Taxing Away Freedom

Back to the Slavery Links Page

July 21, 2001
Paul Craig Roberts

The demand for slavery reparations is a diversion to put all Americans – black, white, brown – off their guard as tax slavery emerges on a global scale.

It sounds farfetched, but hear my tale. Consider first how nonsensical is the reparations argument. Whites, none of whom are or were slave owners, would be making transfer payments to blacks, none of whom are or were slaves.

Not even a "sins of the fathers" rationale justifies race reparations. A majority of white Americans are descendants of people who immigrated to these shores after slavery had come to an end. Similarly, many blacks are descendants of people who arrived in the United States in the post-slavery era. Indeed, the millions of "preferred minorities" who have arrived in the last three decades are legally privileged compared to native-born whites.

To find descendants of slave owners and descendants of slaves would require more extensive racial genealogies than Nazi Germany and South Africa were able to assemble for their race-based policies. And how would we classify people with ancestors in both camps? Would they pay reparations to themselves? Would descendents of black slave owners pay reparations?

Consider, also, that in terms of absolute numbers, poor whites outnumber poor blacks. Thus, reparations would be nothing but a tax on skin color. The association of "race justice" with a tax on pigment is so incongruous as to be absurd.

So, what is this issue of reparations about?

It is to distract us from schemes for global tax reporting that will resurrect the slavemaster in the more powerful form of government.

International organizations (United Nations), multinational organizations (OECD) and national organizations (U.S. Treasury) are behind these schemes. The Treasury justifies its scheme as combating tax evasion. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (30 industrialized countries) justifies its scheme in terms of preventing "harmful tax competition." The U.N. frankly admits that it wants to set up an International Tax Organization (ITO) in order to establish a legal "mechanism for multilateral sharing of tax information."

However you cut it, the upshot is that financial privacy would cease to exist. The world's governments would acquire knowledge of the whereabouts and amounts of everyone's bank balance and investment portfolio.

The U.N. wants to impose a tax on "rich" countries in order to fund income transfers to "poor" ones. The U.N. proposes either an energy tax (carbon tax) or a "currency transactions tax." The U.N. also wants to impose a tax on emigrants so that countries of origin don't experience "economic loss when able citizens emigrate."

The OECD is angry that the relatively high taxation rates in its member countries cause capital flight to "tax havens." A tax haven includes any country with a lower tax rate than OECD countries.

The Treasury is demanding that foreign financial institutions provide the IRS with personal and financial information on their customers, whether or not they are U.S. citizens. The purpose of these Qualified Intermediary regulations is to discover Americans who are pretending to be foreigners. The more important effect is to provide the U.S. government with a financial profile of every customer of a foreign financial institution with U.S. investment source income in his portfolio.

In effect, the U.S. Treasury is squashing the sovereignty of nations just as the OECD and U.N. intend to do. This makes it difficult for the United States to oppose the OECD and U.N. for doing the same thing.

What does global tax reporting have to do with slavery? Think about it. When people cannot vote with their feet without being taxed by the U.N. and having chunks of their income remitted to their country of origin, they do not own themselves. They are the property of their country of origin and country of residence.

The deterioration of political discourse in the United States and Europe has dulled the concept of slavery. A slave, like a serf, is a person who does not work for himself. He works for others, just as you and I do when we pay income tax.

A sales or excise tax is consistent with freedom because it establishes no claim to a person's labor. If a purchase tax becomes too onerous, black markets will emerge to curtail government's greed.

Few slavemasters punished a shirking slave as severely as the IRS punishes a shirking taxpayer. An under-performing slave might receive a whipping or short rations for a while, but a taxpayer is robbed not only of his income but also of several years of his life spent in prison for income tax evasion.

Slavemasters understood that human labor was too valuable to lock away in a dungeon, but the IRS regards shirking as slave rebellion and puts it down mercilessly.

So will the OECD and the U.N. Indeed, global reporting will permit parties in power to pursue political opponents across national boundaries and to dispossess groups, ethnic or otherwise, that lose political struggles. Global tax reporting means the demise of individuals, dissent and freedom, and the rebirth of gold coins in the mattress as a favored financial institution.

Dr. Roberts is a former assistant secretary of the treasury and co-author of "The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice."

Copyright 2001 Creators Syndicate Inc.

All Rights Reserved © NewsMax.com