Proportional slavery

Are we just slaves?

No really, this is a serious question. A person can be enslaved in various ways due to their own bad choices, and of course by the choices of others. But is it possible that many of us (if not our entire nation) are for all practical purposes enslaved, but too distracted to realize it?

Now before you stop reading, let's frame the question in a slightly different context. Were the African American people in the South prior to the Civil War slaves? You can't seriously be asking that question, you must be thinking. Yes, I am asking it, although I know the answer as well as you do. Perhaps they were just "part slaves" because some of them managed to save up enough money to buy their own freedom (yes, many of them were paid). Thus, some were able to leave through the prescribed means of the system they were under. Maybe that makes them only, say, 90% slaves?

This flies in the face of reason. They were 100% enslaved, pure and simple whether they were paid or not. It is morally repugnant to argue otherwise. They did not have control over their own lives in any meaningful sense, or control over their own decisions, as their opportunities were limited artificially by their masters on purpose. Any of them caught trying to escape were returned to their enslavement and punished or even killed.

Now take a deep breath, forget for just a moment all of your preconceived notions about our own current situation, and hop on this train of thought for a little ride.

What is This Freedom You Speak of?

What does it mean to be free? Not a little bit free, but truly free? And why is freedom so important? The answer lies within the minds and hearts of every human being. While Locke and the Founding Fathers and others have done a wonderful job helping us to understand the answers, we usually need not go further than what our own conscience tells us. The meaning of freedom is strikingly simple: agency, ownership, and responsibility. But those words are too broad left alone, so let's define them further following our intuition.

To have agency is to be able to make choices without coercion. Nobody is to take away that agency from you unless you specifically harmed another's agency. In philosophical parlance, this is called violence against another individual or their natural rights, whether it is physical in nature or not. You have a fundamental, God-given right to live your life the way you see fit, so long as you do not infringe the right of others to do the same. If you do infringe someone else's right to live their life the way they see fit, that person (and society at large, and thus the government by delegation) has a legal opportunity to ensure justice is met and that you are punished accordingly. But that is the only time you may justly be deprived of your right to agency in any way (for justice's sake).

Ownership is the concept of controlling a limited, scarce resource that you have earned or intrinsically have. Among the things you automatically own are your time, your talents, and the fruit of your labor; although the latter may just be a manifestation of your time and talents. You have a right to control what you produce, and a right to control what you already legally own such as land, houses, financial assets, etc. You also have a right to enter into a transaction with anybody else (note, I said anybody) to exchange something you own for something that you want, as long as the other party in the transaction agrees. You cannot force them to agree to any terms, and they cannot force you, but you voluntarily agree together to a set of terms that are favorable to (hopefully) both parties. In such transactions of resources, information in the marketplace from yours or others' previous transactions inform the terms. This exchange forms the core of what is called a free market, and when viewed on a large economic scale it is referred to as capitalism. The free exchange of goods via contracts, and the producing of new goods by those using their rightfully owned resources is all there is to capitalism.(1) If anybody coerces you into not being able to transact the way you and another party wish to, or threatens you with violence of any kind if you do not give up some of what you own (your time, work, talents, property, etc.), then they are infringing your natural(2) right to ownership.

Responsibility at its core is the requirement that you not infringe the two basic rights of agency and ownership, and that you uphold these rights in all of their proper manifestations for others completely. Anything less is essentially advocating a form of slavery! (Let that sink in for a moment.) There are some additional responsibilities, such as a responsibility to accept the consequences of your actions. This includes receiving the application of justice. It includes a responsibility to not retaliate against someone or attempt to curb his or her use of their natural rights when they have not infringed the natural rights of others. It includes providing for any children you have; e.g. you had an opportunity and choice to engage in sexual intercourse with another willing person, but you do not have an inherent right to then avoid the consequences of doing so. As your children grow in their capacity to exercise their agency, you have a responsibility to let them actually do so and allow them to face the consequences of their actions. Of course, you should teach them as much as you can along the way so that they choose to use their agency wisely.

Are We Free Today?

The foregoing principles all make sense, and they form a simple framework against which we can decide what promotes freedom and what does not. But here is where the ears usually get plugged, when we start applying this to our current situation. Let's start with a candidate that people have accepted for far too long: income tax. There isn't a single person I know that would like to have taxes raised, or really be taxed much at all (there are those strange creatures out there who do, but they are rare). We inherently understand that taxes are bad, and we all have this awful helplessness deep down about them that they might just be immoral and not the best way to do things. However, we convince ourselves that our government wouldn't function without them and that they are somehow a necessary evil. But are they really necessary? It has been discovered that if we were to take away all of the federal personal income tax receipts from the government, and reduce government by that size, we would have a federal government about the size it was in...1999. Yes, you read that right. We could have a 1999-sized government, with zero personal income tax. Perchance it is not so necessary after all?

Individual income tax is identifiable as not a necessary evil, but it is even worse than just being unnecessary. It can be easily shown that it is a violation of property rights; it is a form of slavery. It is estimated that we individually work until around March or April every year to cover the taxes we pay that year. For those that claim you can get out of it by dropping below the poverty line, or not having a job, does that seem like much of a choice? In that state we can't live, or else we live on the dole and essentially are advocating the slavery of the rest of society to pay for us. The choice is to accept slavery either way. You may have heard some people in government refer to our tax system as voluntary. But is it really? What happens if you have income but do not pay your income tax? Eventually, you will get a notice from the IRS. If you ignore it for long they will send armed agents to your house, who will kill you if you resist, or throw you in jail if you don't resist but don't pay. So, if you don't agree to an obfuscated form of slavery, they will subject you to overt slavery and a complete loss of freedom. Oh and by the way, if you leave the country but are still a US citizen, you still owe your taxes, and they will still eventually get you. If you do a private transaction and do not pay taxes on any income, it is in the tax code that even barter of that nature is taxable on the dollar value of whatever you transacted. In practical terms there is no escape.

Another example is the use of dollars (Federal Reserve Notes) themselves. The Federal Reserve controls the money supply along with its cohorts the banks as they engage in fractional reserve lending. They have depreciated the value of the dollar by over 95% since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. While there were financial panics before that (due to banks doing the same thing by overissuing specie!), the overall value of what people owned stayed largely stable, if not being subject to a slightly deflationary environment. Slow deflation actually rewards savers modestly, and is not to be feared. Nowadays if you save your money the Fed essentially will tax it via inflation of the money supply. What's worse is that due to the mechanics of monetary velocity, the rich and politically well-connected get the newly printed dollars first and can spend it before prices rise, and you get stuck with the bill indirectly. Your property is stolen.

No problem, let's use a different currency, you say? By law, you cannot. You are expressly forbidden to create a new currency, even one backed by gold (thus not being nearly so subject to the problem of inflation), or else the Secret Service will raid your operation and throw you in jail. Nope, only the Federal Reserve and their friends the bankers are allowed to counterfeit money, and you must accept the damage they do to your own savings and asset values.

But otherwise we still have a lot of freedom, right? It can't go too far beyond that, we might surmise. Well, let's take something seemingly very disconnected with any of this and see. You go out and buy a bottle of Sprite. You got paid yesterday, so inflation isn't an issue, and you're a poor college student who doesn't make enough money to pay taxes. (Scratch that, make it Coke because you have a project due and need to stay up working on it.) You do a quick, arms-length transaction that benefits the store owner and yourself, with no taxes involved besides sales tax, but that was voluntary on your part to purchase the soda, so that's relatively better. No problem.

Or is there no problem? Take a look at the label, and you'll notice on the ingredient list (ha! that list is there mandated by law, increasing the cost of production!) that there is no cane sugar, but instead it contains high fructose corn syrup. What has that got to do with anything? The question is why do they use the real sugar in Coke in other countries (even in Europe) but not the US? It is due to stifling regulation on the price of sugar, presumably to protect american sugar producers. All it has really done is give us Coke that doesn't taste as good, and high sugar prices, not to mention other knock-on effects of price fixing. Price fixing is inherently anti-freedom, because it ties the hands of other parties in transactions such that they can't transact the way that is in their own best interest. It inserts a third party by force of law into every transaction, who has the power to dictate terms to one or both parties. It is a form of coercion, in an area that the coercive party has no business sticking their nose.

We can find thousands upon thousands of such examples. It permeates our lives, even though it appears largely hidden from view at first. Just because we cannot see them easily does not mean the problems do not exist, or that they are not going to destroy our freedom entirely in the end. An undiscovered cancer often does not manifest any symptoms until it is too late, or nearly so. These distortions and reductions of freedom benefit a powerful few at the expense of the many.

The Curse of Collectivism

There are certain ideologies promoting the common good or doing our part, but in reality the common good is far and away best achieved in the freest society. Are there poor among us? Set up a charity, and take voluntary donations. Is there lying and fraud? Investigate, punish, and apply justice for those who have had their rights violated, but never punish a crime before it is committed.(3)

Every form of collectivism (be it corporatism/fascism, socialism, communism, chrony capitalism, and any number of other -isms) is just an immoral justification for the reduction of individual freedom; their tantalizing promise of everyone being equal in unjustifiable ways is really just a pretty face on a maggot-infested ideology that has proven to provide misery for those subject to it, time and again. Don't fall for the siren call of wealth redistribution or of giving up a little liberty for a little security. In all cases, you will effectively lose your wealth, your liberty, and your security, and be left to beg at the hands of those who you thought would be your saviors.

Proportional Slavery

Are we slaves? Maybe just 10% slaves? Maybe 30% slaves? Are we enslaved at all? If so, and we do nothing about it, are we not truly 100% slaves? Do our masters just hide that reality nicely behind a facade of conventional wisdom and public demonization of anyone who would dare contravene the status quo?(4)

Take a moment to stop and ponder this the next time you see your taxes taken out of your paycheck, or hear about government regulation and intervention either here or abroad, or about bankers and elites getting bailed out while you are still paying your taxes, or any number of other indicators that something is not quite right in the Land of the Free. If you listen closely enough, you might just hear the crack of a whip, the cocking of an oppressor's gun, or the clatter of the chains around your ankles.

And finally you will smell a hint of true freedom, coming from just past the edge of the plantation. It is within reach, if we are principled enough to obtain it.

Notes:

1 - The recent attacks on capitalism as the culprit for the current great recession completely dumbfound me. We do not have true capitalism, for starters; we have limited capitalism occuring in segments of the market despite the intervention by the government and distortions from what is now been documented as rampant fraud. Greed is not the fundamental unit of capitalism; hard work and freedom are the fundamental units. A person may be completely driven by the desire to do good and collect money to give to charity and flourish under capitalism, just like the next guy who is driven to collect money to buy a mansion. Those drives have nothing to do with capitalism.

2 - Note the word natural here; for religious folks, this is synonymous with God-given. The implication here is that these rights predate and supersede government authority. This was well understood by the Founding Fathers, who sought to codify a big giant check against the government in favor of these rights in the US Constitution in the form of the Bill of Rights.

3 - This is not to suggest you shouldn't try to stop a crime in progress. However, if someone has not committed a crime, regulations that purport to prevent crime or other "bad things" generally really are just used to provide barriers to entry in a market or cause other distortions, and they don't actually prevent the crimes very well anyway.

4 - Someone remarked the other day that they had really been bothered by President Obama's handling of dissenting views against his policies. They noted that his response is to make fun of and demean (usually subtly) any who oppose the policies he is pushing for. He is by no means alone in this behavior.