Taxation as slavery on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
Taxation as slavery is the idea that
Taxation as slavery is the idea that taxation
A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, o ...
results in an unfree society in which individuals are forced to work to enrich the government and the recipients of largesse, rather than for their own benefit.
History
Historically, the earliest and most widespread form of taxation was the corvee, which can be traced back to the beginning ofcivilization
A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system).
...
. The corvee was state-imposed forced labor
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death, or other forms of ex ...
on peasant
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasant ...
s too poor to pay other forms of taxation (''labor'' in ancient Egyptian is a synonym for taxes).
In her book, ''American Patriots'', journalist Gail Buckley wrote, "In British eyes, the American colonies existed only for the benefit of the mother country, but Americans saw any form of taxation as slavery." Anarcho-capitalists
Anarcho-capitalism (or, colloquially, ancap) is an anti-statist, libertarian, and anti-political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enfor ...
and other right-libertarians are some of the foremost proponents of the argument that taxation is equivalent to slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
. The International Society for Individual Liberty has made this claim, as has Bureaucrash, which refers to Social Security
Welfare, or commonly social welfare, is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specifical ...
as "social slavery."
George Mason University professor Thomas Rustici uses two hypothetical anecdotes to illustrate his point of view:
Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...
argued that taxation of labor is one of three stages of slavery (the other two being ''land slavery'' and ''personal slavery'').
See also
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Taxation As Slavery Anarcho-capitalism Libertarian terms Slavery Libertarian theory