There are also cases in which you may violate laws that are reasonable in order to draw attention to political wrongs, as when civil protesters trespass or ignore regulations on peaceable assembly. When the point of doing so is to express your moral ideas, you have to do so in plain sight, which means you must face the legal consequences. (And you should take care not to undermine the public good, especially by causing harm to others, including the police, when you do so.) This is the classic kind of civil disobedience. The two kinds of exceptions came together during the civil rights era, when Jim Crow laws were defied in public ways. Rosa Parks didn’t merely accept the risk of being caught in the white section of the Montgomery bus; being caught was the point.

Your talk of redirecting your taxes is something of a red herring. When you overpay your state taxes, the state sends you a refund. There are legal ways of reducing your federal tax burden — by giving more to charity, say — but only within set limits. What you are proposing, though, is not legal tax avoidance but illegal tax evasion, which you are hoping to get away with. That means your aim is not the public, expressive one of civil disobedience.

If you aren’t sending a message, what are you trying to achieve? Nothing practical, surely: When it comes to the federal budget, your individual tax payment isn’t even a rounding error. Perhaps, then, you want to reduce your complicity in what is going on. I am on record as thinking that these clean-hands arguments are usually exercises in moral narcissism. In any case, your taxes go to large numbers of things that you probably favor. Today nearly two-thirds of the federal budget covers so-called mandatory spending: Medicare and other health expenditures, Social Security payments, unemployment benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. If secretly reducing your tax payments prevented you from being complicit with expenditures you dislike, it would also make you complicit in trying to reduce expenditures you do like.

When the president’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, called for ‘‘deconstruction of the administrative state,’’ the idea was a government that collects less, spends less and does less. Against that background, withholding your taxes to protest Trump is like burning down your house to protest arson. Perhaps you disapprove of the way the E.P.A. has been hobbled by its Trump-appointed chief. Then take note: The E.P.A.’s budget this year is around $8 billion; the head of the agency gets a salary of around $170,000. Administration is costly; deconstruction is cheap. When you consider curtailing your federal payment, consider all the forms of federal spending that the White House would like to curtail.

One great virtue of a decent society is that you don’t have to think about politics all the time. But surely the right thing to do when you believe the government is behaving badly is to become politically engaged. If you want to spend money on something, spend it on supporting the causes you believe in. Argue for them with your fellow citizens; get involved in political campaigns. That’s something you can do because we’re a democratic republic. You say you’re willing to resist in any way you can. Why not pursue these public, constitutionally protected forms of resistance and make the most of this precious political inheritance? If, as you believe, we are headed in the wrong direction, it will take the active work of well-intentioned citizens to help us find the right one.