The chains of bondage...

It's that time of year again to begin thinking about filing your tax returns with the Internal Revenue Slavemasters. That means I'm angered about the state of affairs in America, and need to rant.

Mises has a great article on this subject here.

The bottom line is simple. Either a man owns his own labor in its entirety, or he does not. There can be no other option.

If he owns his own labor, he is to be considered a free man. He may choose to enter the marketplace in an attempt to trade his labor to an employer for whatever compensation he will agree upon with that employer.

However, were a man not the sole owner of his labor, he would be considered a slave in bondage, and rightly so. Just as the plantation slaves of centuries past were not the owners of their labor, neither am I.

Of course, I am always free to bargain with my employer or seek another one all together if I feel that my wages are insufficient to meet my needs, but either way the reality of my circumstance remains the same.

The federal government confiscates some portion of each dollar I earn in exchange for my labor before I take possession of it. Therefore, it cannot be said that I own my labor because I am only able to take possession of that portion of compensation that the government does not take first.

If the government has the first claim to the fruit of my labor, I cannot simultaneously make the same claim. If I cannot make first claim to the fruits of my labor, how can it be said that I own them?

Sadly, I thought that the men who fought and died to establish this Republic secured for the People the unalienable rights to life and property. Unfortunately, that is not the case anymore.

Each and every day we get up and go to work, we are working first for the government and only secondly for ourselves. Yet, our leaders have succeeded in convincing millions and millions of Americans across successive generations that this is called liberty.

We are told what a wonderful system of government we have in America, most surely the finest one ever established for its revolutionary and historically unrivaled protections of individual rights and for the ways in which it secures the liberty of the people by restraining the size and scope of the government.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Today's American government is no different than so many that have come before it, and like those, it too will collapse and fall into the faded memories of history along side the rest of the tyrannically abusive empires that have come before and will come in the future.