the missiles.

By choosing to make sex toys which do not benefit the state in any way (other than by the taxes imposed upon them) rather than missiles which benefit the state directly, I at least keep my hands off of a transaction which would create greater evil.

I put it to you that by refusing to do the state’s work I am creating a benefit for freedom. Certainly, in the inverse case, you would not praise me for finding a quasi-agorist method of doing work to help provide the state with ICBMs. The object of the work matters as well as the economics.

That was quibble #1. Quibble #2 is this:

[I]f you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Arguably true, given today’s circumstances. However, in my particular case, there are only a very small number of professional translators who both speak English as their native language and who have a high level of competency in translating the Slovak language. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that I have a real niche market, and that there are only ten other people in the world, including me, who can deliver the same Slovak-to-English translation job at the same level of quality as I can. My refusal takes me out of the pool of available labor, and thus the state has only 90% of the potential labor force available to it. At any given time, this tends to make getting the state’s work in translating Slovak to English more difficult, as there are fewer resources which can be applied to the task. It might also have the side effect of driving up prices among those other nine translators who are willing to work for the state. At some point, when prices are driven up high enough, the customer stops buying.

However, there is yet another benefit. When I tell one of my agency clients that I do not do any work for directly governments, that I do not do any work on non-governmental company/charity projects that are funded by governments, that I do not do any work for organizations that derive more than X% of their revenues from taxes, that I do not do any work for organizations which engage in certain objectionable statist activities, I am making a contribution toward anarchist education. I have alerted one or more people at that translation agency that there is a moral objection which might be raised against taking certain kinds of work.

In many cases, that message may well fall on deaf ears today. Maybe only 1 in 100 translation agency employees might have their own beliefs modified by coming into contact with mine in this way. But it will be remembered, and perhaps in the future those same people might think over the issue again, or tell a story to a colleague or a friend: “Hey, there’s this Mike guy who says ‘All taxes are theft!’ and ‘I read FSK!’ and won’t take certain kinds of jobs from us, isn’t that funny?” And it can spread from there.

And now, quibble #3:

There is a moral argument for refusing to take jobs and income from the state. All of the state’s money and property is stolen. When we freely accept known stolen property in trade, if we do not become accessories to theft ourselves we at least become facilitators of that theft, in that if we refused to accept unearned wealth in trade and convinced those around us to do the same, then the criminals stealing it would no longer have an incentive to do so, as they could never spend it. I, personally, do not want to be paid out of money stolen from other people through taxation. Recognizing that eliminating this entirely under the statist system may be impossible, I still hold it as my own duty to minimize the occurrence thereof and to encourage others to do the same.

A drop, perhaps, in an ocean of statist shit. But it’s my drop, damnit, and I’d like you to see all sides and all possibilities.

Dixie Flatline of the No Treason blog adds additional commentary, to which FSK replies in An Example of Pointless State Resistance. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

The Consul, an affable man about my age, did his duty. He made certain all the forms were filled out properly, and discussed with me what I am doing. Part of his job is to advise potential renunciants of the consequences, to make certain that they are not insane, under duress or lacking sufficient knowledge of the law to appreciate their action, and to explore all of the un-thought-of possibilities which might lead one to back away from the decision. We chatted a bit about prior renunciants he is aware of. Apparently there have been a good number of them who renounced back in the Vietnam War era as a political protest, only to regret doing so later on and attempt to reclaim their citizenship via the courts, to little avail. Additionally, and interestingly, there have apparently been cases in which cult leaders induced followers to give up their citizenship as part of binding themselves more closely to the cult. When these become deprogrammed and attempt to put their lives back together, they may find sympathy in US courts voiding their renunciation and restoring them to citizenship status.

Anyway, I jumped all the hurdles and through all the hoops he offered, and he accepted that I know what I’m doing — or, at least, that I am well aware of all the risks. Inquiring as to my motives I told him that I’m after a political divorce, and that, no, it doesn’t matter that Obama won the election, as his administration will no doubt continue doing the real work of the people who actually own and direct the American system. I signed all of the documents, read aloud from the Oath of Renunciation a bit to satisfy a “swearing” requirement, and handed all of it over to him.

The final item, not previously known to me, is to fill in and submit an IRS Form 8854, a delightful document entitled “Initial and Annual Expatriation Information Statement”. The IRS wants a full accounting of my situation for the past five years, a statement of assets and liabilities and an income statement. According to the instructions to the form, because I will answer “no” to the question “Do you certify under penalty of perjury that you have complied with all of your tax obligations for the 5 preceding tax years?”, I will become subject to “section 877″, which among other things will require me to file an updated copy of Form 8854 every year for the ten years following my expatriation. The “Penalties” section of the instructions contains this gem:

If you are subject to section 877 and required to file Form 8854 for any tax year, and you fail to file or do not include all the information required by the form or the form includes incorrect information, you will owe a penalty of $10,000 for that year, unless it is shown that such failure is due to reasonable cause and not willful neglect.

I will have to answer “no” to that question, and thus I will be subject to this penalty, because since 2005 I have not filed a US income tax return. Even though I have had no income subject to US taxation in the last several years, the filing requirement still exists. By the sound of things, and since I do not plan on ever filing an IRS form again after this one, it looks like that by 2019 I will have accumulated $100,000 in penalties, simply for failing to do government-mandated paperwork. A blog doesn’t really allow one to communicate a sense of profound indifference to the fullest extent. Is it possible, grammatically, to be highly willfully neglectful?

So, a bit of weekend work ahead for me as I slog through the 8854 in order to clear the hopefully last bureaucratic hurdle. I have another appointment with the Consul at 2:15pm on Monday, at which I will hand in the Form 8854 and surrender my passport.

Besides having a rather lousy September in terms of billings, this comes today from the editor of a magazine I do translation and proofreading for, published by the company that is my biggest source of income:

Many clients have cancelled their advertising. Basically, the magazine lives [off revenues] from Slovak companies, with a few from abroad, as you have surely noticed. And there was a high percentage of banks and insurance companies….

Oh boy…

There was also a news story today about J&T Group — a major investment bank in the Czech Republic and Slovakia — cutting sale prices for new luxury apartments in a huge new project it is building on the Danube riverfront by something like 40%.

Rough waters ahead.

Workers in general do not care about profits nearly as much as they care about their own wages and well-being.

I’m not sure whether or not you fell off the definitional rails here. To the worker, his profit is his wages. More specifically, his profit is his subjective value of his wages minus the subjective value of the opportunity cost and the time+labor he forfeited to obtain them.

Let’s go through a likely and probable scenario for the creation of a new business in an Anarchist system:

1. A group of investors, be they relatively rich people, managers of a planned community or people interested in the boom of a town or neighbourhood, or a private bank acting for millions of normal people looking for a way to make some interest, see an opportunity, and pool their resources together.

With you.

2. These investors attract workers, who become the first owners of the new business. The investors give these workers a starting capital (as well as perhaps an ideal location or new ideas to use) in exchange for a set return on their investment.

Breakdown. Who are these investors? Santa Claus? They just come around and give the “workers” a whole bunch of money AND a great idea, in exchange for a “set return”? I’ve met banks that work that way, but never investors. Is it possible for “workers”, as you go on to describe more in what follows, to become investors? If so, why would their values and motivations change so much?

3. The workers get to work and pay off the investment and interest.
4. Having paid off the investment and interest, the workers are now working solely for themselves (self-management). They decide of their own working conditions and wages. They decide of their management and the future of their business.

The non sequitur just deepens here. Let me try to get this straight, for my own understanding. The investors come together around a great idea which can create a self-sustaining and profitable business for those who own it, and then they just give it away to the people they need twisting knobs, pulling levers and bashing on keyboards to make it real. Why? Would you, if you were one of those investors with the brilliant idea to create wealth and the connections to bring an organization into being that could realize that idea just give it away for a “set return” on investment? If so, sir, you are a true saint and a man of great virtue, one to be admired and sung of down the ages. Funny, I can’t find anyone matching such a description in the phone book or my history texts.

In the world that I live in, investors want to become part-owners. Yes, they want others to perform the labor. But they provide the capital to make that labor possible, especially within the window where success or failure is not known and all money invested may be lost. I doubt very seriously that this dynamic would change in any substantial way minus the state, or that it ought to. To me, it’s simply an observation of human nature, and I believe that it is not human nature that we ought to elect to contest.

The workers would have a strong incentive to make the business grow so they can pay off the initial investment faster, and thus have free reign. But when that’s done, the workers (the only people who legitimately own the business) have a much stronger incentive to secure better wages and work conditions for themselves than they do of making more profits. So businesses (not corporations, obviously, since the corporate status is a creation of the State), as organizations, would seek to improve the quality of their work environment and their service, instead of trying to expand or make more profit.

If we accept a ridiculous premise, we can arrive at all sorts of ridiculous conclusions. I’m using forceful language here because I know you respond to it and because I believe you are a person with his eyes open. The workers in your scenario might or might not be motivated as you suspect. They might be motivated not by potential future security in the maintenance of a self-sustaining and growing business, but rather by the grim necessity of earning a wage to feed their children. They might be motivated instead by a cultural diktat which says that hard work is virtue. They might be motivated by the continuing chance to steal from the cash drawer. They might be motivated by the need to maintain a certain wage in order to maintain a gratifying lifestyle. They may know nothing of economics, and nothing of political theory. They may have extremely short time horizons which renders speculation about their incentives meaningless or at best questionable. They may be insane!

That was a response to the first sentence. Now the parenthetical, “the workers (the only people who legitimately own the business)”: Huh? I do understand there is a historical and moral critique which suggests that those “employed” today ought rightly seize and legitimately own the means of production put at their disposal through employment. I also understand there is a position which states that workers “should” own their means of production. The reality of things is much different, though, even if we imagine starting from a utopian genesis in which all property titles were legitimate and in which coercion were never employed except in legitimate defense. Inequalities of wealth will still occur. They will be based upon such factors as natural resources available in the starting areas and the intelligence of the economic actors, and become amplified over time. Eventually there arises a group of people with the capital to become investors. You or I or the lowliest of our brothers might be members of that class. But they rise from the same stock! They are not going to look around with superhuman virtue, seeking places where they can offer to advance the species for something as shitty as a “set return”! Were you or I in their place, we would rightly and honestly seek better than that.

To the second sentence, I say again that there is a fuzzy barrier here between the concept of “wages” and the concept of “profit”. It’s made even worse now in that the workers have taken over the ownership of the business. What then is to be the logical blade which separates “wage” from “profit”? If I am a co-owner with a few others of the means of our production — and thereby the means of sustenance of our selves, our families, our values, our political philosophies and our blogs — how could this division even exist at all? I will certainly not appoint one of my comrades in the industrial collective as he who shall determine what is “wages” and what is “profit”, especially being that “profit” as defined is that which shall be swallowed up by those who exploit us. The enterprise has input costs and it receives sales revenues. That difference is called net income, or something similar. From that income, that excess, that “gross profit” in a broader sense than the accounting textbooks define, must be derived the fixed wages of all employees (shareholders/members/comrades), plus the amount to be reinvested in expansions (via marketing, territorial growth, hiring, product diversification, etc.), plus the amount that should be disbursed to investors as compensation for their interest, plus amounts to be employed in improving efficiency, etc.

Would the fully-vested co-owner of such an enterprise sit around trying to draw lines between “profit” and “wages”? Surely not! These categories have become meaningless to his calculations, whether those calculations serve only his own aggrandizement or some nobler ideal of group advancement. “Profit” as bogeyman has become meaningless.