Wage Slaves and Tax Slaves

Doctor Roberts, a distinguished economist explains all. In England it is different in detail but not in principle. There they exploit our ignorance using stealth taxes. When challenged they adopt a high moral tone, claiming that we have a duty to help the government help the poor. The reality has more to do with corporate welfare, bureaucratic self interest  and corruption. If you think the average man has less than 80% of his gross pay extorted you should consult a good accountant or a psychologist. See something about the numbers at Brown and the Budget

An early form of slavery was the Corvée which the Wiki tells us is:-
Corvée is labour, often but not always unpaid, that persons in power have authority to compel their subjects to perform, unless commuted in some way, such as by a cash payment;.... It differs from chattel slavery in that the worker is not owned outright – being free in various respects other than in the dispensation of his or her labour – and the work is usually intermittent; typically only a certain number of days' or months' work is required each year...... it operates very much like a tax for all intents and purposes, usually a poll tax...... In France the corvée existed until August 4, 1789, shortly after the beginning of the French Revolution, when it was abolished along with a number of other feudal privileges.......... Counterrevolution revived the corvée in France, in 1824, 1836, and 1871, under the name prestation; every able bodied man had to give three days' labour [ per year presumably but not stated - Editor ].

Three days pay per annum as tax would be a major improvement on the current 80%, that is four days a week extorted by Her Majesty's Government.

Tax Slaves Existing for Government by Paul Craig Roberts
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By Paul Craig Roberts  (January 2, 2001)
Alan Keyes, a candidate for the Republican 2000 presidential nomination, argues that the income tax is a slave tax and that Americans are slaves. He is correct. A slave is a person who does not own his own labor. After tax, successful Americans retain no more of the income they produce than 19th century slaves -- and considerably less than medieval serfs. The maximum that could be extracted from a medieval serf was one-third -- an amount extracted today by the combination of the payroll tax and the bottom rung of the federal income tax. Add in state sales and income taxes, and it is apparent that Americans are not a proud, free people.

Our Founding Fathers knew that an income tax was a slave tax, and they forbade it. It required a constitutional amendment -- the 16th -- to make us slaves. Republicans permitted the constitutional amendment to go forward because they believed most of the states would vote it down. The states did not vote it down, as few of the states had people with incomes high enough to be subject to the tax. The tax seemed tailored to hit a few wealthy northeastern states -- the very states that people blamed for high tariffs. This bit of "getting even" backfired, as it wasn't long before the income thresholds were lowered and the tax rates raised. The income tax net was refashioned to catch us all. An income tax is different from other taxes. An income tax gives government a claim to your labor, just as a slave owner had a claim to the slave's labor.

A slave who withheld his labor was likely to be punished. He would be put on short rations or whipped. If one of us today withholds from the IRS, the punishment is more severe -- several years in prison. The slave tax is very expensive in other ways. It takes 6.1 billion hours -- more than 3 million man-years -- to comply with the slave tax. In dollar terms, it costs us slaves an additional $200 billion to comply with a 2,840-page tax code -- more than twice the number of pages as the Bible and more than three times the words. The federal tax rules interpreting the code come to 46,000 pages.

The complexity is so great that it is easy to make a mistake and be subjected to "enforcement action." There are 481 separate IRS tax forms for 1999, an increase of 20 percent from 1990. Last year, the IRS received 110 million telephone calls asking for help in understanding the rules. The IRS did not know the answer 27 percent of the time.

Consequently, more than half of us tax slaves hire experts to prepare our slave-tax returns. The Joint Economic Committee of Congress, chaired by Sen. Connie Mack, R-Fla., has prepared a "Tax Complexity Factbook." It is available online at www.jec.senate.gov. You might say that we Americans are nothing like slaves and that nothing happens to us as long as we do our duty and pay our taxes.

The same thing can be said about 19th century slaves. As long as they worked at a reasonable pace, they had room and board and clothes on their backs. Judging from the number of IRS enforcement actions, a larger proportion of tax slaves get in trouble today than in the 19th century. At least a 19th century slave could run away, but where can we go?
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Doctor Roberts is right again.

 

Wage Slavery
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Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially in a total and immediate way. The term's analogy between slavery and wage labor may refer only to an "[un]equal bargaining situation between labor and capital," particularly where workers are paid comparatively low wages (e.g. sweatshops). Or it may draw similarities between owning and employing a person, which equates the term with a lack of workers' self-management. This covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical social environment e.g. working for a wage not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma or status diminution.

Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted at least as early as Cicero and Aristotle. With the advent of the industrial revolution, thinkers such as Proudhon and Marx elaborated these comparisons in the context of a critique of property not intended for active personal use. Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery also invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North.
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The Wiki gives a low key view of the issue and Marx's use of the idea. See the Communist Manifesto.

 

Communist Manifesto
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10. Conditions For Transition To Communism
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
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Have we got a communist government or a treacherous government sneaking it up on us by stages?