Read full text: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/02/16/on-slavery-and-taxation/
It is extraordinary that in the present time everyone accepts their own slavery.
It is extraordinary that libertarian and free market economists are up in arms against tariffs but are comfortable with an income tax that enslaves them to government.
Tariffs are a tax on consumption, which is where the classical economists wanted taxation to be placed. An income tax is a tax on the factors of production–labor and capital. It is the income tax, not tariffs, that suppress the growth of the economy by reducing the supply of labor and capital.
I have been making this point for decades, and it is libertarians, those committed to freedom and liberty, who have paid the least attention. Until slavery was reestablished in 1913, tariffs were the main source of government finance. The United States developed as a powerful industrial and manufacturing economy under the protection of tariffs, not as a free trade country. Indeed, the North invaded the Confederacy and destroyed a country in order to force the South to bear the consequences of a tariff needed for the North’s industrial development.
What are we to make of this? Are we so brainwashed and indoctrinated into our own slavery that we cannot recognize it, preferring to project our present day slavery onto the 19th century South?
When Trump speaks of abolishing the income tax and substituting tariffs, he is speaking of the restoration of American freedom which was abolished in 1913.
