"The best slave is someone you overpay and who know it, terrified of losing his status."
As I sit here entering my 12th hour of work for the day, this sounds remarkably legit.
As I sit here entering my 12th hour of work for the day, this sounds remarkably legit.
Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output.
I recently severely pissed off a correspondent (who'd written Yet Another Article on the evils of capitalism) by equating compulsory taxation with slavery.
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.
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.
That depends on the exact historical milieu. For example, slaves in Athens at various times had the right to freedom of religion, right to claim asylum at an altar, right to not have their owner kill them out of hand (or more precisely if the owner did this, he was brought to trial, at least in theory), etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece has some selected details.
Totally agreed with your last sentence, though. ;)
Personally, if I were in a minor outlying area of the Roman empire, I perhaps would have preferred to become a Roman slave rather than be free out in the boondocks. I've read that a Roman conquest would always start with a call for anyone in the opposing army who wanted to be part of the empire to defect now and become a Roman slave, that was supposedly a better fate than losing in battle. In Rome I could, by hook or by crook, earn my freedom and perhaps even become emperor.
If I were in Africa, and I had a choice, I would perhaps choose to become a slave on James Madison's plantation rather than stay in Africa. You should read the book written about one of his slaves, he was truly extraordinary.
What made US slavery so bad wasn't so much the slavery but the racism. Roman slaves looked just like their masters. But when US slaves earned their freedom through manumission or simply buying themselves off their masters, a somewhat common practice in the run-up to the Civil War, they had to be careful or fall prey to slavers capturing them and re-enslaving them.
If it weren't for the racism, you could make a credible argument that enslavement in the US was, on the whole, better for the people involved, going by the standard of, if you had all the relevant information, would you prefer to stay home or go to the US as a slave.
Of course, American intellectuals made this argument at the time as a justification for slavery. The practice of indentured labor where people willingly sold themselves into bondage to escape their homeland lends some credence to this, but in my opinion the racism blacks experienced and still experience places it solidly in 'wrong' territory.
In her grandparents time, that was the term for the more than disappointed feeling freed slaves had when slavers seized their 'free papers', burned them, and then enslaved them once more.
It's not that far in our past.
I'm in complete agreement with you, until you introduce compulsory taxation. That is morally equivalent to slavery: your time is being literally taken from you by others, for their own reasons.
Sure, it might also buy you healthcare and so forth, but the same argument could be made in defense of historical slavery too.
That is not slavery, it's not even close to slavery. And it is not your time being taken away from you, it's your money. One can figure out how to earn money less onerously, then taxation becomes less onerous.
Arguments that modern institutions are basically slavery cannot simply boil down to "the lives of poor people suck". That's always been true, your argument is so general it's meaningless.
States have always survived on institutionalized violence towards its citizens. The question is not of whether, but of what kind. There is no way around violence, we can only try to get by with less of it.
Taxation is much, much, much less onerous these days than slavery was. In fact, Taxation, in the agrarian empires of antiquity, was one step removed from slavery. Ancient peoples had to be coerced to produce an agricultural surplus.
It was basically like the mob. Produce as much as you can and give us 95% of it and we'll protect you from other bands of marauding barbarians. You wanted the people you gave that surplus to to be well-organized and powerful, because that had knock-on benefits.
It was better than slavery because your masters only showed up during harvest. They didn't take your kids and trade them away for a profit. They didn't kill you if you couldn't make quota, otherwise who would work the farm.
Slowly things like social contracts and human rights evolved. Taxation became less onerous.
Do you not see the connection between those things, especially in the case of income tax? And especially in the case of progressive taxation, which punishes people in proportion to their productive virtue?
Yes there is a connection between time and money. But they are not the same. A person can, throughout their life, learn how to trade less of their time for more money. That makes taxation far less of a burden than slavery. The two are not equatable in the slightest.
And progressive taxation does not tax innovation and growth as much as you might think it does. In the United States, it is often thought that getting "bumped into another tax bracket" has you paying a larger percentage of your income as taxes in very non-smooth way. But it is smooth, you only pay a greater percentage of money you make in excess of the 'dividing line'.
This year, the cutoff between 15% and 25% is $37,450. If you make $37,451, then you do not pay 25% of $37,451. You pay an amount somewhat less than 15% of $37,450, (to account for the lower tax brackets) plus 25% of one dollar. You keep less of your earned income, but there is never a disincentive to keep improving and growing.
Compared to alternative ways of funding the state, progressive income tax regimes have proven their worth in many countries. The US is the most economically powerful nation on Earth, so if a progressive taxation regime is bad, it must not be that bad.
I keep reading this as "there's this field of cotton you need to pick; if you get done early, have some time off."
I'll grant you that progressive taxation in the context of an objective tax law is significantly better than roving bands of armed thugs.
But that's not a very high bar; surely we can do better from a moral perspective?
You shouldn't. It's more like, "Here's a field of cotton you could pick, if you want to, we'll give you these pieces of paper with which you can buy whatever you want. Don't want to pick cotton but still want money? Here's a cotton-picking machine you could learn how to use, we'll pay you twice as much if you can figure it out.
Your moral argument seems to boil down to "give me what I want for free or I'm going to call you an enslaving bastard."
What I was referring to was the arrangement between the worker and the State, when compulsory taxation is involved.
Before states, you had endless raiding. Each farmer didn't have the resources to maintain an army to protect him. You can crowdsource that protection, but then you have a standing army, which is a necessary evil in a violent world.
Without a state and an army, some other state's army is going to move in and conquer you, therefore, there's no getting around the need for a state and the necessity of funding it. Being conquered is no fun.
States are still every bit as necessary now as they were before, aggression from other states is still a thing. And you can't fund a state with voluntary taxation, you won't raise enough money. Therefore it's compulsory. Your moral argument still boils down to "give me what I want for free." You may not think you want a state, but all that means is that you're blind to what would happen in its absence.
1) It's good to have a State. 2) The primary purpose of a State is not protection from other States, it's to protect the rights of its citizens, i.e. to uphold the law. 3) This may take the form of protecting its citizens against each other (Police, Courts, etc.) or against foreign threats (Defense). All are legitimate.
I think the only disagreement we have is over whether voluntary taxation would be sufficient.
Do you really believe that, say in the case of New Zealand, the majority of working adults wouldn't be willing to stump up $2,500k / annum - this, in the absence of any other taxation - to pay for the State and all the benefits it brings?
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.
How the actual fuck did you read that into what I wrote?
... deep breath ...
What I meant was, and perhaps I was unclear, is that material goods are a requirement for life, and a good many of them if you want to thrive rather than just 'not die'.
Those goods have to be produced, by someone. Work has to be done. This is not negotiable. It is a fact of living in this universe.
If that work isn't done by you, then it has to be done by someone. You can't just "opt out" of work, all you can do is either a) do it yourself, b) let someone else do it for you, c) force someone else to do it for you.
Right now, my children are in state (b). There are many adults in that state too - they are dependant upon the work of others. In many case that's through no fault of their own, either, and I think that it's entirely just that a civilised society look after such people.
It seems pretty clear to me where I got it from. You are definitely fine with letting people live in misery at the best. It's pretty simple, there is no "actual what the fuck" about it.
Funny that you comment on nature, when civilization has made a lot of the horrible things that have to be dealt with in nature a lot less relevant. In nature animals are violent to each other, and will kill each other even of their own species. By your logic you must support killing each other, otherwise your argument about nature would be totally hypocritical.
The more civilized a place the more people can do their own thing without worry of harm or their needs being met. What you wrote below has nothing to do with a basic income. A basic income will make people less afraid of moving employers for example, making parasites that employ people in hideous conditions lose power. Threats from those psychopaths will have a lot less punch. That is a massive gain.
A basic income does not look like it will not alter how much people work. As an example, the MINCOME project showed that the only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less in an actual experiment with a form of basic income, the people who work will still work. I will not repeat other sources here, any reader can look it up if they want.
What part of living in a modern industrial / post-industrial society is "in a state of nature"?
I give up.
Imagine a country run entirely on a voluntary poll tax. You literally pay in order to vote. The last time I ran the numbers (along with the now-defunct Libertarianz party), it'd cost around $2.5k per working person to run core Govt. services in New Zealand on that basis, assuming 100% buy-in.
That's not a donation, exactly, but it's not compulsory taxation either.
Sure, poll taxes and similar have been used to exclude all but the wealthy from Government. Many types of legal structure can be misused: gun control laws to disarm black people in the face of the KKK, union laws to prevent non-white people from getting decent jobs, etc. etc.
But it's not a given.
Edited to add: and especially when you consider that the so-called 'sin taxes' that particularly burden the poor would be eliminated under that scheme.
I think the GP means income tax since the conversation is about being a slave === being 100% income taxed. And yes, there had been an example of a successful income tax-less capitalist economy. The United States of America for most of the time pre 1913.
It's an interesting subject.
* people are terrified of fundamental changes to systems that provide their 'benefits', even if the existing system involves literal slavery
* people get really, really angry when you mention the 'slavery' thing; they don't seem to like really thinking about how the sausage is made, so to speak
* slavery is easy when quality of life is so good; it's easy to get bent out of shape when 40% of your income is being taken when your income is diddley-squat; when you're living like a 1700s king already, meh
* socialists have entirely and completely conflated the concept of a just society with compulsory taxation and state welfarism that it is almost impossible to get people to even acknowledge that the two can be considered separately
* self-described capitalists are often only capitalists when it suits them, otherwise they are often happy to suckle from the State tit to a far more egregious extent than any 'welfare queen' ever did
I don't do politics any more.
(In a way, it's recursive slavery - masters are often bound to someone else.)
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?
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.
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/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.
If you want to complain about the fact that you've chosen to work long hours for a six figure salary (I know, it can be frustrating sometimes!) then go right ahead, but pick different words.
Substantially: You are downplaying a big part of "Slavery." The most important factor in a successful fight for freedom is the fact that you are fighting for your own freedom. There is no reason to have guilt over principally addressing your own.