18A041 VOGs Part 1 by Jim Davies, 10/9/2018    

Victims of Government, that is; and it's a long list. Let's look at a few today, and some more next week.

Taxpayers, of course; because tax funds everything else and the ripoff is enormous and it penalizes everyone. I can't think of anyone who doesn't pay it; young children arguably, but see below for other ways those are victimized. Some are smart enough to avoid or minimize one kind of tax but nobody can avoid them all. Since tax comes out of the product of our labor, government makes partial slaves of us all.

How "partial"? Counting all of it - income, sales, property taxes plus the hidden tax of inflation - tax hits everyone hard but the very poor and the very rich most of all, as a percentage of what's earned; in the 1980s Milton Friedman studied that subject and estimated 48% for those two groups and 42% for the middle class. My Your Tax Dollars at Work proposed an average of 45% though that too is a bit dated and by now I suspect it's higher. Most European governments levy more than 50%. Whatever; every Monday, Tuesday and part of Wednesday, all of us are enslaved to government.

True: bread, circuses and some actually useful benefits are provided out of that imposition. That was true also of antebellum slaves; all their housing, feeding, clothing and medical needs were met by the master out of the money they earned him. The arrangement doesn't make either example of slavery less repugnant.

Blacks have suffered immensely under government, which firstly enforced slavery with two key laws: slaves were denied access to the courts it monopolized, so could not obtain legal redress for having been kidnapped and imprisoned; and the fugitive slave laws (backed by Article 4 Section 2 Clause 3) effectively prevented escape. Then after 1865 in the South, government laws kept blacks separate and second-class, making it very difficult to escape poverty; and the first anti-gun laws prohibited the only weapons blacks could afford.

Finally and most hypocritically of all, after 1950 and the "white flight" from cities to suburbs and countryside, government zoning laws mandated large lots, making homes so expensive that few blacks could buy them. This left blacks behind in city areas from which the economic engine had been removed, condemning them to long-term poverty. To nail down that repression, anti-drug laws made sure that most blacks with entrepreneurial skills would be placed in a government cage.

Children are defenseless against the might of government, whose laws firstly require them to be branded at birth with an ID number cynically known as "social security", and soon afterwards require them to attend for their 12 most formative years a school of whose curriculum government agents approve. Those schools have the primary purpose of teaching respect for authority, and such true teaching as may take place is almost fully excluded from schools in black ghettos, in which discipline is unenforcible and so learning, virtually impossible.

Prisoners are the victims of the government's soi-disant "Justice System" - because they broke laws. There are two million of them, and about 70% come back for more, after release, because the imprisonment deprived them of the ability to earn a conventional living. Half of them - one million - harmed nobody; they were condemned not for doing something malum in se (bad in itself, regardless of any law) but malum prohibitum ("bad" only because it was forbidden by government edict.) Like dealing in certain drugs, for example. Resisting taxes, for another - whether legislated or not.

A true justice system (such as will prevail in the coming zero government society) will require those who harm someone to provide restitution. Period. No caging; once that requirement is fulfilled, the aggressor will be free to get on with his life.

An especially outrageous failure of government "justice" is that sometimes it imprisons people who have not even broken one of its uncountable laws; ambitious prosecutors, furnished with almost inexhaustible funds stolen from taxpayers, hammer away at some suspect until a conviction is won - and then even stubbornly resist his release if and when he is able to prove his innocence.

Pensioners are impoverished by government's "social security" scheme, because it confiscates the funds that anyone could have used to purchase retirement support in a competitive market. That confiscation is 15.3% (not 7.5%!) of what he earns, up to a high and rising maximum, for all his working life.

In return, he is provided on retirement with such pension and benefits as Congress then decides it can afford. There is no contractual obligation to pay any particular sum. If that deal were offered by a provider in a free market, nobody would be silly enough to buy it; there would always be a contract, specifying both premiums and payouts. Instead, the government operates a monopoly and forces everyone to take part.

Monopolies never provide a good deal. Always, in a market, they are displaced by smarter competitors after a few years. I've been advised that if the SS "premium" (of 15.3%) were charged, the benefits provided would be two or three times larger. Hence, oldsters are being deprived of at least half what they could live on in their golden years.

Next week's ZGBlog will continue this list (I did say it was long!)