by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
Americans have become so accustomed to living under tyranny that they are probably incapable of recognizing tyranny. Once upon a time, April 15 was the annual day of infamy. It was the day you had to pay your income taxes.
Americans have been subjected to a tax on their working lives for less than half of their existence as a free people, or, to correct myself, as a former free people. With the gradual long-term demise of American education, helped along by the US Department of Education, the content of what Americans know has dramatically changed. Once they knew who they are and the principles on which their liberty rested. Today they know how to play video games, write software for programs that regulate their lives from instructions their cars give them to how the NSA and businesses spy on them. They know movie trivia, the affairs of celebrities, the standings of their college football teams, their golf scores, and the expense of their wives’ remodeling of kitchens and baths.
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But they don’t know much else, except the Democrats know that Trump is evil. And America and white people are racist and evil. And there are many genders. And illegal immigrant-invaders have the same, or greater, rights as American citizens. Just ask any Democrat federal district judge. And still Americans vote for Democrats. In other words, the question is: Are the American people capable of self-government?
The historical definition of a free person was a person who owned his own labor. Historically most people were not free. They were either slaves of serfs.
A slave did not own his own labor. His owner did. His owner purchased the slave’s labor when he purchased the slave. He purchased the slave in order to acquire his labor which was needed as there was no available labor force to hire. Instead, producers had to acquire a work force by making a capital investment, not by paying a wage. In place of a wage, producers had to purchase labor by purchasing slaves, often warriors who were captured in the black King of Dahomey’s slave wars. Many black Africans who became slaves in the New World, were the defeated black warriors in Dahomey’s slave wars. Those who themselves were fighting for slaves became, in defeat, slaves.
The fact that a black warrior class, which constituted a percentage the slaves on 19th Southern cotton and tobacco plantations, never revolted, not even when provoked by Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” when no while male adult presence was on the plantations, is proof that the Northern propaganda against the South had hatred of Southerners as its purpose. It is amazing but a fact that the world view of every person on planet Earth is contaminated by propaganda accepted as fact. Almost every narrative people believe is false.
A Medieval serf owned the largest part of his labor. The lord of the manor on which the serf lived had use rights to no more than one-third of the serf’s labor, and serfs had use rights to a portion of the land.
We can look at the lords use rights in the serf’s labor as a form of taxation. A system of use rights predates and is different from a system of alienable rights, rights that can be bought and sold. But if we ignore the exchange, which involved the serfs rights to use the land in exchange for the rights of the lords to use the serfs’ labor, we have the fact that serfs did not own the full portion of their labor. This is the identical position of all peoples who today labor under an income tax.
In other words, the medieval era was brought back to Americans with the income tax in the second decade of the 20th Century.
From their inception until 1913–really until 1918–Americans were still a free people. The income tax introduced in 1913, along with the Federal Reserve–two disastrous events in American history–turned free Americans into the serfs of the government. Your labor, and the income from it, no longer belongs to you. Your feudal lord, your “constitutional democratic” government, has the same claim to your labor as a feudal lord had on a serf’s labor in the medieval era.
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