f0xr on Nostr: There's a word for the system where someone else takes all the output of your labor, ...

There's a word for the system where someone else takes all the output of your labor, but claims that it's right and good for them to do so because in return they give you everything you need to survive for "free".

The word is slavery.

Are you cool with that? Or are you doing something to change it?

quoting note1nj7…h398

I always like to remind people who are like "the rich aren't paying their fair share!" that you could liquidate like 3 of the largest companies in America, and solely use their equity to run the government (you couldn't without losing all the equity in the meantime, but bear with me), and it wouldn't put a dent in the budget and you'd need to liquidate the next 10 largest companies next year, and by year 3 or so you probably wouldn't have enough market cap left on the S&P 500 to keep going.

It's like, you have this beast that's so big and sucks up so much money, you can't possibly feed it.

It's crazy to think about because we all pay so much tax, but our great grandparents often didn't have to pay any direct taxes -- no land taxes, no income taxes.

The Jacobins actually played with taxation like what we have during the French revolution, and it was wildly unpopular and killed (along with unpopular revolutionaries like Robspierre)

People will say the obvious, that the expectations of what the government does have changed dramatically over the past 100 years. The word "expectation" is an odd one though because as an example, the US taxes enough for medical care to provide universal healthcare, but then it just doesn't. Many such cases. The problem isn't limited to the USA, however. Italy for example has an economy composed of 56% state spending. Many countries are near the same levels of spending they saw during the world wars. And what do we get? Demands for more money!

Another thing that happens when the government is so big and takes so much is it chokes out everything else. People can't tithe to the church for example, if they're already paying half their income in various taxes as is the case in many countries. They can't save for a rainy day. They can't donate much to the poor because they are the poor. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle where wealth is soaked up and makes individuals poorer, and because they're poorer they need more big government interventions to make up for their lack of wealth. Government becomes totalizing whether we like it or not, and that's what my grandfather fought in the world wars to prevent. He died quite bitter at what happened afterwards.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND/CAN