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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

That doesn’t make all of us slaves

Taxation: income tax is a relatively new re-invention. Even more for other types of taxation like VAT or capital gains. I’m all for paying for services though. But this is basically stealing or claiming from a person’s fruits of labor.

Passports/citizenship: Although most people will see a passport a sa travel document, you could also see it as a certificate of ownership. In many countries it is illegal to have multiple passports which supports this argument.

Try resigning from the United States. It’s very difficult. Also, passports and border patrol have been used to prevent people from leaving a country in order to exploit their labor, and slavery:

> During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure

Lastly, if you do not comply or pay taxes to your owner, you will be taken by force and sometimes with the result of injury of death.

I have heard people claiming that taxation is theft. I have never heard anyone claim that taxation makes us slaves.

Income tax is even less coercive than previous forms taxation, where people were taken from whether or not they could afford it. With income tax, people who do not work do not pay it. In fact many people who do work do not pay income tax.

That’s exactly the difference between upper and lower class.

You need money. If you work, you give half to the gov.

If you earn “passive”, it still happens, but rates are a lot lower

So rich people are still “slaves” by that definition.

In fact the President is even a slave by this definition.

The arguement goes that theft is retroactive slavery, the thief stole time from me. Not sure if I can make the logical leap between those myself, though I do consider them roughly morally equivalent.

> But this is basically stealing or claiming from a person’s fruits of labor.

It is actually the opposite. It all belongs to the rulers, and they generously gift you a portion of it.

Income taxes, transaction taxes, and customs duties are thousands of years old.

It's always been how kings and governments raised the money to pay their armies.

Taxes on certain goods, yes. Incometax, nope. It’s little over 100 years old. VAT I think about 75. And the list goes on.

In the uk it started around 1800, a few years before ending slavery. Could it just be a substitute?

Sure, the legal terms "income tax" is relatively recent (and VAT more so). But they're just new names for taxes that already existed. The written record of income and commercial transaction taxes dates back to Hammurabi (1700s BC) and Egypt's Old Kingdom (3000 BC). (https://almanac.upenn.edu/archive/v48/n28/AncientTaxes.html)

In American chattel slavery, women were kidnapped, stuffed into boats where malnourished strangers died around them, beaten, forced to change their names and religion, and raped. The children of those rapes were routinely sold at auction, and their parents would never see them again. If the children were caught secretly learning to read, they would be beaten. Income taxes are annoying, but they are not slavery.

Meanwhile we still rip custody from many (disproportionately) black dads, auction their children to foster homes, compel them to come up with certain amount of money and if they don't do it for the whip crackers we toss them in jail where they may be raped and malnourished and legally chained in work gangs.

Of course. That’s a whole different aspect and I wouldn’t want to compare to that part of it.

> Incometax, nope

Sharecropping taxes are income taxes. There weren’t formal income taxes because peasants didn’t have incomes. They paid a tax to their lord that was fixed as a function of the productivity of the land they farmed.

Income tax isn't there to get government an income, it's a surveillance tool. You have to write down how much money you earned, and HOW did you earn it, and sometimes even what things did you spend it on. People today are brainwashed to believe that it's OK for the government to know that, but when income tax was first introduced I believe that was one of the most common arguments against it: invading one's privacy.

Slave has a very specific meaning. Paying taxes does not make you a slave.

I think given the existence of debtor prisons that becomes arguable.

And some do utilize the laws and systems in our country to increase the amount of slaves though.

This is likely just the tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

I'm not going to argue for the hyperbole of us all being slaves though.

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