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Comment by AdrianB1 | Hacker News Reader

This will be a very unpopular opinion, but it is true: USA is much better than 200 years ago; if 200 years ago you were a slave, 100% of your output belonged to your master. Now your government owns only 40-50% of your output and you feel totally free. The only bad thing is that almost 100% of the population is now a half-slave. You don't chose what to pay, how much and what for, you just have to pay up, or else. Yes, you get some services, whatever the governments wants to, same as slaves got shelter and food, as much as the master wanted to. I see some similarities, tell me they don't exist.

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Slavery was not fully eliminated in the US; it was just fractionalized, and the terms - which groups are enslaved, which groups are entitled to their output, and how much of it, etc - were obviously heavily modified. For instance you are able to change employers now, but no matter which one you pick - even if it's your own firm - in most highly-valued fields 40-70%+ of your output will be taken by various layers of government - by force if necessary. Your children are subject to the same obligation so "fractionalized chattel slavery" is a decent first-order description.

It is true that acts of extreme violence are less common than they were in the 19th century South, but that alone does not make the system "not slavery" given that a threat of overwhelming force still underpins it.

Yeah, makes sense to me.

But you can move stuff out of government reach. If you're wealthy enough to afford good counsel, you can do it ~legally. As Apple, for example, does. Or you can do it illegally. Just don't count on Switzerland or Panama anymore.

And even little people like me can manage it. Using anonymous personas and well-mixed Bitcoin (or whatever). You just can't bring it back to meatspace, without risking deanonymization.

This is just foolishness. Are some rich people still exploiting others and rigging the system? Sure. But chattel slavery was an extraordinary evil. It's at best vacuous to put it in the same moral bucket as a democracy where people vote to, say, make sure old people don't starve in the streets.

USA was a democracy also before Abraham Lincoln. Voting to take 50% of regular Joe's income does not make it right, like voting to kill Joe or voting anything that affects Joe, no matter how nice is the "cause" used as an excuse.

I understand your own quirky morality, but when you live in a society with other people, you'll have to find common ground.

I'll note that "50% of regular Joe's income" has an enormous number of hidden assumptions, all of them similarly socially negotiated. So the theoretical purity of your position is mainly an illusion.

> people vote

The "high taxation is not slavery, because you voted" argument lost all merit once net recipients of the welfare state became able to out-vote its net contributors - which has already happened in the US.

> make sure old people don't starve

If only that were what the extent of what social security actually does. But it's not properly asset tested. So broke millenials are paying a ton of payroll taxes, which are - after substantial adminsitrative overhead - transferred to their elders who almost always have significantly more assets than they do, and often don't even need a transfer at all, let alone as their only way of avoiding starvation.

One, your numbers for "already happened in the US" are at best erroneous. The question of who gets what from labor is complicated, but the one thing for sure is that there are no easy answers, because labor itself is deeply social.

How is that different than any other country? You pay what the government says you owe, you get what the government says you get.

Many other countries did not have slavery at all. Others have no income tax on citizens. Is that different enough?

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