Forced jury duty in Erie County PA
by Jeff Thomas
I believe it’s safe to say that most all of us sympathise with anyone who’s living in a condition of relative slavery and, if he has the courage to attempt to free himself, we root for him to succeed. Those of us who are the most compassionate would even offer him support in his quest, if we were called upon to do so.
But few of us think about slavery as being a modern institution. We tend to see slaves as victims of a racial divide who suffered disgracefully in times gone by.
So, we should take a look at the definition of slavery. In essence, it’s a state in which the product of an individual’s labour is forcibly taken from him. (His condition may include abuse, bondage, etc., but these are symptoms, not a definition.) The purpose for enslavement is always the same: to obtain the fruits of the slave’s labour, without mutually agreed-upon compensation.
And so, if we look at the bare bones of the definition, we easily recognize that if all of the fruits of our labour are taken from us, we are entirely enslaved. If a portion of those fruits is taken from us, we are partially enslaved.
Taxation is unquestionably, by definition, partial enslavement. It’s safe to say that virtually no one in the present world has ever been asked to sign away to his government the power to tax him. Make no mistake about it – taxation is achieved through force. You don’t wish to pay whatever is demanded? You go to prison.
Throughout history, there have been governments that taxed their minions ever-increasingly, eventually reaching the point that people began to leave the country rather than pay the usurious tax. (Rome declined in the fourth century as countless merchants left to live in the more-primitive north, amongst the barbarians, in order to escape tax enslavement. Similar developments have occurred in other countries throughout history.)
Although, in bygone eras, total slavery was quite common and occurred in every continent at one time or another, in our own time, governments have recognized that partial slavery is more effective – give people the impression that they’re free, whilst taking a major portion of the fruits of their labours from them in the forms of taxation and inflation.
But, at some point, people tend to rebel against slavery.
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