Adventures in aggrieved entitlement: The nightmare world of tax protesters.
What happens to your life when grumbling at your tax bill becomes a moral crusade? Nothing good, as history shows.
Some years ago, when I was looking to get a novel into traditional publication, I read a blog run by a literary agent that specialized in critiquing query letters from authors pitching their books. The agent and her blog were known for being snarky and humorous, and reading her take-downs of poorly-written letters was entertainment in itself. One of the more amusing entries concerned a man who had written a novel that was, of all things, fanfic based on George Orwell’s 1984. (He was somewhat nonplussed at the agent’s warning that he couldn’t legally use those characters and the Orwell estate, notoriously protective of his intellectual property, was unlikely to grant permission). In this as-yet unpublished writer’s magnum opus, the main plot evidently focused on Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, facing not the oppression of Big Brother, but instead a tax audit. In the novel this was treated as a grave injustice. The agent quickly recognized that the proposed novel was a polemic on the evils of the income tax system, to which the author was comparing the crushing totalitarianism described in Orwell’s classic 1948 book. She pointed out that no book agent or publisher was likely to find this premise anything other than laughable. The blog’s commenters had a good round of fun mocking the idea and the author went away discouraged.
I was incredulous that someone would write a serious novel with that premise, but also curious about what kind of person would do so. The author had posted a comment, and following his handle led me back to his own blog which was on the same platform as the agent’s. I was totally unprepared for what I discovered. The man’s blog, little-read except by a tiny cadre of right-wing libertarians, was an endless rabbit hole of posts—some thousands of words long—railing against the income tax system of the country in which he lived, which was not the United States. This person seemed to be unhealthily obsessed with taxation and his interactions with the tax authorities. The final article, written years before I found it, was a farewell post in which the man expressed that he felt completely beaten down by “the powers of the state” and that his life seemed utterly useless. The despair was so palpable that I felt concerned for the man’s mental health. He truly lived in a nightmare world, but he left no doubt as to what he believed was its chief evil: the obligation to pay taxes.
