About 250 years ago, 56 men met in Philadelphia to address the British crown with a list of their grievances and rights. You may have heard of that group: the Continental Congress. Their main grievance, the core grievance of the American Revolution was: taxes. Taxation tyranny you might call it.
How very American.
You might think the issue was high taxes. Actually it was low taxes. On the non-American East India Company, purveyor of tea to the colonists. Those excessively low taxes allowed the East India Company to establish a monopoly in America. And bankrupt their small American competitors. Not good. The Continental Congress considered this a form of taxation tyranny.
And guess what?
Exactly the same thing is happening today.
Criminally low taxes on corporations, billionaires, and the otherwise excessively financially endowed have created taxation tyranny. In a vast array of essential industries, this taxation tyranny has allowed the establishment of monopolies and near-monopolies. Pressure on smaller American competitors has been unrelenting. The pressure on at least half the households in the country has been even worse.
And the GOP just passed a bill that extends and enshrines taxation tyranny. The legislation breaks Trump’s promises on Medicaid. And it kicks a whole lot of Americans right in the metaphorical teeth. The bill extends tax cuts from Trump’s first term that almost exclusively benefit the wealthy. Furthermore they add trillions of dollars to the national deficit. People making over a million dollars a year will see their incomes go up by 3.5%. People making 100K a year will see their incomes go up by 2.5%. 20% of Americans will see their incomes decrease as a result of cuts of benefits. Those 20% of Americans already make less than $35,000 a year.
The problem here is low taxes for the wealthiest. Those millionaires and billionaires aren’t paying their fair share. We need both the kind of intellectual revolution that makes this kind of taxation tyranny indefensible. And we need the kind of emotional resistance that keeps people from just giving up.
It is time right now to create a new list of rights and grievances focusing on the taxation tyranny that the American government is foisting on the American people. It may take awhile for people to feel the effects and fight back, but by the middle of next year, I expect and hope to see Americans revolt against the taxation tyranny of the super-rich.
How to rebel against taxation tyranny?
#1: Protests Against Taxation Tyranny
Back in Trump’s first term, Americans were quick to protest. And Republicans of conscience were quick to quit the Trump administration. Times have changed. Although there have been protests against the Trump administration since January 2025, the protests that have garnered the most attention have been anti-ICE protests in LA.
The anti-ICE protests center around the idea that people targeted are in fact working people striving to make a living and contributing to the economy in profound and positive ways. These people do in fact pay taxes and deporting them only impoverishes the area further. The conduct of the deportations seems to be pushing the people and the government toward war-like behavior.
#2: Boycotts
250 years ago (more or less), the colonists also fought taxation tyranny with targeted boycotts. Boycotts can be an effective tool for consumers to influence corporate behavior. One example is the boycott of the NRA that convinced some companies to terminate their relationships with the National Rifle Association.
One of the most relevant companies to boycott today is Amazon, which has been engaging in extreme tax avoidance for at least a dozen years. There are many other reasons to boycott Amazon based on its frequently disgusting corporate behavior and the stomach-churning antics of its founder, Jeff Bezos.
Other current targets of boycotts today include McDonalds, in that case for abandoning its DEI programs. These kinds of boycotts, for example those led by The People’s Union USA, led by John Schwarz, can gain steam online. And some of the most passionate boycotters are those who feel a company betrayed them (e.g., Target also abandoning DEI).
Boycotts, of course, trigger the ire of Trump and the GOP – when the boycotts don’t suit their taste. And they don’t always work. Sometimes they even benefit the boycotted company. But boycotters today can perhaps take a lesson from those determined Americans two and a half centuries ago – hammer down on getting people to comply with that boycott.
If you want to put pressure on Amazon, for example, hammer down on the companies that do business with Amazon. Trash them publicly. Metaphorically hurl rocks at their windows. Make businesses and governments cut ties with Amazon.
#3: Make the argument that the United States government cannot Engage in Taxation Tyranny.
It cannot morally compel its least wealthy citizens to pay more proportionally in taxes than its most wealthy beneficiaries. And make the argument with conviction and authority.
Effective resistance to the current regime of taxation tyranny will require people to mount challenges to existing state of affairs, along the lines of the challenges mounted by Senator Elizabeth Warren that led to the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As Warren noted in her 2014 book, the time “when even families of modest means who worked hard and played by the rules had at a fair shot at the American dream” has vanished. This is both a reality and a message that can and does resonate with people across party lines.
There is a profound and justified sense of betrayal, injustice, and violation in many parts of the population. Trust in American institutions has collapsed. This sense of betrayal powerfully motivates action. The very people enacting the tyranny know this and use it! It’s time for that to stop. Move that emotion from the extreme rightwing to the movement to stop the taxation tyranny!
Make the arguments with confidence, flair. Be willing to draw attention to the issue itself and to the people willing make the case to the American people. Ending taxation tyranny requires people who can write and teach and think in some way that is more engaging, persuasive and realistic than the current condescending crap that comes from progressives at universities and that manages to alienate normal people.
#4: Crowdsource.
For example, there’s a new app that allows users to send alerts about ICE agents in a vicinity, making everyone a potential Paul Revere of modern times. Apps like these potentially turn technology against the tech titans (e.g., Palantir, facial recognition, Peter Thiel) who are turning technology against regular people. The crowdsourcing apps may require continuous security upgrades since the new Paul Reveres have predictably already managed to piss off the government. Coders wanted – because clashes over ICE are likely to get even more important next year as things really heat up.
Entreprenuers wanted too. Young entrepreneurs are among the most idealistic among us. And they have economic motivation as well to fight the tyranny, because the current regime decimates small and new businesses.
#5: Form groups to resist taxation tyranny and to address other issues.
Individuals protesting, boycotting, making the argument, and so on, are better than nothing. But resistance to taxation tyranny also requires people contributing their talents to groups and group action. Not all groups outlast individuals but they have the capacity to, and a much better chance of moving from an easily repressed minor rebellion to achieving meaningful, full-scale reform of the government.
#6: Get alternative leadership.
It’s a truth not quite universally acknowledged that any effort to restore the US to taxation fairness and stamp out taxation tyranny requires better leadership. The current leaders just ain’t cutting it. So what can motivate effective leaders to resist the current regime of taxation tyranny?
New and better leaders can be motivated by idealism, intense emotion, intellectual ideas, by a need for freedom, or an affinity for crusading. The same things that motivate potential leaders also motivate everyone else. And understanding what motivates people can help leaders craft messages that encourage them to unleash their feelings and take action.
So, for example, people motivated by a need for personal freedom or expression might be swayed by messages that draw a direct line between a taxation regime that forces ordinary people to mortgage their time and their futures to scrape for survival. While Jeff Bezos has a 3-day $50,000,000 dollar wedding.
People, no matter what motivates them, differ in what kind of actions they support or participate in. For example, intellectual people often gravitate toward social networks with like-minded folks.
No set of motivational appeals or strategies will appeal to more than half the population, of course. But when an issue resonates with a spectrum of people, a hefty minority will come to favor change.
The primary danger of the current time is that people most in favor of rebelling against taxation tyranny these days seem to be detached, cold, out of touch. They don’t match the fiery realities that animate those who purposefully or inadvertently support the current regime of billionaire welfare queens.
So we need a generous dose of the opposite of coldness -the spontaneous idealistic rebels. The kind of idealists who will take action now. Because they feel it now and the feeling overcomes hesitation. The value these spontaneous rebels embody is courage. And if ever there was a value to idealize these days it would be courage.
#7: Strategize Against Taxation Tyranny
What’s most needed are leaders who are extremely committed to the big picture, a big picture in which dismantling the taxation tyranny that hamstrings half the population of the US benefits everyone. People who can relentlessly pound at that message until it gets through. Because it’s not like the billionaires currently being coddled by the GOP aren’t full of underlying terror of the world as it is now. They are in fact terrified. A calculated approach to wooing supporters across the financial spectrum would pay off and not just in the short term. The ideal would be to combine this sort of calculated big picture thinking with intense strategizing.
The people who want to make the world better and calculate how to do it need to join forces with the people who are just angry about being hamstrung, controlled, and dissed by the current tyranny of the rich.
For those who are motivated by the word ‘freedom’, an important word indeed, messages need to get to them about how the current regime silences them, tries to control what they think, how they worship, and what they do. Such folks need to understand they can do something about being lied to. Because they hate being lied to. They need to understand that people who oppose immigration policy are being arrested and deprived of physical freedom just for having an opinion.
There are plenty of people who don’t think too deeply on matters but who hold strong opinions just the same. Many of these people veer toward the gullible side. They may be difficult to reach as they are disinclined to let go of their ideas, but if some or many of these people can be peeled away from their current sympathies, real change has much more of a fighting chance.
A key point is not to insult these people. Instead, offer them something they might like – more info, secret knowledge, inside secrets, greater understanding of what controls the world around them.
In general, strategy is the willingness to go farther and deeper and even more patiently into the systems and ideas that foster the current corruption and the harm of the taxation tyranny regime. Strategy is willing to go to the roots and dig them out.
Strategy looks at outcomes not just principles and challenges systems that others think are impossible to challenge. Strategic thinkers can draw on intellectual thinkers to come up with the philosophy and ideas that give coherence to a point of view and draw people in. The idea behind strategy is to effect the necessary change at a systemic level, not a superficial level.
The bottom line is that everyone can contribute.
The moderate, the timid, the enraged, the practical, the defiant, the entrepreneurial, and everyone else. We have to challenge the conventional wisdom holding sway over far too many people. But that’s how social progress happens.
The underlying reality is that more than half the country is already pretty fed up. They just don’t know how much better things could be when the taxation tyranny regime is overthrown. Let’s let them know.
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