05-28-2009, 11:57 PM
Quote:Not to impugn the rest of your statement, this part does not make sense. Kandrathe's point is that if you give almost two thirds of your income to a third party (who, BTW, is not your employer), you can rightfully be considered that party's 'vassal' (or 'sharecropper', or 'indentured servant', or a number of less polite though more modern terms). An employee does not give 60% of his earnings to his employer (although the employer may make a large profit from the employee's work). The relationship between employer and employee is not vassalage -- though it can sometimes be unfair in other ways (both ways, given the power of the unions at times).In neither a free system nor a welfare state do you sell your free choice. You pick whether and where to work, you pick where you're going to live and where you're going to move, and even if you let someone take over those rights in exchange for money, you cannot permanently surrender them. Whatever the tax burdens may be, labour is (in the main) free.
Vassalage, indenture, slavery, peonage, serfdom, thralldom, corvee, etc... do not have these qualities. In those systems, you have lost your free choice. You do not get to pick your job, you cannot quit, you cannot stop working. Someone else makes these choices for you; you are unfree labour.
This is fundamental to forced labour, and to conflate any such system with free labour, even one whose product is heavily taxed, is misleading at best.
The other point, of course, is democracy. In Europe as in America, you can vote for change if you don't like the tax regime, or leave the country if you can't put up with it. The government is by, of, and for the people. Whether taxes are high or low, they are not that way because an arbitrary Monarch is expropriating your wealth, but because the elected government has decided it that way. Some countries may choose to tax themselves heavily, but they choose it freely.
-Jester