By Paul Craig Roberts (archive) April 14, 2003 Now that you have
paid your income taxes, calculate how much you own of your own
labor. You can do this by dividing the federal, state and local
income taxes you paid (including Social Security and Medicare)
by your taxable income. Generally speaking, the higher your
income, the less you own of yourself. A person with $300,000 in
taxable income will discover that government in the year 2002
has a claim to about one-third of his labor – the maximum tax
that could be levied on a medieval serf. If you have a low
income or work primarily off the books, you will be rewarded
with an “earned income tax credit,” that is, you will receive a
tax “refund” even though you paid no tax. You not only own all
your own labor, but also have legal claims to the incomes of
higher income persons. Democracy produces the opposite results
of feudalism. Instead of an upper class living off the sweat of
a lower class, the lower class lives off the sweat of an upper
class. Philosophers suc