People like to imagine that moral progress is linear—that we have transcended the barbarisms of the past through enlightenment and empathy. We look back at slavery and congratulate ourselves for abolishing an institution so obviously evil that only monsters could have defended it. Yet the same moral blindness that permitted slavery persists today in subtler, sanitized forms. We have not abolished ownership of human labor; we have merely bureaucratized it.
The ancient slaveowner claimed the right to a man’s output because of birth, caste, or conquest. The modern state claims the same right by law, euphemized as taxation. The whip has been replaced by audit letters, the overseer by the revenue agency, but the structure of coercion is identical. In both systems, a ruling authority asserts a nonconsensual claim on the fruits of another’s labor, and enforces that claim with credible threats of harm.
The key difference is cosmetic: the slaveowner’s violence was direct, the state’s is distributed. The former brandished the whip; the latter hides behind moral abstractions like “the social contract” and “the common good.” The psychological trick is exquisite—to make the victims of coercion believe they are participants in virtue. “I pay my fair share,” they say, as if virtue could be measured in percentages of plunder.
Coercion does not become moral because it is democratized. Consent under threat is not consent. The citizen who “agrees” to taxation because refusal leads to prison is no freer than the serf who tilled his lord’s fields under penalty of the lash. Both labor under the same principle: that their time, their effort, and the products of their mind or body ultimately belong to someone else.
Defenders of taxation will object: but taxation funds schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. So did slavery fund plantations and palaces. The use of stolen labor for socially approved ends does not negate the theft. It compounds it, by laundering coercion through moral rhetoric.
Moral evolution is not measured by the prettiness of our excuses. It is measured by the reduction of coercion—by the extent to which agency becomes sacred. If freedom means anything, it means the right to decide what to do with one’s own labor without fear of sanctioned punishment.
When future generations look back, they may see our era not as the age that abolished slavery, but as the age that perfected it—an age that replaced chains with compliance, whips with withholding, and submission with civic pride. They will wonder, as we do of the past, how we could not see it.
Abolition is not complete until taxation is condemned as slavery by another name.