There is no belief more dangerous to the cause of liberty, than the belief that a person who needs something, has the right to compel someone else to provide that thing.

It does not matter what someone believes they need. Whether someone needs food, water, clothing, housing, medical care, or whatever, the belief that they have a right to force others to provide that thing is also the claim to own someone else’s labor. In Libertarian circles (particularly with capital L Libertarians), there is a saying that taxation is theft.

Taxation is not theft, but it is a claim of ownership over other people’s labor.

Taxation is, quite literally, slavery.

I’m a slave about ten hours a week, which is the time I am working for whatever priorities some government official thinks are important, rather than working on whatever I think is important for myself and my family.

Much of America – more than half today – have negative tax rates, which is to say that when they file their federal income taxes every year, the amount of money they get in their tax return is greater than the amount of money the government deducted throughout the year, in taxes. The difference between what these people pay in taxes, and what they receive, represents labor other people performed, and did not benefit from.

I look at the Democratic Party over the course of its history, and when people talk about how the parties supposedly changed places on racism in 1964, I always correct them. The Republican Party was founded to fight slavery – which is to say; it was founded to make more people freer. Republicans still believe in that. We want limited government and relatively low taxes so that more people are freer to live their lives however they wish, provided they allow others to do the same.

Democrats fight for more government spending, and more Taxation. Democrats fight to control more of the ‘national income,’ which means that Democrats are fighting to increase the proportion of our working time that we spend as slaves.

When you think about it, Democrats never changed their view on slavery, other than changing from wanting it enforced against black people, to wanting it enforced against everyone – including black people. Black people have more reason to be Republican than anyone else does. My message to black people is simple – nothing changes for black people because black people vote as a pretty strong block for the party that keeps them oppressed. If you want change, change the game – vote Republican.

What proportion of our income do you think Bernie Sanders would let us keep if he had the power he craves? What proportion of our income would Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez let us keep? I have never heard these people ask for less government spending. It’s always more, and today they talk in terms of trillions of dollars per bill. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called a five trillion dollar bill ‘a compromise,’ in spite of the fact that it is also 25% of the US economy – in just one bill of new spending. That is in addition to everything the government already spends.

The typical American worker, according to a UCLA report from about ten years ago, spends 40% of their income in taxes, once you total all of the taxation paid at the Federal, state, and local levels, and is thus a slave of some level of government for 40% of the time they spend working. That was ten years ago.  The government has grown since then…

If we ‘compromised’ and only spent another five trillion a year (on one bill), we would then pay 65% of our income in taxes, and would be earning money for ourselves only 14 hours a week (of a typical 40-hour workweek).

I sometimes hear people say that taxes are the cost of living in a civil society. Fair enough, but then excessive taxes are what built the pyramids. Do you want to work for your family, or for Pharaoh? It is somewhat ironic that Democrats sometimes claim to be against ‘wage slavery,’ while also taking our wages, and making us slaves.

There would, of course, still be some taxation, even if a libertarian (small L) like Rand Paul were President (and was able to pass whatever legislation he wanted), but think about how much smaller government would be. We would pay less than 4% of the national income on defense (as we do today), and perhaps 4% on other things. That would leave the American people with 92% of their earnings – minus what state and local governments tax.

According to Democrats, the reason you should only have 35% of your income, instead of 92%, is so that you can have money in retirement, but I wonder what kind of retirement you could afford were you allowed to keep, and invest, all of the income Democrats seize.

Speaking of retirement, Joe Biden refers to what he calls the ‘national retirement income,’ which is the way someone talks when they want to socialize said income. Your pension or 401K – it’s only yours until the government takes it away from you.

The average social security check is $1,437.55 a month. That is the retirement Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks you deserve.

Climate Change, incidentally, has nothing to do with the climate – as the head of the IPCC himself (Dr. Hans-Otto Pörtner) has openly admitted. Climate alarmism is about negotiating access to the world’s natural resources, allowing poor nations to have access to cheap and reliable energy, such that they can become more wealthy, while denying cheap and reliable energy to rich nations (like us), such that we become poor. Joe Biden admitted as much when he told the UN he was committed to ‘global equity.’ Global Equity is also global poverty.

We are not bankrupting the country because our leadership is stupid. Some of our leaders undoubtedly are. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez don’t have enough brains between them to qualify as a single half-wit. But the party leadership is not stupid – they are, rather, evil and corrupt.

Some of the people on the left really believe all the crap about there not being enough natural resources for the whole world to live in freedom, with relative wealth, but those who consider themselves a ‘moral and intellectual elite’ have a natural distrust of any economic system in which people other than themselves are wealthy, and those are exactly the kinds of people who gravitate toward politics as a career. Climate change is a great excuse for the ‘moral and intellectual elite’ to show their morality by stealing from the rest of us, which is exactly what they do.

Incidentally, the Democratic Leadership does not believe in the need to provide free things to the poor. That’s just talk used to get votes. There is an old saying that Democrats don’t love the poor so much as they hate the rich, and that, sadly, has always been true.

There is another saying that money is the root of all evil (in the Bible, it is the ‘love of money’). Democrats use that to justify punitive tax rates on top earners. The Democratic Leadership knows that high tax rates on top earners reduce tax revenues, and impose a larger tax burden on the middle and lower classes, but their goal is not to increase tax revenues, nor to make the rich pay a higher proportion of the total tax burden. Their goal is to reduce the wealth of entrepreneurs and business people, and to enrich corrupt politicians (aka – themselves).

And let us not mention corrupt Republicans. They exist too. It’s harder to be a corrupt Republican, given that the media will throw you to the dogs if you are caught, but corrupt Republicans are out there.

Politicians used to try to hide their corruption, but Democrats are so tight with the media that there is no need to hide it anymore. I mean, Putin masses an army on the border of Ukraine while Hunter Biden sells him artwork, and the media says nothing. The only question is how much art Putin needs to buy to keep us sitting on our hands.

The Democrats know they have lost the support of the bulk of the public, which is why they are repurposing our military away from protecting the public from foreign powers, and toward protecting the government from the will of the people. It is also why the FBI now investigates parents instead of criminals. We are rapidly building a Gestapo.

Our nation is in a very dangerous place, with half the people elected into national office, and the bulk of unelected federal bureaucrats, actively working to weaken our country and to make the American people poor. The Democrats could not do that in honest elections, so we no longer have honest elections.

Understand that the great lie is that the ‘Great Lie’ is a lie. Joe Biden won the election only because of massive levels of fraud – fraud the Democrats are hoping to make permanent with HR1 – the very first bill the current Congress drafted.

Democrats believe they are the moral and intellectual elite, and that they have a moral and intellectual right to own the rest of us. We are to be their slaves, and they enchain us with promises of ‘free.’ This is why there is no belief more dangerous to the cause of liberty, than the belief that a person who needs something, has the right to compel someone else to provide that thing. Slaves dream of freedom. Free people dream of chains.