In the previous installment, I posited that no one can own 100% of a slave’s labor. The slave holder must provide for the basic necessities of the slave, including food, shelter, and clothing. Further, the slave has no incentive to produce to the best of his ability, only to do the minimum he must do to prevent violence against him.
Standard American history is full of pride in the narrative that we escaped the tyranny of the King and established a system of “representative government.” A common reason for the secession movement of the colonists is often simply represented as “taxation without representation.”
Many readers may be surprised to know that taxation, under the crown, was in the range of 1-3%. This is what the founding generation rebelled against.
Today, you pay over half of your income to the state in the form of all taxes, federal, state, local income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and hidden taxes built in to the products you buy (for example: Gasoline averages $0.46 / gallon and cigarette taxes average $2.61 per pack as of this writing.)
Over fifty percent of the product of your labor is taken from you by the state. You are over 50% a slave.
It’s a bit different from chattel slavery, of course. The slave masters have become much more sophisticated than that. They have created the illusion of freedom, but have cleverly put you under an increasing level of slavery.
You believe you are free, and you believe you own your property. But you’re not, and you don’t.
You currently live under a system of millions of laws restricting your freedom. You don’t know what most of them are. They say “ignorance of the law is no excuse” but any rational individual would easily see the ridiculousness of this premise. I’ll guarantee you: Right now, you are in violation of some law or regulation. You don’t feel the oppression of the law because government can’t possibly enforce them all universally. But get in any position in which you’re in opposition to the government, and you’ll quickly find that they’ll have a cornucopia of offenses they can use against you. You’re guilty.
You may think you own your property because you purchased it through voluntary exchange. But take a stand against the state, and you’ll soon find that they’ll take it from you if you don’t comply. Perhaps you have no children, and don’t want to fund government education of other people’s kids. Or perhaps you home school your kids and don’t have a need for the government’s “services” in education and don’t want to pay them, as you’ll bear that cost yourself. Try not to pay, and you’ll feel the wrath of the state in full force. They’ll take your property and put you homeless on the street. If you don’t agree with a trillion-dollar-a-year military empire, and don’t want to fund the aggression against individuals in countries you know nothing about, try to stop paying the state it’s income tax, and again, you’ll feel its wrath.
Slavery is much more comfortable today if you keep a low profile, go along to get along, obey, and pay over half of what you produce to your masters. You’ll enjoy the benefits that (what remains of) the free market provides you, while remaining in a state of belief that you’re free, programmed by your 13+ year government education.
If, under chattel slavery, an owner can only acquire 75% of a slaves output capability (a number we estimated loosely in the first part), then you’re only 25% off from that rate of theft in your own form of slavery. Since chattel slaves have no incentive to produce or innovate, there can be no dynamic economic system, and hence very little wealth produced. The new slave owners have fostered enough freedom to allow the slaves to create, innovate, produce, and create incredible wealth from which they can extract a massive booty, while disguising their violence behind such anecdotes as “the government (slave owner) is us.”
Government produces nothing. Everything it has, everything it spends, everything it funds is taken from the productive sector – you. There is genius and elegance in the way it has positioned itself as the protector of your life, liberty, and property while taking them all from you, and at the same time convincing you that you’re “free.” Even more genius is the fact that it has convinced you that you’re to blame if it’s not working the way you’d like it to because, after all, the government is “you” and you have a vote.
But let us not give them too much credit. While the state has been savvy enough to realize that they can have a much larger pool of wealth to extract from by allowing a certain degree of freedom, like any parasite they continue to suck the life blood from the host until they kill it, in the form of increased regulation, more laws destroying individual liberty, and destruction of the currency. Aesop is destroying the goose to harvest more golden eggs.
To paraphrase W. Edwards Deming, one day future generations will look back upon our era of the state and view it as the age of mythology. Today’s best thinking is tomorrow’s historical curiosity. The idea that you protect life, liberty, and property by taking life, crushing liberty, and stealing property will be looked upon as one of man’s greatest errors.
Wake up, accept the fact that you’ve been enslaved, and rid yourself of this fantasy called government.