How I Became A Voluntaryist: A Farewell to Tax-Financed Murder

Voluntaryist, The, Second Quarter 2008 by Knaebel, Jeff

At the time that I moved to India, I held the fantasy of eventual dual citizenship. Later, serious consideration of Indian citizenship dropped out of the picture because of red tape and regulations. However, being a foreigner without income, at least I pay no taxes except the excise, sales, value-added, and other taxes in the chain of production and distribution that are built into my ordinary daily consumables. Nonetheless, because of these taxes, my bread labor of the past still finances a big war machine.

The fact of unavoidable, built-in taxes is one of the reasons for not being a "legal citizen" of any country. People support the structural violence of the State simply by maintaining their citizenship status. When one becomes a non-citizen, as I would like to be, then one's position becomes that of someone who has been robbed. One is thus not responsible for what the thief does with the stolen money he takes from his victim.

In both the United States and India, governments have made it nearly impossible to live a decent and honest productive life. The State makes it impossible to live a decent (meaning non-destructive) and productive life-because its tax-levies upon our labor are employed to finance murder. The State has also made it impossible to live an honest life. In India, quite literally the sustenance of life depends upon bribes and kickbacks-because of government controls over the absolute basics (food, fuel, shelter). You can neither construct nor sell a house without government permission. Propane cooking gas requires a government license to purchase. Telephone connection requires government paper including photo ID. Food in government shops-sometimes the only available-requires a "ration card." Admission to government hospitals-the only ones affordable to the poor-requires "grease." All these and many other things require bribes: telephone line maintenance, electrical connection and line maintenance; reliable postal service; a seat in a good school; water connection; clearance of property title transfer; obtaining a bank account in government bank (often the only available); obtaining a passport and driving license. The list is endless. The pit of corruption is bottomless.

Since 1995, I have made my full-time domicile in India. I became Trustee and co-manager of meditation centers, helping to design and construct two centers. Working with Indian colleagues, I served as a small-time village social worker. I have assisted in small-scale school and library construction, village water works, and farming technology projects, book distribution, and an adult literacy program. I support education of Tibetan refugee children and have assisted Buddhist monks, a Gandhi Ashram, and a free school for children of widows. These are small-scale individual efforts. I am a member of Friends of Gandhi Museum Pune, and gandhisalt.org.

Current activities of my Indian wife include work for Indo-Pakistan people-to-people peace conferences, adult literacy for slum-dweller women, night shelter for the homeless, a municipal waste management composting project, saving old-growth trees of Pune city, peace education manuals (adopted by the central government), peace library and book distribution, and an international peace website. She is a member of National Society for Clean Cities, World Foundation on Reverence for All Life, and co-founder of Friends of Gandhi Museum Pune.