From the Notebooks
I've long loathed the term "wage slave." If you're getting paid and you have the option of terminating your employment, you're not a slave. Granted, the term "option" can be tricky to apply, but for starters, if you're not bound by the law to your employer, you're not a slave by pre-Civil War standards. If you're bound by institutional arrangements to your employer--like the ErnieFordian miner who owed his soul to the company store--you're beginning to resemble a slave, but it doesn't quite rise to the level of legal slavery.
Still, I think it's helpful to consider elements of our economic existence that take on slavish qualities. Are there legal or institutional elements that force people to work for others against their will? Quite frankly, the taxation system, when combined with public wages that far exceed their private-sector peers, is beginning to take on slavish characteristics, and not just of the institutional sort. Legally, we are forced to contribute to a swollen public sphere. If we don't, we go to jail. If we resist jail, we get shot. Now, I still have the freedom to choose for whom I work, and I have the option of not working at all and living as a bum (institutionally-speaking, a legitimate route). Those things make me a non-slave by any reasonable rendering of the term, but still, the fact that (i) I need to work to support my family, and (ii) the government takes nearly half of my wages through different forms of taxation, and much of that is given to others (including wealthier individuals) against my will, begins to make me look a little like a slave.
Sound extreme? Ask yourself: What is the essence of a master? Precisely this: He can force others to give him the fruits of their labor. Is the governmental master today much different than the pre-Civil War master? To me, it's merely a difference of degree (half of my fruit instead of all), not kind.
The obvious retort: "Well, the taxation system contributes to the greater societal good." Perhaps, but I'd point out that the slaveholders had high-sounding justifications for their system, too: biblical ones.
