Over four hundred years ago Etienne de la Boëtie penned this priceless advice:
| "I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer. Then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces." |
Since then countless rebels of various persuasions have ignored him, and rivers of blood have needlessly flowed in consequence.
His insight is: all government is totally incapable of sustaining itself. It feeds like a parasite on us, its host. If that supply of nutrients is simply cut off, it will wither and die; there is absolutely no need to "place hands upon it" in violent overthrow. All we need to is to turn off the money spigot and in other ways end the co-operation that makes up "the consent of the victim."
In America at least, thanks to the limits the Founders tried to place upon the government they were so unwise as to create, it is not necessary to use "civil disobedience" in that withdrawal of support; though there's nothing immoral at all in that kind of action. The key thing we should do it to stop paying "income tax." That makes up nearly half of all Federal Government revenues, and a larger portion of those of some State governments. And it's easy to do.
One consequence is that "withdrawing support" does not need the "blood, toil, tears and sweat" you may have supposed this page would evoke. On the contrary, every penny denied to government is an extra penny in the pocket of the resistor; we can simultaneously cut off their funding and increase our own!
There is more than one way to do so, but the best-established and most effective method is introduced here. Its designer is Irwin Schiff, and if you have any doubts about whether US Law requires anyone to pay income tax, dispel them here by reading on-line and without charge the first chapter of his remarkable book, "The Federal Mafia."
His method is not a "magic wand" that just needs waving once to make it all go away; it needs some homework, some study. But many thousands of people are using it and not one of them has even been charged with breaking the law. No wonder; there is none!
Although denial of funds to government is the most important, there are many other supplementary ways to hasten its demise. Take every chance, for example, to claim its handouts and goodies of which it boasts; the more it hands out, the more it will try to steal from taxpayers and so, the sooner they will join you in revolt.
And of course, in every interaction you have with its clerks, representatives, officers and "bureau-rats", follow the time-tested principle and question authority. It will quite spoil their day and "waste" their time - perfectly legally. The more they waste the less efficiently they can perform, and the less job satisfaction they derive the sooner they will leave and increase the cost of operating their department... you get the idea. Peaceful resistance; withdraw support, and have fun in the process!