David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

opposition (“There would be no movement, no publicity”) is quoted in Michael Cooper Nichols, “Cities Are What Men Make Them: Birmingham, Alabama, Faces the Civil Rights Movement 1963,” Senior Thesis, Brown University, 1974, page 286.
    Walker’s reaction to the use of K-9 units (“We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement”) appears in James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (Macmillan, 1972).
    King’s reprimand of the photographer from Life (“The world doesn’t know this happened”) is given in Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Random House, 2006).

Chapter Seven: Rosemary Lawlor
    “For God’s sake, bring me a large Scotch” is from Peter Taylor, Brits (Bloomsbury, 2002), page 48.
    Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.’s report on how to deal with insurgencies is Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (Markham Publishing Company, 1970). “Fundamental to our analysis” appears on page 30.
    The description of Ian Freeland is by James Callaghan in A House Divided: The Dilemma of Northern Ireland (Harper Collins, 1973), page 50. Freeland and the officials and journalists being likened to “the British Raj on a tiger hunt” is from Peter Taylor, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein (Bloomsbury, 1998), page 83.
    Seán MacStiofáin’s quote about revolutions being caused by the stupidity and brutality of governments appears in Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford University Press, 2003), page 134.
    The principle of legitimacy has been articulated by a number of scholars, but three deserve special mention: Tom Tyler, author of Why People Obey the Law (Princeton University Press, 2006); David Kennedy, author of Deterrence and Crime Prevention (Routledge, 2008); and Lawrence Sherman, coeditor of Evidence-Based Crime Prevention (Routledge, 2006). Here is another example of the same principle. The following is a list of developed-world countries ranked according to the percentage of their economy that is underground—that is, the amount that is deliberately concealed by their citizens in order to avoid taxes—in 2010. It’s one of the best ways to compare the honesty of taxpayers in different countries.
    U.S.A.
7.8
 
 
Finland
14.3
Switzerland
8.34
 
 
Denmark
14.4
Austria
8.67
 
 
Germany
14.7
Japan
9.7
 
 
Norway
15.4
New Zealand
9.9
 
 
Sweden
15.6
Netherlands
10.3
 
 
Belgium
17.9
United Kingdom
11.1
 
 
Portugal
19.7
Australia
11.1
 
 
Spain
19.8
France
11.7
 
 
Italy
22.2
Canada
12.7
 
 
Greece
25.2
Ireland
13.2
 
 
 
 
    The list is from Friedrich Schneider’s “The Influence of the Economic Crisis on the Underground Economy in Germany and other OECD-countries in 2010” (unpublished paper, revised edition, January 2010). The list is not surprising. American, Swiss, and Japanese taxpayers are pretty honest. So are most of the other Western European democracies. Greece, Spain, and Italy are not. In fact, the level of tax evasion in Greece is such that the country’s deficit—which is so large that Greece has teetered on the brink of outright bankruptcy for years—would all but disappear if Greek citizens obeyed the law and paid what they owed. Why is America so much more law-abiding when it comes to taxes than Greece?
    Leites and Wolf would attribute that to the fact that the costs of tax evasion in the United States are much greater than the benefits: that if Americans cheat, there’s a good chance they’ll get caught and punished. But that’s completely untrue. In the United States, a little more than 1 percent of tax returns are audited every year. That’s tiny. And if they get caught underreporting their income, the most common penalty is simply paying back taxes plus a relatively modest fine. Jail time is rare. If American taxpayers behaved rationally—according to Leites and Wolf’s definition of the word—tax evasion in America should be rampant. As the tax economist James Alm puts it:
    In countries with effective audit rates of one percent, you should observe cheating levels of 90 percent or above. If you declare one more dollar of income, you would pay 30, 40 cents in tax. If you don’t declare that dollar, then you keep all of it and there is some chance you will get caught. But it’s .01 or less. And if you are detected then the IRS has to determine whether it is intentional. If it is