The Tax Man Cometh, Part 2

 

There are places in this world where evil grows like cancer in the soul of a dying man, spreading its black tendrils through the body politic until the whole damn thing rots from the inside out. And sometimes—Christ, sometimes—that evil comes wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase full of forms printed on government paper so white it hurts your eyes to look at it.

The anti-tax movement. Now there’s a phrase that’ll make your average politician break out in a cold sweat faster than a vampire caught in Sunday morning sunshine. Linda Upham-Bornstein, bless her academic heart, spent God knows how many years digging through the moldy archives to write Mr. Taxpayer Versus Mr. Tax Spender in 2023, and what she found there would make your blood run cold as January creek water.

“Since the 1970s,” she wrote, and you could almost hear the typewriter keys clicking like skeleton fingers on a coffin lid, “opposition to taxes has focused more on justifying the rights of taxpayers rather than reducing their tax bills.”

But that’s not the scary part. No sir. The scary part is what she found when she went digging deeper into the 19th century, back when America was still young and mean and hungry. The anti-tax spirit, she discovered, had always been twisted up with anarchism and anti-government sentiment like kudzu choking the life out of an old oak tree.

You want to know what real terror looks like? It looks like ordinary people pushed too far, backed into a corner where the only choice left is to fight or die. The Boston Tea Party wasn’t just about tea, friend—it was about what happens when decent folks decide they’ve had enough of being bled dry by masters who live an ocean away and don’t give a tinker’s damn about their suffering.

California’s Proposition 13. The UK Poll Tax Riots. The Yellow Vests in France, their bright jackets glowing like warning signals in the gathering dusk of democracy. These weren’t just protests—they were primal screams from the belly of the beast, the sound a civilization makes when it’s being slowly strangled by its own bureaucracy.

They used every trick in the book: non-payment, civil disobedience, mass mobilizations that spread through cities like wildfire through drought-dead timber. And sometimes—God help us all—sometimes they won. They canceled tax hikes, forced budget reforms, reshaped the very language politicians used when they talked about money and power and who gets to keep what.

But they never managed to kill the thing entirely. Like some unholy creature from the depths of hell, taxation always found a way to claw its way back to life.

Now, Michael Graetz—he’s a law professor who ought to know better—he wrote a book in 2024 called The Power to Destroy: How the Anti-Tax Movement Hijacked America. And Brother Graetz, he’s got a theory that’ll keep you awake at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling and wondering if the monsters under the bed might actually be real.

The modern anti-tax movement, he says, might just be the single most important political force in America over the past fifty years. Not civil rights. Not the Cold War. Not 9/11 or the internet or any of the other things we like to tell ourselves changed everything.

Taxes.

The power to destroy, indeed.

See, it’s not really about the money—though Christ knows there’s plenty of that involved. It’s about something deeper, something that burrows into the American psyche like a tick burrowing into soft flesh. It’s about race and culture and what kind of country we think we’re supposed to be. It’s about the very soul of democracy itself.

And the truly terrifying part? The movement isn’t just trying to lower taxes. Hell no. That would be too simple, too clean. They want to reshape government itself, tear it down to the foundation and rebuild it in their own image.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Indonesia, they’re dealing with their own version of this particular nightmare. Erik Dwi Putra and Ning Rahayu, God bless their statistical souls, calculated that 83 percent of Indonesia’s state budget in 2021 came from taxes. Eighty-three percent. That’s like building your whole house on a foundation made of wet sand and hoping for the best.

But where there’s oppressive taxation, there’s always someone looking for a way out. Like Nunun Nurbaeti and Muhammad Nazaruddin, who fled to Singapore faster than rats abandoning a sinking ship. Why? Because in Singapore, if you’re making less than about $20,000 a year, you don’t pay income tax at all. Meanwhile, back in Indonesia, they’re coming after you for five percent when you hit $5,000.

It’s enough to make a decent person consider a change of address, if you know what I mean.

Come January 1, 2025, Indonesia jacked up their Value Added Tax to twelve percent. Twelve. That’s like adding an extra mouth to feed at every family dinner, except this mouth never stops eating and never says thank you.

Bhima Yudhistira from Celios put it best: “The biggest winners are investors and business owners, while ordinary people are continually burdened.” There’s something almost biblical about that, isn’t there? The rich getting richer while the poor get poorer, and the tax man standing there with his hand out, grinning like death itself.

Over here in the States, Joe Biden made a promise before the election—a stunning pledge, they called it. He was going to tax the corporations and the wealthy, cut taxes for regular families. Four hundred thousand dollars annually, he said, like he was Moses promising milk and honey in the promised land.

But promises are like soap bubbles in a hurricane, and on January 21, 2025, Donald Trump walked back into the White House as the 47th president, and Biden’s promise went up in smoke like so much political rhetoric.

In Indonesia, they tried to start their own movement—#StopBayarPajak trending on social media like a digital wildfire. But it fizzled out faster than a match in a rainstorm. State repression, social fragmentation, the fear of being labeled unpatriotic—all of it conspired to snuff out the rebellion before it could really catch fire.

And maybe that’s the real horror story here. Not that people rebel against unfair taxation, but that sometimes they don’t rebel enough.

There’s this guy in Jombang, Indonesia—Joko Fattah Rochim—whose property tax jumped from 400,000 rupiah to over 1.2 million in a single year. A 400 percent increase. So what did he do? He showed up at the tax office with his payment in coins—200, 500, and 1,000 rupiah pieces stuffed into a water jug like some kind of modern-day Boston Tea Party.

It’s a small act of defiance, sure. But sometimes the small acts are the ones that matter most. Sometimes they’re the only thing standing between us and the abyss.

Ellen Thomas took it further. She deliberately kept her income below the poverty line so she wouldn’t have to pay taxes. “I do not agree with U.S. government policies,” she said, and spent time in prison for camping in Lafayette Park.

There’s something both admirable and terrifying about that level of commitment, isn’t there? The willingness to sacrifice comfort, security, even freedom itself for the sake of principle.

Others found smaller ways to resist: avoiding restaurants that charge VAT, steering clear of alcohol taxes, riding bicycles instead of buying gas to protest fuel excises. Like the Yellow Vests in France, each small act of rebellion adding up to something larger, something that might just be powerful enough to change the world.

Because in the end, that’s what this is really about—not money, but power. The power to determine the direction of our lives, our communities, our nations. The power to say no when the system demands yes. The power to resist when resistance seems impossible.

The tax man cometh, friend. He’s always coming. The only question is: what are you going to do about it?

No taxation without representation.

Those words echo down through the centuries like the tolling of a funeral bell, reminding us that some fights are worth having, even when you know you might not win. Maybe especially then.

And somewhere out there in the darkness, the movement grows. Legal or illegal, organized or spontaneous, it spreads like morning mist through the valleys of discontent, gathering strength from every injustice, every broken promise, every family pushed just a little too far.

The anti-tax movement isn’t going anywhere. It can’t. Because as long as there are taxes, there will be people who refuse to pay them quietly. As long as there’s oppression, there will be resistance.

And that, my friend, is either the most hopeful thing you’ll hear today, or the most terrifying.

Probably both.