Days of labor

Taxes are usually referred to in percentages. The Ministry of Propaganda converts labor to money then reduces labor to an abstract by talking percentages: Let’s increase taxes by 2% or 20%. The percentage amount does not matter to the Socialists who will not do the work taxes come from anyway.

On rare occasions they talk dollars: The worker earning twenty-five thousand a year will be required to pay a tax increase amounting to ninety-nine dollars a year. Whether dollars or percentages are used let’s reverse the formula and see where it leads us.

Take an employee who goes to a job forty-eight weeks of every year. To arrive at forty-eight weeks I allowed for two weeks vacation, and a generous ten paid holidays. Now, let’s reduce 48 weeks into the number of days actually worked:

7 x 48 weeks = 336 days. Now deduct Saturdays & Sundays.

336 minus 96 days = 240 days of actual labor.

My totals do not include sick days, emergencies, etc. The numbers are close enough for me to make my point without getting lost in minutia.

Now, let’s discuss taxes in terms of labor instead of talking about an abstract percentage.

Approximately 110 days of actual labor each year goes to pay taxes of one kind or another. Tax watchdog groups, less generous than I, say that workers toil for the government for the first five and half months of each year before they work for themselves. No matter how the math is done, it’s slavery whether you break it down into days or months.

NOTE: Mitt Romney said he pays 15 % of his income in taxes. I would rather he told voters how many days of actual labor he paid in taxes. If he was honest he would have to add up all of days of labor performed by everyone working for his “investments.” The total could come out to him paying thousands of days of labor each year in taxes. Of course that’s absurd, but so is the income tax.

Now that we are thinking about taxes in terms of days of labor let’s word a proposed tax increase this way: The government only wants to enslave you for an additional five days. Now you will work for your Socialist masters 115 days a year instead of 110 days a year.

On the bright side a politician preaching tax reduction can say: “I want to give everyone five more days of freedom to work for themselves. Under my plan an individual will only work for the government 105 days a year.” (Don’t hold your breath until elected officials talk taxes in those terms.)

Wage-earners at the low end of the scale may not pay a lot when and if they file a tax return, but they pay 110 days of their labor just the same: Sales taxes, transportation taxes, property taxes which are paid to their landlord if they are renters, and so on. Since they earn so little their taxes have to be collected in the sneakiest of ways after they pay their obvious taxes. Every one of their hard earned dollars is taxed and taxed again as they make their way into Socialist bank accounts.

The ultimate tax burden in a collectivist society always falls upon the backs of the lowest income workers no matter how the books are cooked to make it look otherwise. Low income workers pay plenty regardless of the public relations baloney that is fashionable nowadays. When wealthy Socialists pay taxes they do so with the labors of others. In effect, the rich man’s taxes are simply another tax on the poor.

Admittedly, taxes fund necessary government; the infrastructure, the military, the judiciary, and so on. Under a non-Socialist, free market, system of representative government, a corporate flat tax combined with a national and state sales tax should become the instrument for funding limited government after every public trough leech has been driven away from the public larder.

By funding limited government with a sales tax, any increase in taxes would automatically hurt business. That is something all governments avoid. The public might even accept an IMMUTABLE personal income tax of say 5% which would amount to 12 days of labor. Americans would be fools to agree to such a thing, but not such big fools as they are now.

In any event, private sector producers should have a lot more control over every aspect of taxation than they have under American-style communism. If the US continues down the road to full-blown communism, we might as well writeoff representative government right now and get on with it.

Socialists insist that all resources belong to the state. Labor is a resource. It is the wealth of a nation; therefore, Socialists/Communists will never rest until everyone is paying 365 days of labor a year in taxes. I mean everyone in the private sector. And don’t think that private sector employees will at least get a one day break when leap year rolls around. That, too, will be covered. A Socialist can snuff out freedom quicker than Hussein can say “Trust me.”

The highest price that private sector, low income, workers pay is the loss of individual liberty taken from them by the very tax system that will enslave them even further as more Socialist leeches find their way to the tax tub. The lower income levels of the workforce will never be able to offset taxes through interest-earning savings. Then, to add insult to financial injury, Communist teachers, who are amongst the biggest beneficiaries of American communism, say that education is the only way out of poverty.

Of course teachers have a point since they have done so much to destroy individualism and the early American spirit of freedom. Institutional based knowledge used to be just one way out of poverty. Under socialism’s drive to institutionalize everyone education becomes the shortest route to the public trough.

Finally, the government not only wants all of your labor they now own the children and parents are paying for it. What is happening in this country is no different than parents selling their children into slavery.

Mother Government
Joseph Harris Wednesday, January 18, 2012

As government continues to grow by leaps and bounds, more demands of ownership are exercised, both on the national and state level. This is being seen more and more in some schools around the nation as they shut out parental influence and claim ownership of the students.

More government schools are promoting the myth that parents no longer have exclusive rights concerning the education of their children. When parents fight back against schools which expose their children to inappropriate sexually explicit material, the parents are surprised to discover the school often believes they have more control over the children than the parents. Courts often side with the schools, stating, as one court did, “parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students.”. That should make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, if you are a parent. If you are a good parent, it should burn you up.

On the other hand, look at the flip side. Government schools are just laying claim to their “deserved” parental authority. Take note of how many children today are supported by government. Since government pays for their pre-natal care, birth, medical insurance, food, etc., why wouldn’t government be considered their mother? Government, through its many and varied give-away welfare programs, is the parent of millions of children in this country. It is only natural that government, through its educational arm, would assert its parental authority.

Mother government began conceiving children back in the days of FDR and has remained fertile to the present. We are well into over 70 years of a government dependent mentality. People think the government is supposed to handle their retirement through Social Security, additional retirement benefits through Medicaid, provide their daily bread through food stamp programs, supply insurance through Medicare, and now Obamacare, provide housing through government subsidies, and that’s just naming some of the more well known programs.

The parental government has become a mainstream part of society. Even some law abiding, tax soaked citizens who work and play by the rules, will try to siphon into government programs to “get back” all they have paid in; after all, it’s their money. This type of thinking, at least in part, is derived from the parental government philosophy. However, the government does not owe social services to we the people. Two generations have had an umbilical connection for so long, they cannot begin to live and think independently. Remember, all of these programs are provided by our taxes, and when more money is needed, new taxes are created by innovative politicians. However, the teat has dried up. Adding more taxes is like putting extra udders on a milk cow’s bag; you may be able to get the milk faster, but the amount of milk in the bag does not increase.

So don’t be surprised when government institutions try to usurp parental authority. Mother government has been playing parent for so long, it is natural for her to lay claim to that in which she has invested.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/44009

 

I want everyone to do an experiment. Were Flanders wrote Government I want you to replace it with Employer, were he put taxes I want you to think of how business take your labor keep some of it for themselves and then hand you a portion of it.
Basically the gist is that a business operates just like a government only its small scale, less transparent and less accountable to the public as a whole

 

To JamesDF: You forgot to include the major difference between the two: The government uses force.

 

The employer uses a denial of food. So what? The means of coercion differ, but it's still coercion.

And, if the government didn't prevent them, the employers would use force too. They're not angels--as their actions in the third world demonstrate.

 

Do they? Must of missed that! Could you point me to the socialist political economy that states "all resources belong to the state". I don't mind you referring to either Marxist or non-Marxist varieties. Socialism is tremendously vibrant after all!

 

To Someone: This is America not the Third World. The freedom to take care of yourself more than compensates for the actions of an employer ——singular not plural —— unless you are claiming all employers act in unison! Even if that were possible they would not wield anywhere near the power the government exercises through the income tax.

 

Income tax has a purpose: provision of merit and public goods that- without public provision- would be characterised by deadweight loss and free riding. In comparison, private enterprise are thieving labour value and there's nothing you can do about it (even unionisation can tend to be a zero sum game, reflecting redistribution from one group of worker to another)

 

Employer's don't deny people food. Thats absurd. People have a choice as to their place of employment, and people move freely between jobs. If a person doesn't like one employer, he can go to another.

A job is a two way agreement, the employer needs something and the employee provides it for an agreed upon price. If the employer is too demanding then he has no employees, if the employee is too demanding then he has no job. Its a compromise.

Slave labor is not as effective or efficient as voluntary employees. Slave is not free either, and I am guessing its more expensive than a good voluntary happy workforce.

To divide everyone into two totally distinct classes and label one all evil - more absurdity. What third world examples do you have? Most employers are also employees, particularly in small companies. In fact, most small business owners work more hours and harder for less pay than their employees.

 

Businesses don't have guns, you can walk away from the association at any time, and what you earn is yours by contract and no longer belongs to the business. The government, on the other hand, has guns. It has the legal right of force and you have no recourse to self defense. You cannot walk away from government without permission and then leaving everyone behind. And, it claims the right to take all of what you earn under threat of using those guns against you. What you actually keep is a privilege, not a right nor is it truly yours should the government demand it from you later.

There's a *huge* difference.

 

That is only true if you think that people aren't forced to survive by needing food and so forth.

 

I see so in order for you to support your position and political believes you have to deny reality and the truth this is nice information to know

 

Its of course utterly silly to suggest that the labour contract can be purely characterised by exchange. 'I've got to eat' certainly enables coercion to flourish. What I don't like about that argument, however, is how it misses the variation in compulsion generated. A reservation wage strategy, understood by the employer such that bargaining cannot be used to ensure wages reflect productivity, is quite different to the general misery created through capitalism's utilisation of involuntary unemployment