A reader responded to ‘Why Didn’t Slavery End In America?' with a comment that essentially stated that taxation is the only possible means by which the poor can be helped at the expense of the rich, and took offense that I included taxation—specifically the income tax—as a form of enslavement. My response below is limited to clarifying my point from the article, which is that taxation is a means by which the few have always benefited from the many.
I am protecting the identity of this reader so that 100 savage libertarians do not jump on him. His assertion was the standard hard left redistribution scheme that calls for more taxation of the rich and more benefits to the poor, an argument that ignores the middle, where the money actually comes from, as the rich always have the leverage to limit their actual net taxation.
First off, the income tax does not target the rich. The belief that the rich somehow work for taxable wages like their slaves is among the false assumptions that permits the rich politicians to tax the middle and working class, ostensibly for the good of the poor, but in reality for the gains of the superrich, who are the ultimate slave masters.
Taxes always flow to the rich. Taxation evolved from pillage—directly from rape and plunder—and will always devolve to that basic form under extreme stress. Actual welfare money that stays among the poor is zero. U.S. plantation slaves were conditioned to spend any accumulated assets by year's end and were severely penalized for saving any money. The modern poor person is more subtly conditions to easily part with his/her money. My colleagues in the retail food business value the ‘food stamp dollar’ more than the cash dollar for the very reason that it is dispersed in such a way, and to a class of people educated to make impulsive choices, that a food stamp customer who shops with you with $100 on his card is more valuable than a cash customer that shops with $100 in his pocket. It flows through their hands and into large corporations.
You will notice that the media has cultivated the taste of the poor to extend only to massive corporate interests. This is obvious to anyone who works in retail food, where the poor purchase almost exclusively what has been designed to capture their dollar. Pepsi-cola is the single largest receiver of food stamp funds. As you pointed out, dedicated welfare to the poor is still less than dedicated welfare to the rich, such as military spending—and the rich get it all, that's the beauty of it. Wherever the money is supposed to go according to politicians it will ultimately go to the moneyed interests. Obama and Romney had the same top 15 campaign donors. We would be naive to think those interests will not always come first.
Think about this.
1. The way public schools area administered [Baltimore city for instance] guarantees a dismal education
2. Paying 1,000 a month per child to a woman on condition that the father does not cohabitate guarantees emasculated and therefore violent male youths
3. The organization of police departments around fighting the drug war guarantees a large prison population drawn from this uneducated and violent population where the apex of the cycle turns back down with the man's release as an unemployable criminal statistic. His only purpose is to menace the working and enrich the massive state, federal and increasingly private corrections institutions by repeated incarceration. This process sucks tax money indirectly from the middle, though the bottom, and to the top.
The entire process simply utilizes the poor as a vector for channeling money from the middle to the top. Check out all of the hockey stick graphs out there on the wealth distribution trends.
The poor remain poor.
The middle class slide toward poverty.
And the rich get super rich.
This is how the State, as a social organism, has always been designed. There has never been a government that has not presided over the redistribution of wealth from the many to the few. It has never gone the other way, especially not in communist nations, and the U.S. is currently operating According to principals from the Communist Manifesto.
On this point check out Free Domain Radio, The Truth About Communism.
My over all point is that wealth distribution from the many to the few is the very cornerstone and purpose of civilization, and that any attempt to reverse this will either destroy nations and societies with a return to rape and plunder as the redistributive method or will simply fail as the weight of greed and years pulls the egalitarian impulse of the primitive into the deep swift channel of avarice at the heart of our materialistic order.
“There is no such thing as a good tax.” -Winston Churchill
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” -Winston Churchill
“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”-Winston Churchill, in a speech in the House of Commons, 11 November, 1947.
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. “-George Washington
“I tried to put my broken world into perspective and understand this new world about me. I systematically studied the literature the Russians made available to us. I listened to their lectures, I talked to German communists, I studied the books in our library by Marx, Lenin and Stalin. I read other literature as well, but I could not convince myself that Bolshevik socialism was anything more than a clever scheme to keep a small group of elitists in power. I felt that if Germany accepted their political system, we would be exchanging a bad system for a worse one.”
-From Soldat by Siegfried Knapp
Jeremy,
Thanks for the quotes. Churchill is the best.
Soldat was a great book. I'm still reading The Forgotten Soldier.
The best of the bunch is Iron Cross Sniper on the Eastern Front, the best German war memoir I read.
I understand thinking taxation is good.
We are all taught that it is good.
All taxes are supposedly meant to do good.
I just don't get how someone thinks living under taxation—income and inheritance tax in particular—is not servitude.
The argument that servitude is good is one thing.
The argument that servitude is not servitude, kind of makes me wince.
Glad you enjoyed the quotations, James. Since today is the day we must render onto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, I think it is important to remember that taxes are collected at “gunpoint”, no matter how necessary and noble the use they will be put to and even when they are collected at the consent of the governed. If you don't believe that, don't pay them and see what happens! Like Alexander Fraser Tytler observed, historically democracies only last until the people discover they can vote themselves money out of the public treasury; then the democratic form of government collapses from financial instability and is replaced by a dictatorship or oligarchy. This process usually took about two hundred years to play out in the democracies of the distant past. Unfortunately, it appears the USA is well on a similar trajectory. In the meantime, enjoy some quotations from the great economist Dr. Thomas Sowell, which I believe are apropos to the subject:
“Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.” -Thomas Sowell, 16 Oct, 2012
"Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?" -Thomas Sowell
"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." -Thomas Sowell
“Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the left’s denunciations of society.” ― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America
"It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law." -Thomas Sowell
I always enjoy jumping on a baby-boomer mortgagor when they say "I OWN my house".
Quit paying those property taxes—see how long it's "yours"....
I can't consider property taxes without thinking of those dirt poor third generation home owners in South Baltimore who had to sell and move from their ancestral home because housing values increased eight-fold due to gentrification.
Hey James, interesting reading, thanks. Thought you might like the following.
Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe
by Joel Barlow - 1792
Chapter V - Revenue and Expenditure
A nation is surely in a wretched condition, when the principal object of its government is the increase of its revenue. Such a state of things is in reality a perpetual warfare between the few individuals who govern, and the great body of the people who labour. Or, to call things by their proper names, and use the only language that the nature of the case will justify, the real occupation of the governors is either to plunder or to steal, as will best answer their purpose; while the business of the people is to secret their property by fraud, or to give it peaceably up, in proportion as the other party demands it; and then, as a consequence of being driven to this necessity, they slacken their industry, and become miserable through idleness, in order to avoid the mortification of labouring for those they hate.
The art of constructing governments has usually been to organize the State in such a manner, as that this operation could be carried on to the best advantage for the administrators; and the art of administering those governments has been so to vary the means of seizing upon private property, as to bring the greatest possible quantity into the public coffers, without exciting insurrections.
Those governments which are called despotic, deal more in open plunder; those that call themselves free, and act under the cloak of what they teach the people to reverence as a constitution, are driven to the arts of stealing. These have succeeded better by theft that the others have by plunder; and this is the principal difference by which they can be distinguished. Under these constitutional governments the people are more industrious, and create property faster because they are not sensible in what manner, and in what quantities, it is taken from them. The administrators, in this case, act by a compound operation; one is to induce the people to work, and the other to take from them their earnings.
In this view of government, it is no wonder that it should be considered as a curious an complicated machine, too mysterious for vulgar contemplation, capable of being moved by none by experienced hands, and subject to fall in pieces by the slightest attempt of innovation or improvement. It is no wonder that a church and an army should be deemed necessary for its support and that the double guilt of impiety and rebellion should follow the man who offers to enter its dark sanctuary with the profane light of reason. It is not surprising, that kings and priests should be supposed to have derived their authority from God, since it is evidently not given them by men and that they should trace to a supernatural source claims which nature never has recognized, and which are at war with every principle of society .
Thank you John.
Somehow I knew it had been said much better in the past. The research is apprciated.