The claim by libertarians that to taxation is equivalent to ensalvement strikes many people as being extreme and fanatical. However, I hope to show that this claim is entirely correct by a rather brief argument that I hope clarifies the situation.
When someone is enslaved*, they are in a situation of involuntary servitude. They have no choice about their employment, their residence, or the work they are asked to do. Their rights are not recognized, nor is their rightful property. Now, intuitively, one can already see that taxes bear a similarity to this in kind, the only difference in kind being that taxes do not eliminate one’s choice of employment (although they do manipulate and distort it, along with many other State-interventions).
Now, what do we have with taxes? People are required to give up a certain percentage of their income annually. Thus, they were effectively forced to work without compensation for a certain percentage of the year or a certain percentage of every day. Now, we do at least have the choice of what kind of employment to take, and some kind of mobility. However, both of those things are restricted by states. Hence, in a very real sense, all of us are slaves to our respective states.
