True, anyone who pays taxes has a hand in this. The issue is that deciding not to pay your taxes means that the dogs are set on you. This is not a free society, unfortunately. Perhaps bitcoin will change all of this. I've been contemplating the idea of a shadow economy where people work remotely and anonymously, getting paid in an anonymous currency and completely circumventing the current economic and political systems. Anyone hiring developers for bitcoins?
It's not an issue of paying taxes. We have a responsibility and a duty to control our government and our political systems and to direct them to the ends of justice. Whether or not we pay our taxes, we still have this duty.
That's what makes this so tragic. Aaron Swartz was one of the few people willing to actually do this, even when it meant poking at a sleeping bear, one that, in the end, he couldn't face.
I believe that there are at least three stances on this issue. One is, as you mentioned, involvement in the current system in a positive sense (steering in the right direction). Another is involvement in the system in a negative sense (destruction of it). The third is abandoning the system and using something else altogether.
The last option has the side effect of bleeding the existing one dry through inaction (within the boundary of the current system). It is similar to a software fork. We have seen many a project where the ones in charge have become rigid enough in their ways that, for all intents and purposes, the cost and probability of convincing them outweighs the cost of detaching from the infrastructure and moving in a new direction. For example, XFree86 and X.Org.
An issue that we face with activism is that the structure in place is supported by individuals with orders of magnitude more wealth and influence than what the activists have access to. This is evident in the case of Mr. Swartz where he was rapidly running out of money to fight his battle in court. We are at a disadvantaged position in that sense.
As such, every [insert your unit of currency] we pay in taxes go towards feeding the policies we so emphatically disagree with. With a nod to The Art Of War, a valid tactic in such a case is to starve your enemy and wage a war of attrition - in other words, reduce their material wealth while increasing our own. The end result is that nobody gets hurt yet they slowly lose their influence and the new guard have the opportunity and resources to build theirs.
The issue is that deciding not to pay your taxes means that the dogs are set on you. This is not a free society, unfortunately. Perhaps bitcoin will change all of this. I've been contemplating the idea of a shadow economy where people work remotely and anonymously, getting paid in an anonymous currency and completely circumventing the current economic and political systems.
A fundamental misconception of Bitcoin is that using Bitcoin as a currency will magically obliterate the Government's ability to determine income taxes. The government never has tracked currency for the purposes of determining income. They track transactions in whatever currency or assets the transactions are denominated. Thus, governments have been able to determine taxes since the days of barter, and they will continue to be able to determine taxes until long after Bitcoin is digital dust.
Although bitcoin transactions are public, if you cannot correlate a hash to a human then they are essentially anonymous. The 'leaks' can only happen when exchanging bitcoin for traditional currency. Fortunately, there are ways to do this anonymously too. With some care, it is possible to stay hidden in the true sense, even though the currency is exchanging hands in public.
