The problem is that being forced to fund activities we oppose is built in to how governments operate. We all agree and disagree with different programs. This problem is not about particular policies. Like Anatoliy, you are forced to pay for it. When you go into the office every morning – or the factory, or the store, whatever the case may be for you – your hard work, your sweat and passion, funds something that you find morally reprehensible. Is it the welfare state? Or the war on drugs? Or surveillance programs? You pay for all of them. It is government protection of the finance industry? You pay for it. The state has no choice but to incarcerate him.Įveryone should want to press the button.Ĭonsider any government program that you strongly oppose. But he will not budge in his convictions. Everyone in town affirms that he is an exemplary citizen and a wonderful husband and father. The state officials do not want to punish Anatoliy. He simply will not pay to fund the initiation of violence against a fellow man because that would be against the Law of Christ. He assures them that he has no political motivations. State officials suspect subversive intentions, and question Anatoliy. Knowing that the Tsar’s taxes fund war, Anatoliy abstains from paying them. A man – I’ll call him Anatoliy – chooses to live by the “Law of Christ”: he will never initiate violence and never contribute to violence. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.Ĭount Leo Tolstoy outlines the following scenario in The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894).
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