Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the assumption of taxation is that everything belongs to the government, and they allow us to keep some of what we earn out of the goodness of their hearts. If you hew an ax handle from a stick, that ax handle is government property. If they so choose, they can take it or any portion of it. This is premised on the notion that you and I are the property of the State, therefore anything we create is the State’s property by default. They passed a Constitutional amendment to allow the government the right to tax us individually. Wilson said it “Will never touch a hair on a working man’s head.” This shows that our slavery wasn’t the way the U.S. founders set up the government, it’s an innovation from the Progressive Era. Today, we are all the slaves of the government to the degree it decides.
A slave is someone who is owned by another. A person can own a slave as can a corporation, or government. Moreover, a slave can be partially or wholly owned by another as can any other property. So you and I might be 33% slave, more or less, depending on how much tax we have to pay. That 33%, however, is only a perception because for any part of someone to be owned, all of them must be owned. So that hypothetical 33% government ownership of you and I is only part of the government’s ownership of us. The government must own 100% of us to allow us to have back 66%. This allows us to maintain the notion that we are free individuals with agency. This is in fact a fiction. A slave has no agency nor are such people free. We are property.
Property can’t own property. Anything property creates then becomes owned by the owner of that property. If the owner allows the slave to retain some profit from his or her creation, that is at the slave owner’s discretion… not the slave’s. Take for example the output of a loom. Does the loom own the cloth or the owner of the loom? If some of the profit from the cloth is put back into maintaining the loom, that doesn’t mean the loom is a free agent. The production of a machine or slave is the property of the owner of that machine or slave. That is the premise that allows taxation. The citizen is actually a slave of the government. That government then can reduce or elevate the slave as they see fit. In the end, however, we are still and always slaves to those in government.
Ownership and property are states of mind and a state of mind is not reality. This means that a human being can only be owned in mind and not reality. The difference between slave and owner is the willingness to commit violence. Even in those rare historical circumstances where someone willingly accepted slavery, power and violence were then used to enforce that subjugation. We are slaves to the government because the government has so few morals and ethics it is willing to use the power we invested in it and the violence it has a monopoly on… to enslave us. In doing so, violating its most basic duty and our trust. Nevertheless, every State on Earth considers its people mere slaves. The recent admonitions by the elites at the victory of the AfD in Germany illustrate their opinion of us.
The problem is, how can a human being be property? Only a human being or group of human beings can own property. That which owns can’t be owned… just as that which is owned can’t own. Therefore, calling a human being property is a category error. A State is merely a group of arrogant human beings. Therefore, a State can’t own its citizens. It can claim it owns us and so tax us, and exploit violence to keep us in line. However, a State being merely a group of human beings can’t do anything morally, legally, or ethically that a human being can’t. Indeed, a state claiming ownership of its citizens is a thing created claiming ownership of that which created it. Nevertheless, this is the paradigm we find ourselves in. We are only slaves to our governments… until we choose not to be.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
