My favorites were the gold fringe flag folks.

He was in that camp too. Again, federal employee. I’ve met many of them (federal employee tax protestors and sovereign citizen types) over the years, it surprised me at the time but not anymore. Now it just confuses me.

Yeah, federal employee doesn't usually mean "integral and knowledgeable part of governmental power structures", often enough it's just an average person who wants stability and not a lot of challenge.

True. The part that really confuses me is that they’re perhaps the clearest example of cognitive dissonance. They’ll literally say taxes are evil (common word they use) and still go work for the government. Only one person, when I presented them with this conflict, chose to leave federal employment. The rest have just looked at me like I was an alien and kept talking.

I don't think it's quite as surprising as you might expect.

The underlying logic of the tax protester arguments, to the degree that one exists, is that the law is a magic system where you can do what you want if you just find the precise words to invoke the legal magic. If you're a functionary whose job is to reject applications because line 17b was filled out incorrectly, your work isn't going to disabuse you of this notion.

Another parallel instance to think about: how many paid software developers are pro-open source and against paying for software? I can count at least one anecdotally, namely myself. :-)

I imagine it catches up to most of them, eventually. After all, they are protesting their "right" to illegally not pay taxes.