Are You a Slave?

Just didn't know it?

As my old friend used to say, “A free country’s free son does what he is free to do.”

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A slave, by definition is a person who

1.       is treated as property;

2.       cannot move freely;

3.       cannot own property.

Am I getting something wrong here?

Slavery was present in many cultures, including tribal communities, for millennia.

According to Aristotle, about 70% of people deserve to be slaves, because they wouldn’t or couldn’t put up a fight for their freedom. The approximately one-in-three people who deserve freedom eerily coincides with the percentage of my past students in the US and in Europe, who were able/willing to perform university-level work, the ones with the acumen and the independence to be able to make informed and responsible decisions.

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How does slavery go down in cultural history?

Colonuses emerged at the end of the Western Roman empire. They rented the land on which they labored. However, under constant Barbarian attacks, Rome became a spurious place for many. Without a Magistrate’s protection that would be backed up by military force, gangs formed and took over the protection racket that was the direct path to the feudalist system. A colonus was allowed to move, assuming he didn’t have any debts to the landowner, and was allowed to own whatever he could afford, but he was unlikely to be able to protect his assets.

In the Middle Ages, serfs were the most decrepit underclass, who belonged to the land, even if the ownership of the land changed. While sometimes they were allowed to move, there was not much point in moving around, except for the periods of plagues, when labor became scarce and landlords competed with each other by offering favorable conditions. It’s another question how far those conditions were honored. Such contracts, based on human nature, must have been mostly one-sided, especially after considering that a serf, if found in possession of a military weapon, was punished by death. (Well, in 1806, a 12-year-old boy was still hanged in England for “fishing from the landowner’s pond.”)

Travel documents in the Middle Ages were often required in order to avoid tolls, customs, and fees, so only the privileged could afford to travel affordably (traveling students were an exception in many cases).

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Industrialization freed up rural labor force and destitute workers showed up in factories in droves. Mines and factories also liked child labor. In Britain, child labor was limited to eight hours a day by the 1830s, but passing a law and enforcing it are two different things. Workhouses (and prisons) guaranteed slave-like conditions. It might surprise you that workhouses in Britain were eliminated only in 1948.

Factory workers differed from slaves, because they were able to move around, but usually couldn’t save up much for exercising their right to mobility. They, just like medieval peasantry and serfs, were allowed to own necessities and inconsequential trinkets that they could afford, but such amenities didn’t exactly make them “free.” The vast majority of them were little more than slaves who were granted to house, to feed, and to clothe themselves.

It was a constant battle between the employers’ cartels and trade union corruption to obtain and keep living wages for workers, but the movement definitely obtained more for workers than “free elections.”

Elections originally favored those with assets, who contributed and thus, had something to lose. After a few decades, elections became poorly-disguised façades to front for the real rulers and to allow for some room to blame the electorate for not receiving real representation from the political class that is elected by moneyed interests.

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Today, people cannot travel freely, unless they submit to authorities that grant them the right to do so. This type of control originates from the start of WW1, when passports were introduced (“Your papers, please” does NOT originate from Nazi Germany). The end of the war didn’t end the practice, which gave birth to the idea of national IDs, whose use is mandatory and prevalent in most of the “civilized” world. (Only about five percent of the US population owns a valid passport.)

So, when it comes to travel freely, your options are limited to the point that in a sense, you are a slave.

You are still allowed to own your “wealth” or your trinkets, but those rights can go away any moment. During the Great Depression, Americans had to submit their gold, and since 1913, the money they use has not belonged to them. The USD, ever since, has been issued by a private bank, The Federal Reserve, in the form of a debt owed by the taxpayer to the bank (no matter where in the world you live, there are about 160 such “central banks” owned by the same crooks). Since the 1990s, your bank deposit hasn’t belonged to you, either: it is an unsecured loan that you give to the bank that can freely use it for just about any risky commercial or investment transaction. If all banks tanked at the same time, the FDIC could cover about 50 cents out of every 100 dollars that it “insures.”

Without a SSN, you are not even a valid human being in the US; you cannot legally own a car or acquire a driver’s license. Technically, you do not exist, which illegals don’t seem to learn fast enough, because they are blinded by the temporary handouts that will end one day, while the young among them are in constant danger of being kidnapped by the sex or organ traffickers. Young males are likely to be recruited into an illegitimate “police” or “security” force, whose members can also disappear anytime. You can enjoy conditional rights that can be taken away anytime. However, in order to acquire one as a legal immigrant (e.g. getting married for real), you must submit to a large number of autotelic and autocratic rules that are not even laws (not that it matters), including a hefty “application fee” that amounts to about $4.5k and the acceptance of a number of “vaccinations” that after the sooner-or-later-lethal “covid” injections, would require an insanely optimistic attitude to accept. Some states have similar requirements even for children’s schooling, unless the parents want to risk their offspring to be swallowed by the black hole of CPS.

Besides Eretria, the US is the only country in the world with dual taxation, meaning that you have to pay taxes in the US (above a certain amount of income that was $110k last time I checked) even if you do not reside in the US. Forget about denouncing your citizenship; that’s $2,350 for the application, plus traveling to the US Embassy, waiting, and having to go through a lengthy audit process with the IRS.

Still, here comes the criminal code, too. The average American breaks the law three times a day on average without having the slightest idea of doing that. Many laws result in many “crimes,” which provides a good supply of free labor for the governor’s son’s private prisons.

As for owning property, you do not really own anything as long as you have to pay property taxes. Even if you fall short by $1 on your property tax, your property can be confiscated and sold in order to recover “the amount owed.” Add the widespread violation of the 4th Amendment by law-enforcement to this: you don’t have to commit any crime, it’s enough that an official deems your ownership “suspicious,” and your property is gone in a jiffy. As for personal liberty (habeas corpus), after the Orwellian-named “Patriot Act,” you can be imprisoned and held indefinitely as soon as an official (whose best interest is to create cases in order to prove their “usefulness” even when there aren’t any) utters the t-word; you are finished.

To make a long story short, in many ways, your condition seems to meet the conditions of being a slave:

1.       You are treated as property in a surprising number of ways;

2.       Your property ownership is only tentative and remains legally unsubstantiated;

3.       Your movement is severely restricted.

Shall I ask, you are not even allowed to legally exist, unless you succumb to all the rules and regulations?

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You may have suspected all this, but it’s here, written down clearly. Valid until further notice, but don’t expect any improvements.

Still, I expect you to draw your conclusions and, if possible, discuss them in the Comment section.