The Green New Deal, Socialism and Slavery

What exactly is slavery? Who is a slave?

Most Americans undoubtedly define slavery with reference to our own experience in the antebellum South, where the black population, with few exceptions, was stripped of all civil rights and forced to labor as legal property on their masters' plantations.

But can one be a slave without being the legal property of another? What if one retains at least some civil rights?

The Book of Exodus paints a somewhat different picture of slavery: "The Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves. They appointed brutal slave drivers over them. ... They forced them to build cities ... worked the people of Israel without mercy ... made their lives bitter, forcing them to mix mortar, make bricks and do all the work in the fields."

The people enslaved in Egypt did not live on plantations. They had their own homes. They weren't the property of a particular slave owner; they were forced to labor for the Egyptian state. They enjoyed at least some civil rights. They could own homes and personal property. They could marry, at least bear female children, and practice their Jewish religion. So you doubt that the state, as opposed to an individual, can be a slave owner?

Were the Russian people forced to do hard labor in the gulags anything other than slaves? The question, really, is at what point does the state so control a man's life as to render him a slave?

Nobody seriously believes that when the state imposes a tax in the amount necessary to provide for the national defense, or the necessary expense of government, that such a tax makes citizens slaves. During WWII, the top marginal federal income tax rate, was 94 percent on income over $200,000. Nobody cried slavery! Everybody knew the war had to be won. Young men were "financing" it with their blood. Rich older men, by their taxes.

As early as 1828, the use of tariffs (taxes) to support Northern manufacturers provoked bitter protest from the South. The South argued that the tariff was imposed, not to support the general welfare of the entire nation, but to subsidize New England manufacturers, at the expense of southern farmers. It made them slaves of the north -- like the Jews in biblical Egypt.

Now, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., believes the top marginal tax rate should be more than 50 percent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes it should be 70 percent. Julian Castro, a former Obama administration cabinet member, wants 90 percent.Warren has also proposed an additional wealth tax on billionaires.

But if you labor to earn money, where is the justice in the government seizing 70 percent or 90 percent of it? It is robbery when your neighbor seizes for himself 70 percent to 90 percent of your earnings at gunpoint. A claim that the taking was a mere act of social justice affords him no legal justification. So what principle justifies the government doing for your neighbor via taxation what he can't do for himself with a gun?

In Rerum Novarem, Pope Leo XIII (1891) wrote, "The Socialists, working on the poor man's envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State."

Pope Leo rejected that as "emphatically unjust." 

Compare AOC's notion of social justice, as embodied in her Green New Deal, with Pope Leo's in Rerum Novarem. AOC and her GND would guarantee economic security for all those who are "unwilling to work." Pope Leo, by way of contrast, wrote "if a family finds itself in exceeding distress ... without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth."

Those who espouse the GND will insist that it is meant only to provide a basic minimum income for those "unwilling to work." Rather like the minimum wage.

Nobody quarrels with the need to provide a basic income for the aged and disabled. But why does society have any duty to any able-bodied person who chooses not to work? Doesn't every able-bodied citizens have a duty to do his fair share to provide for the general welfare?

Why does one who earns have any duty to share his earnings with a neighbor who chooses not to work and do his fair share as a citizen? If 90 percent of Americans choose not to work, should the remaining 10 percent support them? What if 50 percent make that choice?

At what point does taxing the laborer to support the parasite transform the U.S. government into Pharaoh's Egypt?


Posted: QCOline.com   April 11, 2019

Copyright 2019, John Donald O'Shea