Revolution through nonparticipation

Factual Questions
1

I have a cunning plan. No it won’t work because human beings suck. But let it work for the hypothetical. If I don’t earn money, I don’t have to pay income tax. Conceivably, if I could generate my own power (let’s keep this easy, use solar panels) and grow my own food, and don’t break any laws, I wouldn’t need to interact with the federal government, would I? I could live in my compound in relative peace. I’d still have to pay some kind of land tax, I suppose, but that’s it.

Scale it up some. Now I own a large parcel in Wyoming, let’s call it 1600 square miles. All mine, and I’ve got sufficient US $ in savings to pay the projected property tax for the next 100 years. As above, I’m making my own off-grid, totally clean power and I’m growing my own completely vegan food. I invite others to come hang with me (sounds like a commune, and I suppose it is). So, this commune is well-organized and eventually becomes quite large. As people commit to living here they leave their US currency in a shared account banked maybe in Nebraska. That account is able to buy adjacent parcels of land so the territory grows as the population swells. Everything is nice and legal, and we’re not causing any trouble.

Is there a conceivable limit to how large our population can get before the federal government starts to feel the bite financially? Suppose, as we grow, the locals see that we’re living the good life and donate their land and join in? And suppose it gets big enough the Wyoming state government just quits because the lifestyle model we offer is far superior to corrupt old-fashioned democracy. Eventually, Wyoming functionally ceases to exist as a state, and in its place is a really, really big residence. Maybe Wyoming stops sending representatives & senators to play in DC. And so it grows, potentially absorbing other states.

For purposes of this exercise, everybody behaves themselves, and nobody hoards stuff. To the extent there is misdemeanor-type crime, it is dealt with humanely and fairly. Maybe the perpetrator spends time working an unpleasant but necessary construction project, or doing some other community service to mend the social fabric his actions have damaged. The rule to live here is, “Take what you need, give what you can.”

The whole thing becomes this massive, encysted, self-sustaining household that doesn’t use money, doesn’t import or export anything, and doesn’t violate federal laws (drugs the US government finds distasteful are still a no-no, for instance). At what point, and under what pretext, could the feds step in and … do what? At some point the Federal government would be unable to sustain itself because nobody works for dollars and there’s no tax money coming in.

2

This fails instantly because you need to pay property tax, and you can only do that with actual money, not through barter or payment in kind or anything else. You don’t have allodial title to the land, you own it in fee simple, at the sufferance of the sovereign entity that does own allodial title, and one of the sovereign’s rules is payment of property tax. (In theory, the sovereign is the state; in practice, the sovereign is the one with the most operable aircraft carriers and cruise missiles.)

Therefore, yes, you’d need to pay income tax because you’d need to earn money to pay property tax, so this isn’t a way to get out of income tax, either.

As for the rest, it comes down to what actually happens. Minor assault and theft might generally be winked at if nobody is willing to press charges, but if that rises to the level of whatever your jurisdiction calls “violence within a relationship” or “child abuse” or “elder abuse” (not Eldar Abuse, Slaanesh help you), some people are mandatory reporters, so if they find out, the actual government is going to step in and do things.

So, the government isn’t going to feel the bite, because they can raise property taxes, which you’re obligated to pay. Even if you don’t have any other taxes (unlikely, but maybe you can get money without having to pay income tax) you still have that one, and you can’t not pay it if you want to keep the land.

3

Is everyone going to make everything themselves? Or are you going to do some bartering? If the latter, you’ll owe the IRS: How the IRS Taxes Bartering | HowStuffWorks

Ignoring that, how are you getting nails, plows, hoes, replacement solar panels, clothing, etc. ?

4

Bartering with your neighbors for stuff is income. You’ll still owe Federal income tax.

5

It’s sort of akin to a population of people moving outside the country. The biggest difference I can think of is that the people who left would be less likely to try to collect welfare, social security, medicare, etc.

6

I think it fails because that lifestyle offers worse quality of life than federalism does, so you’ll never have enough people signing up for it.

Not directed at you, but some people seem to find it self-evident that the “agrarian commune” lifestyle is most desirable, which is entirely a personal opinion and nothing more. I don’t want to have to devote huge amounts of time to creating all my own food, electricity, etc, from scratch. when there’s a perfectly good system in place.

7

Oh, and one more thing: Prehistoric people didn’t live in Wyoming year-round. It gets too cold and dry in the winter to maintain human habitation unless you have an industrial and agricultural base elsewhere on the continent (at least!) feeding you the essentials of life via roads and/or rails and/or aircraft. Imagining that you’ll be able to build a no-contact commune with non-trivial population there now is purest fantasy, from a purely ecological perspective.

You could recast your fantasy elsewhere, but those places are all taken, and you’d have to evict someone.

8

Already accounted for–
[QUOTE=OP]
I’ve got sufficient US $ in savings to pay the projected property tax for the next 100 years…As people commit to living here they leave their US currency in a shared account banked maybe in Nebraska
[/QUOTE]
Now I suppose Wyoming, or the relevant county, could raise the property taxes or move in to enforce zoning based on how many people appear to have taken up permanent residence on the property, and if we’ve installed permanent buildings (nobody’s going to commit to tents in Wyoming). So that’s a good point.

ETA: And prehistoric people didn’t have wind-turbines & electric heaters. So…

But this is less about working out the kinks of how to make the commune work, and more about what the gubmint can actually do, fairly, to shut it down. Taxing bartering, for instance.

9

Eh, people have tried the commune thing thousands of times. The success rate is not great. You’d end up having the thing dissolve in a pile of acrimony and drama before you got anywhere close to the Federal gov’t noticing or caring.

As others noted, you’d still owe income tax, even if your not using a cash economy. If you paid that I doubt they’d care if you lived on a commune or not. If you didn’t…they probably still wouldn’t care unless you started moving large amounts of goods around that way.

10

Congratulations, you just invented the commune.

At some point, you’ll be fenced in by neighbors who won’t sell out to you. This includes the government, which owns a lot of that land already. Your growth stops there. And you’d better be perfect neighbors, or the conflict will bring the forces of the established outer culture (i.e., the government) down on you. No pollution, no violence, nothing the nosy neighbors will think is weird or deviant or unhealthy or un-American. And no secrets, because they’ll just assume all of the above and worse.

11

The federal government wouldn’t have to shut it down. If it grows as large as your hypothetical describes, it will realize that Wyoming needs the federal government more than the federal government needs Wyoming:

http://wyofile.com/gregory_nickerson/wyoming-where-independent-people-rely-on-federal-funds/

12

Depending on where you are, water rights are subject to government regulation. As is raising livestock and other aspects of farming. Who is slaughtering the animals and following FDA protocols? Once your group gets large enough certain aspects are likely to be under review for worker safety and compensation laws. You can say that it’s all volunteer or non-commercial but at a certain point/size the government isn’t going to accept that.

Kids still need to be educated, and in most places given vaccines and other health check-ups. Home schooling still requires gov’t supervision and testing. Will anyone in the group ever need advanced medicine that isn’t available on the compound?

Will vehicles ever be driven off the compound? How are you getting gas to run them?

Take a look at the Amish, probably the closest large group in the US with similar goals and needs.

13

You also won’t be able to undertake ANY large infrastructure projects without obtaining government approval on a number of levels.

14

Totally impossible to completely divorce a large group of people from society in general. Eventually you will need supplies, health care, fuel, or some other service. Sooner than that the government will raise property taxes, move to collect delinquent income taxes, and investigate child welfare problems.

15

I take it that this is an anarcho-syndicalist commune, where you take turns being a sort of executive officer for the week?

But as the Bolsheviks found out, once someone has the power, the urge to ignore democracy to feed your own vision leads to abuses.
I suppose you could bypass a lot of the legal/tax issues by converting to a religious order?
How do things work for the Amish?
The problem really is that there are 340M people in the USA, many of them legal residents with voting privileges. How many people are you going to attract to and support in a self-sustaining commune in Montana? Especially if “no outside commerce” means they aren’t getting cable, internet, and flat-screen TV’s. The number might affect county politics, but the certainly won’t make a dent in national politics.
We haven’t even talked about necessities like clothes - I guess sheep ranching and itchy underwear are on the agenda too.
Then you get back to the administration issues alluded to. In a huge crowd, you are going to find child molesters, wife beaters, the embezzler who will insinuate himself into the management of the property tax fund, alcoholics and general lazy bastards looking for a free ride. Your disciplinarian options are limited to “throw the bum out” and “call the cops”. (Best bet - get enough voters and money to take over the county so the “county sheriff” can deal with these, and property taxes are kept close to zero.
The experience with Russian collectives was “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”. Huge collective farms found that nobody had a deep interest in working hard to provide for everyone else. What do you plan to motivate your members, other than “in the future the collectives will overthrow the established governments and create a workers’ paradise”? you will end up having to pay in some sort of money, which the workers will want to exchange for chocolate and computers and other outside goods.

16

Such “independent” communities can only exist as a pimple on civilization’s ass.

If the rest of civilization just went away, what’s left inside the bubble is not self-sustaining in the long (or maybe even shorter) term.

If the surrounding civilization didn’t provide several layers of protection - civil, military, disease control, economic - the commune would quickly be wiped out.

(Which is why I have very little respect for “Libertarian” communities and towns, comfortably ensconced in Unca Sam’s navel.)

17

I was thinking more along the lines of an autonomous collective. :slight_smile:
But yeah, I never said I thought it would work. I mean, it would if the world were made up of people like me, but I realize that it is not. I was just uncertain about how far in advance the idea had been squashed by Big Brother. Pretty far, as it turns out.

So what I’m understanding is the system itself has to be the means of its own undoing. Pretty tight little system we live in, isn’t it?

18

Thing is, life as a subsistence farmer generally sucks balls. Yeah, you’ve got solar panels. What happens when your solar panels break?

Also note that 48% of land in Wyoming is federally owned, with another 6% owned by the state. Plus farming in Wyoming is pretty marginal, expect to eat a lot of barley and beets–hope you like the diet of a Russian peasant because that’s what you can expect to grow yourself.

19

You can easily replace the US government–simply get enough votes to call a Constitutional Convention, and replace it with, “Henceforce the joint is ours”.

20

A community that can only work if it’s populated by ideological/cultural clones can never work except as a self-selecting body within a larger framework. The longest-lasting such community I know of made it just 35 years before dissolving, and did so only by remaining carefully engaged with the world around it, including in commerce.

Correct. You’re not allowed (anywhere I know of on earth, except maybe Somalia) to take your portion of collective wealth and declare yourself independent of the host community that gave it to you.

Systems find their own stability, no matter how many ripples and sparks it may throw off. The notion that your tiny, encapsulated idea of “community” can displace the general community of 300-odd million who have found their own ongoing stability is… well, amusing.