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Slavery in Modern America |
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I worked alongside slaves in my youth. No, I'm not talking about illegal slavery nor am I using nonsensical double talk like 'wage slaves'. I'm talking about lawful and very real slavery. The kind where human beings are forced to do work for a master. Many of them were forced to die for the master.
And no, I'm not incredibly old. The slaves I knew were young men forced into captivity and made to fight in a foreign war in southeast asia in the early 1970's.
Why, you may be wondering, would we maintain slavery in the USA after having a horrific war and 'abolishing' it in the 19th century? Now, as then, slavery is about economics. It's cheaper to force someone into dangerous and unpleasant work than it is to entice them to freely agree to do such work.
Slavery, in the modern form of a military draft, is simply a way for most people to avoid the cost of war. And the highest cost of war is paid in the lives of the men who fight them.
We maintain the selective service system to this very day to ensure that when volunteerism drops off in a long, bloody, or unpopular conflict, we won't run out of bodies. We won't have to do the politically difficult thing of raising taxes to pay soldiers enough to keep long lines at the recruiting offices.
The military draft makes a mockery of the phrase, 'the land of the free', and has no place in our country. |
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| | mail this link | permapage | -Ray Yeargin, October 1, 2008 |
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Hidden Taxes: Goods and Services |
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There are hidden taxes on the goods and services that all of us buy that go far beyond sales taxes. Corporations calculate the prices they charge for their products starting with their costs.
The first rule of the Corporate Club: The price of a product must exceed its cost.
It doesn't matter whether the costs come from materials, labor, manufacturing equipment, shipping, or taxes. They all get added to the final retail price. So when you purchase a bag of groceries you're paying your share of all the taxes paid by the grocery store, the shipping companies, the packagers, the farmers who produce the food, as well as the income taxes of the cashier and the bag boy.
You're paying all of the corporate taxes from farm to table for your sales tax-free bag of groceries.
Aside from the issue of government deception, this is bad because it raises the price of goods produced here relative to comparable imported goods.
The second rule of the Corporate Club: The price of a product must be low enough to sell briskly.
When the tax component of an imported car is significantly smaller than that of a similar domestic car, the foreign automobile manufacturer gains a price advantage -- and can sell more cars. The domestic producer sells fewer cars, resulting in fewer employees and reduced local investment.
Corporate taxes are a destructive method of hiding taxes from the consumer. This is justified by the demand that 'rich' corporations pay their 'fair share', as if they weren't simply collecting them from their customers.
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| | mail this link | permapage | -Ray Yeargin, October 1, 2008 |
(Contact: root at this domain)
© 2008-2009, Ray Yeargin
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