I'm always hearing about wage slavery from the left, which is their definition for people who are forced to work. Taking a deeper look at the definition of slave, we see that it refers to a person "whose person and services are wholly under the control of another".
Well, this doesn't sound much like a working contract, which is the product of an agreement between two people. The fallacious argument that people are forced to work, in a country where it's entirely possible to live on benefits, does not make working for a wage sound anything like slavery.
But what about taxes? Taxes, essentially, are working for another person. This alone doesn't qualify taxes as slavery, because there can be consent, but as services offered and taxes taken increase, surely that consent is more likely to come into question.
I'm not going to go full voluntarist on you all and say that there should be no taxes. They are certainly less optional than work, but there is a certain level of consent accepted by the act of somebody remaining and working in a country; infallibly making use of some of its public services, whether that's the education of their employees / co-workers, the state pension, the surfaces of the roads or the police service.
So, we've established that wage slavery doesn't exist in the UK, and we've established that tax slavery isn't really slavery because people can try to change it or move away, but I think it's worth a better look at how much exploitation is done by both sides, to try to compare the two.
Marxists argue that any level of profit is exploitation, so using this table of net profit margins, we can see that employers take around 10% of their workers' productivity for their own gains. In other words, in a 9-5 Monday-Friday week, the average worker works monday morning for his employer, and Monday Afternoon through Friday for his own gains.
Now, let's see how long he works for the state. For this, we're going to need to work out his salary, let's make him a fairly typical worker. He earns £25,000 a year, works monday to friday full time and has no children.
So, how much tax does he pay on that £25,000?
Well, first of all we can take off his income tax and national insurance, that's £5,600. This leaves him with £19,400.
Already, the state has taken more than 20% off him, so twice as much as his 'enslaving' employer, but this by no means ends here.
Next of all, he needs to pay his council tax of around £1,000.
How about VAT? Let's say he spends £7,000 of his money on VAT-included goods (most things that aren't bills or rent). There's another £1,400. He's down to £17,000.
Now, corporation tax which will be passed onto him in order to achieve company required margins, that's about 4% on everything he buys including foods, so maybe £400. Now he has £16,600.
He's going to spend £1,500 on petrol fuel in average over a year. That's another £600-odd in tax, taking him down to £16,000 and still with no end to his beaurocratic charges in sight.
Road tax, sin taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, aviation duty if he goes on holiday, whatever amount higher his salary would have been if his employer wasn't paying £1,600 in employer's NI for him... even ignoring all of this, the state has reduced his £25,000 wage to £16,000, a loss of £9,000 or 36%.
If his employer is exploitative, then the state is 3.6x as exploitative as his employer is.
But, assuming that our worker is voluntarily working for his employer and voluntarily paying taxes, however begrudgingly, is it not reasonable to look at how much of his tax spend is unnecessary? Is it not about time governments start looking at how little they can squeeze the productive working people, instead of how much they can get out of them?
Our worker is spending £9,000 on taxes, where is it going?
The vast majority is going on useful services, like health, education, policing and pensions. Whilst savings can be made in these areas, I'm going to concentrate on things which have little positive effect for the ordinary British worker.
£225 is going on the Climate Change Act, a unilateral piece of legislation which aims to reduce our share of the CO2 emissions of the earth by 80%. A good mandate, you might think, until you realise that in real terms this will reduce the total CO2 emissions of the earth by 1.2% at a cost of £20 billion a year, based on nobody else's emissions increasing.
In practice, China is firing up a new coal plant every week, and all that this measure will do unless it's implemented worldwide is cost hundreds of jobs.
The European Union, in direct fees and payments to EU budgets only, is costing him £400. All this offers him is a ban on smoking in his pubs, higher costing food and less chance of being able to buy a cod and chips in the near future.
The authoritarian war on drugs costs him £20, benefit fraud costs him £40, wars in Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya cost him £30 above the defense budget, foreign aid costs him £120.
A staggering £500 is going on servicing the country's debt interest, which produces little if any productivity in the UK. The left don't think that the debt is a problem, and fully advocate the fallacy that we can grow out of it with yet more tax and spend (which is what got us this far into debt in the first place.
Yet, the left are not asking for any of this to be looked at, they're not asking for efficiency savings, for the cancellation of extremely expensive projects. They're asking our working man to pay more. They're telling him he isn't being exploited enough.
Who is the exploiter, Marxist sympathisers?
Taxes aren't a problem just for the rich. If this typical working man works monday morning for his employer, then he works monday afternoon, all of tuesday and some of wednesday morning for the state.
£1335 of his £9000 taxes have been identified as essentially having no value to him, ignoring the efficiencies which could be made in the departments I haven't touched on. £795 of this waste could be cut immediately in foreign aid, the climate change act, EU funding, the war on drugs and wars abroad with no national interest.
Whilst we, on the right, are trying to put £795 immediately back in this guy's pocket, the left are trying to take away more and more of his money. Which side stands for the working people, again?
The right is right, as usual.
