Taxation, Slavery, and Consent

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Mises

Taxation, Slavery, and Consent

90 COMMENTS

08/18/2017Chris Calton

I could see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of my toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, “Is this all?” He was satisfied with nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him six dollars, sometimes gives me six cents, to encourage me. (emphasis added)1

This passage comes from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. With these words, Douglass is describing the experiences of many slaves who lived in the border states of the antebellum United States. It was common for slaves to be granted the “freedom” to contract out their labor for wages, enjoying the ability to move throughout the town, interact with people voluntarily, and sometimes even live on their own. But they were still owned, and this ownership was demonstrated through the demand for a percentage of their earnings from their master. Economically, these slaves were treated as “capital” earning a rent for their owners.               

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The Scourge Of Modern-Day Slavery

by W. Kurt Hauser

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from the Hoover Press book Invisible Slaves: The Victims and Perpetrators of Modern-Day Slavery.

The legacy of slavery haunts the West, especially the United States. Indeed, critics of the West cite slavery among the many evils spawned by Western Civilization in general and the United States in particular. But nothing could be further from the truth. Slavery existed before the discovery of the New World and before the origins of Western Civilization. The abolition movement is Western in origin and sprung from the enlightenment in Europe. Great Britain and the United States were the first countries to ban the trade in slaves—and the West led the globe in enacting laws prohibiting the institution of slavery.

Yet slavery continues to exist in virtually every country of the world. Thus, slavery is not a problem of the past, but a present-day scourge. As many as 46 million human beings will wake up today to a life of forced labor, violence, sexual assault, and dehumanization under the yoke of slavery. A major part of the solution is an acknowledgement and awareness that slavery exists today in all reaches of the globe.    

https://www.hoover.org/research/scourge-modern-day-slavery