ConstitutionEconomicsPolitics

I Agree with Lauryn Hill: Taxation is Slavery

I never heard of Lauryn Hill. The fact that she’s a Grammy award-winning singer did not register with me since I don’t follow music award shows. She’s in the news now because she’s about to go to jail and pay a fine for not paying income tax:

“Lauryn Hill was sentenced Monday to three months in federal prison for failing to pay taxes on more than $2 million in earnings during a five-year period. U.S. Magistrate Judge Madeline Cox Arleo in Newark, N.J. federal court also sentenced the famed rapper and actress to three months of home confinement with electronic monitoring after the prison term. Hill must also serve a year of supervised release and pay a $60,000 fine in addition to paying her tax debt to the IRS.”

 And what is her tax debt? Hill failed to pay $1 million in taxes. Please explain to me how any one person should have to pay $1 million in taxes over a period of a few years that will filter through a bloated bureaucracy and be paid out to people who did nothing to earn it and to projects and programs that are unconstitutional?

“I was put into a system I didn’t know the nature of,” the 37-year-old hip-hop artist said. “I’m a child of former slaves. I got into an economic paradigm and had that imposed on me.”

We’ve all had a taxing program imposed on us by a majority of voters who contend that if elected officials believe it’s OK to take money from people who earn it then it is not stealing.

“I sold 50 million units now I’m up here paying a tax debt. If that’s not likened to slavery, I don’t know what is.”

Slavery comes in a number of forms. Steven Yates and Ray E. Bornert II point out in their article “Is the Income Tax a Form of Slavery?”:

“[S]lavery is non-ownership of one’s Person and Labor. It is involuntary servitude. A slave must work under a whip, real or figurative, wielded by other persons, his owners, with no say in how (or even if) his labors are compensated. His is a one-way contract he cannot opt out of. A slave is tied to his master (and to the land where he labors). He cannot simply quit if he doesn’t like it. Moreover, a slave can be bought and sold like any other commodity.”

 In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln stated that every person has the natural right “to eat the bread which he has earned by the sweat of his brow.”

The phrase was not unique to Lincoln. John Winthrop (1587/8–1649), Governor of the Plymouth Colony, wrote the following in his Journal in 1642, “So many enemies doth the Lord arm against our daily bread, that we might know that we are to eat it in the sweat of our own brows.”

Consider how we might look at taxation that if each day we had to stop our productive work and march off to some government facility and work directly for the State or other people. Failure to comply would mean the loss of property or jail time.

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