Vote: How Much of a Slave Do You Want to Be?
Hint: Any amount is too much. (DN 1.9)
Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |
(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9
Chapter 1: WHY
1.9 — The Slave Contract, Part 2
The forces arrayed against us are tremendous…
Government employees. Statists of every flavor.
Businessmen with government connections.
Upper-class elitists, cowards, and control freaks who share a belief that someone has to keep ‘those people’ under control.
Moochers and lazy people and lobbyists and special interests and everyone else who benefits from the endless exsanguinations of the government redistribution machine.
Mainstream midwits and throngs of mass-formation zombies.
We are the few who believe in human liberty. They are the many who want to take things by force.
We have the weight of truth and natural law on our side. They have the Voldemort Formulation: “There is no good or evil—only power, and those to weak to seek it.”
When the forces arrayed against us hear our charge that government is categorically similar to slavery, they react with vitriol and venom. They must discredit us. But how? All the facts weigh against them.
Still, let us steel-man their arguments and address them as best we can.
In order to deny that government is tantamount to slavery, we would need to do one of the following:
Identify some mitigating characteristic of government that can somehow overcome, or cause us to ignore, all the other ways in which it is categorically similar to slavery.
Identify some sine qua non characteristic of slavery that government lacks, and without which cannot be considered slavery.
What could possibly fit the bill for #1?
No doubt many people (including, sadly, quite a few classical liberals) will respond with that one word, which they will speak in stentorian tones as if it is some sort of magical incantation…
DEMOCRACY.
*insert trumpet fanfare*
As we have already observed (and will further demonstrate later in this chapter), democracy is not consent. A vote is a piece of confetti tossed into a howling gale of forces beyond our control.
Real consent is an individual person being able to say YES or NO before something is done to him, or before he is made to do something. A vote isn’t that. Nor is the ‘privilege’ of (technically) being able to run for office or work for government.1
Votes and being able to run for office may have constituted an improvement over monarchy (in some ways), but they are nothing close to actual consent.
So what’s left?
Why…you get to cast a vote to decide how much of the fruits of your labor will be taken from you, by force, against your will. After all—it’s a free country.
Great. So you get to cast one vote out of millions on the question of how much will be extracted from you for the sole use of others. You get to express a fractional opinion about how many government employees, welfare cheats, and corporate welfare whores will get to live off the sweat of your brow.
Yes, it’s magical. Truly the “consent of the governed.”
You get to cast your confetti into the gale of forces that will decide how heavy the boot of your overlord will weigh upon your neck, or how many of your actions and choices will be forcibly compelled.
But never are you given a choice not to have a boot or an overlord. Never are you given the option not to have your actions and choices compelled at all.
It sounds to me like you are allowed to express an infinitesimally fractional opinion about your degree of enslavement, but never about the fact of it.
And yes, if you resist any of this, you will be punished…
Some governments will punish you more readily, or more severely, than others. Different nations will offer you greater or lesser degrees of due process. But there is no nation on Earth where you can fully claim the rights granted to you by natural law. Every single government on Earth will punish you for doing so, and will murder you if you press the issue.
So far, #1 seems like an epic fail.
So how about #2? What essential, definitive characteristic might slavery have that a government does not?
The first possibility that springs to mind is the notion of ownership. In chattel slavery, the slaveowner treats the slave as property. Government, it will be argued, does not do this to its ‘citizens.’
We can dispense with this fairly quickly, however, simply by noting that chattel slavery is not the only type of slavery. The list of other types of enslavement is, tragically, quite long…
Bonded labor, indentured servitude, forced marriage, forced labor, child labor, sex trafficking, serfdom, military conscription (war enslavement), domestic servitude, child soldiers, a thousand kinds of ancient slavery, and many more.
And various types of slavery differ significantly in character:
Some slaves are deemed to be “owned”; some are not. Some can be sold; others cannot. Some are held by contract; some by an endemic caste system; some purely by force.
Some are subjected to systematic physical and psychological abuse; others are not. Some have pathways by which they can end their own bondage; others are entirely at the mercy of their masters.
Some slaves in the ancient world could own property and engage in certain types of commerce. Some enjoyed the protection of law and, within a range, a measure of autonomy and personal choice. Others, obviously, did not.
In other words…
Slavery, like any other sort of oppression, is not an on-off switch. There are degrees. There are variations.
A statist can always point to the ways in which a government does not forcibly limit your actions and choices. Look, see, government does not do [this, that, or the other specific thing]; therefore, it isn’t anything like slavery.
For example, in the comparatively freer economies of the West, you are generally allowed to choose your own profession.
Sure…
They interpose themselves in a thousand different ways into your relationship with your employer or employees, and prevent you from making any employment agreements that they do not control…
They extract, by force, 20 to 50 percent of everything you earn and keep it for themselves or give it to their political allies…
By forcing you into their failed Ponzi scam of Social Security, they rob you of the generational wealth you would otherwise be accumulating…
But hey, at least you get to pick your job.
It’s all a matter of degree. A medical professional in a country with a nationalized heath system certainly has less choice than he would in a freer market. Soviet citizens also had some choice of profession. Were they free?
The slaver can claim that slavery too is a matter of degree…
A person in debt bondage may be given a choice between working as a domestic servant, dishwasher, dock worker, or drug runner. A sex-trafficked woman still has some control over exactly how she satisfies her clients and the precise way in which she convinces them that she is enjoying herself.
There is infinite variety in the degrees and types of oppression to which a person can be subjected, but it’s all oppression of one sort or another.
Either it forcibly coerces your actions and choices or it does not.
Either it violates your consent or it does not.
Either it subjects you to force or the threat of force, or it does not.
Either it forces you to labor for the benefit of others, or it does not.
Slavery and government are both on the wrong side of this ledger. How much longer will we keep condemning the one while making excuses for the other?
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Why “technically”? Think about it: when was the last time an “average person” was elected to high office. It happens, but not often. Our overlords all send their kids to the same schools—the same schools that they themselves attended. They live in the same zip codes. They go to the same cocktail parties. They rotate from elected office to the private sector to lobbyist for the private sector and back again. They’re all married and scratching each other’s backs, all the time. It is a party to which—in spite of all the brochure rhetoric of “democracy”—we hayseeds are simply not invited.
Heck, 42 of 43 presidents appear to all be descended from King John (and Eleanor of Aquitaine): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183858/All-presidents-bar-directly-descended-medieval-English-king.html (HT: The Starfire Codes) Now, that may just be a coincidence. Or maybe not. Either way, the presidency isn’t really there for the taking. At least not to you, plebe.
Interesting analysis. But throughout it seems as if the government is the main issue when in fact it is but a sideshow. The US is run,as I know from my time in DC, by multinational corporations and banks, private equity, and occasionally the strategic teams of billionaires. Although bureaucrats sometimes have real power because of the number of people who work for them,or the size of their budgets,they are small fish. Corporations for profit, not the incompetent but harmless, bureaucrats, are the ones responsible for what we have because corporations are simply another form of government, but one more totalitarian.
A brilliant evisceration of the system that we live under. Thanks.