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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 compulsor
by 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 agoThe difference being that you get something back for that. Also, that you're free to leave at any time.
- fennecfoxen 11y agoWell, 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 agoA 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 agoI 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 agoIt 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.
- 11y ago
- guelo 11y agoI 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 agoNo, I'm saying that I think that a compulsory tax of 1% of your income means that you're 1% enslaved.
- kbenson 11y agoSure, if you want to ignore the part about not having freedom of choice.
- duncan_bayne 11y agoLast 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 agoBut 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 agoNo, 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.