Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Robbery vs Slavery

Proximo: Can any of them fight? I've got a match coming up.
Slave trader: Some are good for fighting, others for dying. You need both, I think.
--Gladiator

Are income taxes better thought of as acts of robbery or slavery? Robbery is the forceful taking of property for the benefit of someone else. Robbery is different from theft. A thief can take property without directly threatening an individual. For example, a thief could steal items from a home while the owners are away on vacation.

Robbery involves the use of force or threat of force in appropriating property. The robber may shoot the gun, point the gun, or convince the victim that shots are imminent in order to obtain the victim's property.

Robbing the same person multiple times, while certainly possible, becomes challenging because the victim learns to anticipate and defend against attack. As such, robbery has a 'one off' nature about it. The application of robbery on a particular individual tends to be singular rather than routine.

Slavery is the forceful taking of production for the benefit of someone else. Slavery requires that the slave works in a manner that produces output that the slave master can benefit from. In order for slavery to be profitable, slave masters must ensure that the slaves engage in activities that produce output deemed as valuable. This may or may not require the use of force on slaves to work in a certain manner. In some institutional designs where slaves prefer the work and the output produced, the force is applied instead in the confiscation of production--either partially or in total.

Slavery is rarely a 'one off' crime. Production is routinely confiscated. If the slave becomes more productive, then the amount taken is likely to rise as well.

To be sure, slavery could be viewed as a form of robbery. The master robs the slave of property, and does so on a regular basis. But because property taken from the slave is directly tied to production, slavery can be readily construed as a direct violation of individual liberty, as it prohibits individuals from pursuing their interests in an unencumbered manner.

Rather than a one off appropriation of property, slavery is routine confiscation of production and the liberty that accompanies it.

Because of their focus on the output of production, and because of the regular occurrence of confiscation, income taxes seem to have more in common with slavery than with robbery.

5 comments:

dgeorge12358 said...

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.
~Samuel Adams

dgeorge12358 said...

Historically, the earliest and most widespread form of taxation was the corvée, which can be traced back to the beginning of civilization. The corvée was state-imposed forced labour on peasants too poor to pay other forms of taxation (labour in ancient Egyptian is a synonym for taxes).
~David Berg, A World History of Tax Rebellions

dgeorge12358 said...

1. Sam Slime mugs a person for £50.

2. Sam Slime votes for a politician who taxes a person in order to redistribute £50 to the "disadvantaged" Slime.

Both examples involve the use of force. However, the second scenario is arguably worse, since through the state, Slime is now empowered to repeatedly take others' money, thus putting them in a condition of slavery.

~Thomas Rustici, George Mason University

dgeorge12358 said...

We submit that forcible taxation on your personal income makes you a partial slave? For if you are legally bound to hand a certain percentage of your income (the fruits of your labors) over to federal, state and local governments, then from the legal standpoint you only have "some % ownership" of your person and labor.
~Steven Yates and Ray Bornert II

dgeorge12358 said...

The income tax is one of the most egregious encroachments on our liberties today. It is a form of involuntary servitude, which was supposed to have been outlawed by the 13th Amendment.
~Ron Paul