W2E-008 Taxes - John Major-0.txt
SECOND THOUGHTS

Mary Ellen Synon

Three days of every working week the Irishman is a slave

Part of the population remains tax slaves, working for the benefit of the other part, who remain parasites

ON considering the citizens of this state, one's mind naturally turns to thoughts of slavery. Anybody who works here turns over more than half the wealth he creates to the state.

The term for this is taxation, but the effect is slavery: for slavery means being forced to work for the benefit of others. Three days of every working week, the Irishman is a slave. And a badly paid slave, too: in the 19th-century slave states of America, the typical slave field hand received about 90% of the income he produced. The typical Irish PAYE worker receives about half as much.

And who is it that is enslaving the Irishman? Well, that is an interesting point. Usually you would imagine that it is either the totalitarians of the right; or it is the totalitarians of the left.

That is the way it has been in most states with a slave economy. But here we have a quirk. We have left and right both working towards enslaving the population, for different reasons - or, at least, under the guise of different philosophies - but with the same end. Which is no real comfort to the slave, but he might want to look up from the cotton-picking long enough to see whose hand holds the whip.

First, consider the totalitarians of the Irish religious right. They, of course, do not believe that the citizen should work for his own benefit. He must, the right say, work for glory in the next life, for the word of God, for the needy, for the benefit of his family, for the benefit of other people's families, for poor people here, for poor people anywhere.

However, he must not work for his own benefit. That, say the religious right, is wrong. That is selfish. That is also liberty, but the religious right do not work for liberty. They work for the surrender of liberty. They work for slavery.

The heartiest slave-drivers of this religious right are the priests and nuns who press the Government - in the name of 'justice': how the stomach turns - to pull more and more taxation from the working people so that idle people can have bigger welfare payments.

The success of this lobbying can be seen in the result. Part of the population remain slaves, working for the benefit of the other part, who remain parasites.

Neither group has control over its money, either how it is spent or where it comes from. Neither group is made up of citizens enjoying liberty. But we are assured this is God's intention: money must go where it is needed, not where it is earned.

The other slave-drivers of the right are those who say they work to protect the family, to protect morals, to bring God's laws into civil legislation.

Now, these people are a particularly interesting set. Mostly their policies are founded on utter irrationalities. They do not deny that their foundation is irrational; they admit it is mystical revelation, not rational argument.

Yet sometimes their irrational motives bring them into rational territory. And the slave ought to look up and be pleased that, if only by accident, liberty is somewhere left alive.

I mean in particular the question of legislation on abortion. The ardent right oppose abortion, which is a rational and liberal thing to do. But they oppose it for the wrong reasons.

Consider this. The free individual lives for his own benefit. He is in slavery only when he is forced to live for the benefit of others. The individual - the free individual - needs no further justification to own his life than that life exists.

No person, however young, must die for the benefit of another - not unless he himself chooses to. The pre-born child lives for his own benefit, not for the benefit of his mother. The law must protect the individual's ownership of his own life. Abortion is a form of slavery taken to its most extreme.

So no-one's liberty - except in the rarest of cases - is endangered by laws against abortion. But the right's warped reasoning, which by coincidence reaches the right conclusion on abortion, reaches the wrong conclusion on just about everything else.

Marriage without the possibility of civil divorce is slavery; restriction on the free choice of willing partners is slavery - in other words, what chaps do with chaps is not something the law should be concerned about.

The destruction of liberty is everywhere on the right. But the horrors come when one sees there is no refuge on the left.

The left offer the slavery of democracy. They offer the totalitarianism of 51%. An individual, they say, has no rights, he has only the privileges given by the majority. And the majority can remove those privileges any time: all they have to do is to pile into a polling booth. Well, anybody who has ever looked for virtue in a polling booth is bound to be disappointed.
"To assure liberty, the aim of each moral choice must be self-interest"
The forces of the left, of course, are even more adept at looting workers'pay packets than are the forces of the right. They say any theft is moral if a majority vote for the theft.

They are wily, though, in the way they hide the theft. Each citizen who is below what may be called the envy line - a statistic more genuine than the poverty line - is led to believe that if he allows a little theft from his own earnings, what is nicked from others and given to him will be a greater sum.

In other words, he will be burgled, but he will be allowed a good pile of loot from the neighbour's house.

Any mug who believes his own benefit lies in stealing from others might as well climb on to the auction block and open the bidding on his own freedom. For there is a web of moral choices to be made, and the wrong choices end in slavery. To assure liberty, the aim of each moral choice must be self-interest.

A government of thievery - no matter in whose apparent interest - is against each citizen's self-interest. Each individual, to remain at liberty, must refuse to tread on the liberty of any other citizen.

To refuse to steal from another citizen, to refuse to control, to refuse to enslave, is not altruism. It is a far better thing: it is self-interest.

Self-interest is the powerful engine of liberty which the left hate. The left say "steal," they say "take what you have not earned", they say "control other men's lives with restrictions, with demands, with guilt".

The individual who values liberty refuses to do all these things, not because he is protecting the liberty of others, but because he is protecting his own liberty. To agree to the controls of the left is to sell yourself into slavery.

The alert citizen must beware how the left package their slave market: when one of the left says "think of others", the only rational reply can be: "I will think of and for myself. Others are capable of thinking of and for themselves".

The result of relentless self-interest is a marvellous thing. It is a life of independence and liberty. It is a life without slaves or beggars or parasites. It is a life in which the totalitarians of the left - and the right - are destroyed.

Yet the left say we must live for the benefit of others in the name of community and democracy; the right say we must live for the benefit of others in the name of God and charity.

And the really frightening thing is, the slaves have come to believe it. So they have forged their own chains.

Mary Ellen Synon is a freelance columnist
