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All regimes defend themselves by providing incentives for passive compliance/productive labor and harsh disincentives for resistance, whistleblowing, non-compliance and organized (and thus dangerous to the status quo) protest. Given that visible protest carries the risk of physical beatings and arrest (and subsequent abuse), then the alienated citizen--unproductive and productive alike--will only risk joining "street" resistance if they no longer have a stake in the status quo.

Citizens with nothing to lose and no stake in maintaining the status quo are dangerous to the State (and thus to the Plutocracy), and so the State's first line of defense is to become a Savior State which showers entitlements as a way of providing voters and taxpayers with a stake in the system.

The second line of defense is to become a repressive Police State with an active secret intelligence program against domestic protest (as occurred in the late 1960s-early 1970s with domestic C.I.A. spying and COINTELPRO, the FBI's secret campaign to infiltrate, undermine, marginalize and/or subvert the antiwar movement).

These programs employed illegal entry ("black bag jobs") and surveillance, extralegal force and violence (creating and funding extremist front groups to commit the violence at arms distance from the Federal government), and psychological warfare ("dirty tricks," harassment, misinformation, setting up pseudo-movements run by government agents, threaten activists' parents landlords, employers, etc.)

The 1976 Church Committee formed to investigate the domestic intelligence campaigns concluded:

"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association."

Anyone who doesn't believe their government is capable of Police State repression and subversion of First Amendment rights should research COINTELPRO more fully. While you might have disagreed with the groups subverted in 1969, the line between "those radicals" in 1969 and "us tax protesters" in 2009 is thin to vanishing.

Nothing will be more threatening to the State and status quo than tax resistance/rebellion and former insiders (those whose belief in the system has faded) turning into whistleblowers on the web.

Here is one source text: War at Home: Covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it.

Put simply: the State holds all the hammers, and you know what happens to raised nails.

As German social theorist Max Weber observed, the State claims a "monopoly on the legitimate use of violence." Thus nonviolent, non-antagonistic, non-confrontational, perfectly legal opting out and radical self-reliance is the only viable response to the State's last-ditch attempt to sustain its over-reach by concentrating power, appropriating private wealth and ruthlessly suppressing overt resistance in a "dictatorship of the official."

For more on Weber's thinking, please read Science As a Vocation, Politics As a Vocation.

Unfortunately, the Savior State was only possible via an accident of favorable demographic and economic growth fueled by cheap abundant oil: a huge surge in productive population coupled with an equally massive surge in per capita income. Now that the demographic, resource and economic situation is entirely unfavorable, the Savior State is unsustainable.

The State and Plutocracy would be content to retain the State fiefdoms and eliminate or drastically scale down entitlements, but eliminating entitlements would remove the stake the unproductive class and much of the remaining productive class hold in the status quo. The State's self-destructive "solution" remains the same throughout history--borrow stupendous sums of money until it can no longer borrow more, at which point it slips into insolvency.