8 ms·

Except it conflates a voluntary relationship for a forced one. Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output.

duncan_bayne 11y ago
What about being taxed 40%? I recently severely pissed off a correspondent (who'd written Yet Another Article on the evils of capitalism) by equating compulsory taxation with slavery.
- Aeolun 11y ago
  The difference being that you get something back for that. Also, that you're free to leave at any time.
  - refurb 11y ago
    How is that different from employment "slavery"?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Slaves got food and housing back. And one is only "free" in the "they won't shoot you for it" sense, not in the "you won't suffer adverse effects" sense.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  Well, taxation as slavery is rhetoric with a long, strong, tradition going back to pre-Revolutionary days. But if you think the sort of person who writes about how "capitalism is evil" is going to have the background to meaningfully process and respond to that language, that's another matter entirely...
- vacri 11y ago
  A key part of slavery involves restriction of movement. You're generally free to emigrate wherever you feel like. Or stay where you are and join a commune. You'll be self-sufficient and not paying tax. It's not slavery if you can escape it by merely choosing to do something else.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I think we need to start looking at it like at a spectrum. Yes, current employment situation is not a literal owner-and-chains slavery and in principle you can always join a commune. But for upwards of 90% of population this is not a viable option they can realistically take. There are problems, and just because they're not literally slavery doesn't mean they ain't close.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      It does mean they aren't even close. If your situation doesn't meet the criteria of slavery, then you aren't a slave. You may not be completely free, but you aren't a slave. You don't seem to be fully understanding of what slavery is. There is also a legal category. Slaves have no rights, they could not avail themselves of protections against abuse. Also there is a ownership / fungibility aspect, you can buy slaves on a market. This is what separates serfdom from slavery. The basic idea of slavery is that an entire country, state and nation, participates in psychological and legal domination of subject people. If that's not happening, then what you're looking at isn't slavery. Human trafficking isn't slavery, the main difference is that it's a group of people that are surreptitiously creating a regime where people can be traded and not an entire country. One may call human trafficking "modern slavery", and people being trafficked as "slaves", because it is, after all, an abhorrent practice. But slavery doesn't exist in the world any more and to say otherwise demeans the numerous armed conflicts humans have fought all over the world to end real slavery. People are not permitted any more to openly treat humans as cattle and expect the law to respect their 'property'. Not even North Korea could get away with instituting slavery, though one could speculate on whether slavery would be better for the people in their gulags now. You can look at a particular criteria on a spectrum and draw a line. But we have better words to describe what happens when you remove criteria. There is a rich lexicon of terms we can employ to describe removing freedoms from people. Slavery becomes serfdom when you remove fungibility. When you remove state-participation, it's called human trafficking. When all it is is one person forcing another person to keep working, it's called forced labor. The modern employment social contract is in no way, shape or form anything like actual slavery, to call it such is to misrepresent both employment and slavery.
- guelo 11y ago
  I don't get your point. Has there ever been an example of a succesful tax-less capitalist economy? Or are you saying that at some tax level below 40% capitalism shifts from slavery to non-slavery?
  - duncan_bayne 11y ago
    No, I'm saying that I think that a compulsory tax of 1% of your income means that you're 1% enslaved.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      Sure, if you want to ignore the part about not having freedom of choice.
      - duncan_bayne 11y ago
        Last I checked the consequence of not paying compulsory taxation was jail (if you didn't resist physically as well) or death (if you did).
        kbenson 11y ago
        But you have a choice of whether to work and what to do for that work don't you? Can we say the same for slaves?
        duncan_bayne 11y ago
        No, not really. The requirement to work is a given, at least for the foreseeable future. Humans need wealth to live: food, water, shelter, clothing. We need wealth even more to thrive: books, schools, factories. None of this comes for free. In a state of nature, to refuse to work is to commit suicide, at a rate proportional to the hostility of your environment. There are a lot of variables to adjust. You could work less, and enjoy more free time and a commensurately lower standard of living (still fantastically high by historical standards). Or you could live off others. That's not always an ethical fault: consider invalids, or children, or the very elderly. So long as the people providing for you have a choice in the matter, that's fine from an ethical perspective. Or - and this is where the ethical fault comes in - you could force others to provide your material needs for you. For example, welfare parasites and professional politicians (but I repeat myself). So, no. There is no choice about working.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
It's not really voluntary if it's that or you and your family going hungry, without heat in winter, or even home. It's still slavery, but you are "free" to chose your master, and some of us are lucky to be bound by comfortable chains of gold and velvet called "software industry". (In a way, it's recursive slavery - masters are often bound to someone else.)
- vacri 11y ago
  Redefining 'slavery' to include all forms of "I must expend some effort to put food in my mouth" (a condition that affects all animals) makes the word 'slavery' meaningless.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    We are more than animals. And at this stage in our development, it's no longer necessary to spend more than half of waking hours on it. Just because it has always been like that before doesn't mean it should continue. Social inertia is holding us back here, unfortunately.
    - vacri 11y ago
      You've just moved the goalposts, from 'having to work' to 'having to work more than half your waking hours'. Plenty of people don't work more than half their waking hours, including plenty of us poor chained slaves in this software shtick.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It's not me who's moving the goalpost. What I described applies to vast majority of population, and includes vast majority of software developers. You can't point at minority that has it better and therefore say there's no issue.
        vacri 11y ago
        > What I described applies to vast majority of population Patent nonsense from the outset - the total workforce is basically half the population (in the US, it's currently at 160M out of 310M total pop). Even if every single member of the workforce was working your supposed grind (which it clearly isn't), it's not "vast majority of the population" territory. Even if you just limit it to the working population, where are you pulling these "vast majority" numbers from? From the same "silent majority" that supports a given person's unpopular political opinions?
cgh 11y ago
Did you read the article? He has a particular definition of slave.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  Sure, he's redefining the term "slave", but it's a loaded term he's using for illustrative purposes.
  - blowski 11y ago
    Agreed. In a world where many people have been and continue to be in genuine slavery, that choice of word rankled me.
coldtea 11y ago
>Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output. Well, you get free housing and food so you have to deduce that. Especially when in some cases, slaves did better in that than poor free citizens. In fact in ancient Greece and Rome there were slaves managers of other slaves, teachers, running businesses on behalf of their owners etc, and even allowed money. The main issue is they couldn't leave -- though they even got that in some cases, e.g. if they fought bravely at some battle (e.g. Arginusae), or after some decades of service at the benevolence of their master. Personally I don't consider totally voluntary any decision based on the need to feed a family. Nobody "volunteers" to work at McDonalds or tons of other "non-creative" jobs. They just get to choose between that and Burger King, Walmarts or something like that. But they must go to work, if not forced by fear of violence, then forced by fear of hunger and homelessness. So between slavery and this, I'd say there are degrees, not absolute differences.
bzbarsky 11y ago
> Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output. That may or may not be the case. That's certainly not how slavery worked in classical antiquity, for the most part. It's not even how it always worked in the US South in the 19th century (e.g. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/text1/text1read.htm http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/te... has examples of slaves buying their own freedom, which is clearly impossible if you're being taxed at 100% of your output). As far as I can tell, as slavery has become less and less "socially accepted" it has also become more brutal, because only the brutes (and typically criminals, as it becomes illegal) engage in slaveowning. And people's mental image of "slavery" nowadays (at least in the US) is a conflation of what happens now with some of the worst cases of 19th century slavery in the US. It's only broadly similar to various social institutions in different societies over the last 3000 years that are all called "slavery" and involve people with varying restrictions on their freedom.
jakeogh 11y ago
No, it's > 0%. Do you think 99% isn't slavery?

What about being taxed 40%? I recently severely pissed off a correspondent (who'd written Yet Another Article on the evils of capitalism) by equating compulsory taxation with slavery.

Aeolun 11y ago
The difference being that you get something back for that. Also, that you're free to leave at any time.
- refurb 11y ago
  How is that different from employment "slavery"?
- coldtea 11y ago
  Slaves got food and housing back. And one is only "free" in the "they won't shoot you for it" sense, not in the "you won't suffer adverse effects" sense.
fennecfoxen 11y ago
Well, taxation as slavery is rhetoric with a long, strong, tradition going back to pre-Revolutionary days. But if you think the sort of person who writes about how "capitalism is evil" is going to have the background to meaningfully process and respond to that language, that's another matter entirely...
vacri 11y ago
A key part of slavery involves restriction of movement. You're generally free to emigrate wherever you feel like. Or stay where you are and join a commune. You'll be self-sufficient and not paying tax. It's not slavery if you can escape it by merely choosing to do something else.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I think we need to start looking at it like at a spectrum. Yes, current employment situation is not a literal owner-and-chains slavery and in principle you can always join a commune. But for upwards of 90% of population this is not a viable option they can realistically take. There are problems, and just because they're not literally slavery doesn't mean they ain't close.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    It does mean they aren't even close. If your situation doesn't meet the criteria of slavery, then you aren't a slave. You may not be completely free, but you aren't a slave. You don't seem to be fully understanding of what slavery is. There is also a legal category. Slaves have no rights, they could not avail themselves of protections against abuse. Also there is a ownership / fungibility aspect, you can buy slaves on a market. This is what separates serfdom from slavery. The basic idea of slavery is that an entire country, state and nation, participates in psychological and legal domination of subject people. If that's not happening, then what you're looking at isn't slavery. Human trafficking isn't slavery, the main difference is that it's a group of people that are surreptitiously creating a regime where people can be traded and not an entire country. One may call human trafficking "modern slavery", and people being trafficked as "slaves", because it is, after all, an abhorrent practice. But slavery doesn't exist in the world any more and to say otherwise demeans the numerous armed conflicts humans have fought all over the world to end real slavery. People are not permitted any more to openly treat humans as cattle and expect the law to respect their 'property'. Not even North Korea could get away with instituting slavery, though one could speculate on whether slavery would be better for the people in their gulags now. You can look at a particular criteria on a spectrum and draw a line. But we have better words to describe what happens when you remove criteria. There is a rich lexicon of terms we can employ to describe removing freedoms from people. Slavery becomes serfdom when you remove fungibility. When you remove state-participation, it's called human trafficking. When all it is is one person forcing another person to keep working, it's called forced labor. The modern employment social contract is in no way, shape or form anything like actual slavery, to call it such is to misrepresent both employment and slavery.
guelo 11y ago
I don't get your point. Has there ever been an example of a succesful tax-less capitalist economy? Or are you saying that at some tax level below 40% capitalism shifts from slavery to non-slavery?
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  No, I'm saying that I think that a compulsory tax of 1% of your income means that you're 1% enslaved.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Sure, if you want to ignore the part about not having freedom of choice.
    - duncan_bayne 11y ago
      Last I checked the consequence of not paying compulsory taxation was jail (if you didn't resist physically as well) or death (if you did).
      - kbenson 11y ago
        But you have a choice of whether to work and what to do for that work don't you? Can we say the same for slaves?
        duncan_bayne 11y ago
        No, not really. The requirement to work is a given, at least for the foreseeable future. Humans need wealth to live: food, water, shelter, clothing. We need wealth even more to thrive: books, schools, factories. None of this comes for free. In a state of nature, to refuse to work is to commit suicide, at a rate proportional to the hostility of your environment. There are a lot of variables to adjust. You could work less, and enjoy more free time and a commensurately lower standard of living (still fantastically high by historical standards). Or you could live off others. That's not always an ethical fault: consider invalids, or children, or the very elderly. So long as the people providing for you have a choice in the matter, that's fine from an ethical perspective. Or - and this is where the ethical fault comes in - you could force others to provide your material needs for you. For example, welfare parasites and professional politicians (but I repeat myself). So, no. There is no choice about working.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

It's not really voluntary if it's that or you and your family going hungry, without heat in winter, or even home. It's still slavery, but you are "free" to chose your master, and some of us are lucky to be bound by comfortable chains of gold and velvet called "software industry". (In a way, it's recursive slavery - masters are often bound to someone else.)

vacri 11y ago
Redefining 'slavery' to include all forms of "I must expend some effort to put food in my mouth" (a condition that affects all animals) makes the word 'slavery' meaningless.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  We are more than animals. And at this stage in our development, it's no longer necessary to spend more than half of waking hours on it. Just because it has always been like that before doesn't mean it should continue. Social inertia is holding us back here, unfortunately.
  - vacri 11y ago
    You've just moved the goalposts, from 'having to work' to 'having to work more than half your waking hours'. Plenty of people don't work more than half their waking hours, including plenty of us poor chained slaves in this software shtick.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's not me who's moving the goalpost. What I described applies to vast majority of population, and includes vast majority of software developers. You can't point at minority that has it better and therefore say there's no issue.
      - vacri 11y ago
        > What I described applies to vast majority of population Patent nonsense from the outset - the total workforce is basically half the population (in the US, it's currently at 160M out of 310M total pop). Even if every single member of the workforce was working your supposed grind (which it clearly isn't), it's not "vast majority of the population" territory. Even if you just limit it to the working population, where are you pulling these "vast majority" numbers from? From the same "silent majority" that supports a given person's unpopular political opinions?

cgh 11y ago

Did you read the article? He has a particular definition of slave.

CaptSpify 11y ago
Sure, he's redefining the term "slave", but it's a loaded term he's using for illustrative purposes.
- blowski 11y ago
  Agreed. In a world where many people have been and continue to be in genuine slavery, that choice of word rankled me.

coldtea 11y ago

>Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output. Well, you get free housing and food so you have to deduce that. Especially when in some cases, slaves did better in that than poor free citizens. In fact in ancient Greece and Rome there were slaves managers of other slaves, teachers, running businesses on behalf of their owners etc, and even allowed money. The main issue is they couldn't leave -- though they even got that in some cases, e.g. if they fought bravely at some battle (e.g. Arginusae), or after some decades of service at the benevolence of their master. Personally I don't consider totally voluntary any decision based on the need to feed a family. Nobody "volunteers" to work at McDonalds or tons of other "non-creative" jobs. They just get to choose between that and Burger King, Walmarts or something like that. But they must go to work, if not forced by fear of violence, then forced by fear of hunger and homelessness. So between slavery and this, I'd say there are degrees, not absolute differences.

bzbarsky 11y ago

> Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output. That may or may not be the case. That's certainly not how slavery worked in classical antiquity, for the most part. It's not even how it always worked in the US South in the 19th century (e.g. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/text1/text1read.htm http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/te... has examples of slaves buying their own freedom, which is clearly impossible if you're being taxed at 100% of your output). As far as I can tell, as slavery has become less and less "socially accepted" it has also become more brutal, because only the brutes (and typically criminals, as it becomes illegal) engage in slaveowning. And people's mental image of "slavery" nowadays (at least in the US) is a conflation of what happens now with some of the worst cases of 19th century slavery in the US. It's only broadly similar to various social institutions in different societies over the last 3000 years that are all called "slavery" and involve people with varying restrictions on their freedom.

jakeogh 11y ago

No, it's > 0%. Do you think 99% isn't slavery?