Money, Taxes, and Economic Slavery in the U.S.

if you read what I wrote, I was discussing who owns your time. When you work for a company they own your time without care for the person working. Just ask the 50% plus americans who work 2 part time jobs just to make ends meet. They have no choice in their schedule ... the companies they work for dictate the schedule for corporate purposes with no care or working with the individual.

Many on this site are retired and have not been in the work place for a very long time. One of the biggests factors today is that companies must provide expensive health care for ful time employees so what they do instead is hire part time employees and work them 28 hours a week. So instead of working one 40 hour a week job most people who work for minimum wage work closer to 60 hours a week with their 2 jobs. So to my mind they are a slave to a system that is broken. It doesnt treat people with dignity or respect.

 

I do not agree with the idea anyone who has built up wealth has "gamed the system" or cheated someone. There are millions of Americans who retire with a million or two or three and they didn't rob anyone or cheat anyone or "game the system." They just learned a trade and worked long hard hours and saved and invested. There are examples of low income people like retired teachers dying and leaving millions to charity. They had just lived frugally and invested all their lives.

I also do not consider Americans to be economic slaves because they need money to live or because they do not earn a high income as the result of them never learning how to make themselves valuable in the job market. Or, because they didn't want to open their own business. The fact is it's easier to work for money in a modern economy than it was to "live off the land" the way primitive people did. You think they didn't work hard every day of their life to survive? Who were they a "slave" to? They had no job and paid no taxes. Yet they worked a lot harder than we do just to eat and to avoid being eaten and freezing to death.

 

this is just my opinion and, if you aren't happy doing what you are doing, or you have no choice other than having a JOB (just over broke) and there are alot of people who live pay check to pay check, then you are a wage slave. That is not to belittle ANYONE AT ALL. And given our current economic condition where many people are working 2 part time jobs just to feed their family, it isn't a good place to be, to have little or no cushion.

On this site many people are prepared and will be ok if there is a further down turn. However there are people in the world who are not prepared. @ghrit I will grant you that most people don't think for themselves. This is mostly because the educational system in America (or the world for that matter) teaches fact memorization not critical thinking skills. But just because they don't think much beyond making a living and providing for their family doesn't make them either an idiot or a sheeple in my opinion. They are just too tired to do more than the bare minimum. I can't fault them for that and I am not going to provide for them when and if things go south.

to answer what I think your corporate question is. I will provide some links.
The global network of capitalists - Graphic Sociology

if you really study that link, you will see the top 50 companies that control assests in the world. You have to dig deeper for who owns those companies but if you look at the graph you can see they own each other and are controlled by a few people. This is the corporatacy that @Brokor talks about.

 

That's why we invented liquor. But 5 bushels still wouldn't fit in your pocket, more like three 1gallon jugs.

 

Consider the San tribes--the bushmen of Namibia--also referred to as the Basarwa. They lived short, brutal, lives of hunger and abject poverty.

Or did they?

The traditional San spent less of their time finding food than we spend working for the money to buy it today.

When "civilized" people were jumping out of buildings during the Great Depression and/or starving because they had no jobs or money, the San were unperturbed. In fact, they were oblivious. Their way of life continued unchanged.

Their culture had no use for money--gifts were the nearest thing they had to a medium of exchange. Gifts that included a social and moral dimension absent from cold, hard, cash.

The San nurtured the world they lived in, rather than raping it for profit.

Their way of life was rich with laughter, singing, and traditional story-telling.

Many lived well into their eighties.

They had no crime within their traditional society. Anti-social tendencies were genty corrected within the group. If they could not be corrected, in the rarest of cases, the offending individual was banned from the tribal group. No one survives alone in the Kalahari. The only options for a banned Bushman were to find another tribe or go to a "civilized" city and get a job.

The San had no chiefs. Only Elders who were listened to with respect because they were the wisest among the tribes.

No San could order another to do anything.

They lived in perfect freedom, with their actions dictated only by their environment. And in doing so they created an almost frictionless Society attuned to that environment.

When the various governments forcibly "modernized" most them about forty years ago, their way of life almost went extinct.

The "resettled" San that became farmers and low-wage workers developed modern vices and modern diseases. They felt the loss of personal freedom acutely, and most wished only to return to their previous lives.

In our "modern" society individual freedom has been subjugated to the demands of our "Nations", as defined by the powerful few that control them.

The San civilization is at least 100,000 years old, and was a very successful social invention.

Our technological civilization is less than 8,000 years old, and all but the last 200 years of it were spent in the infancy of technology.

We are only now hitting our technological puberty, and there's no telling where we will go from here. The social cost of improved technology seems to be a continuing decrease in personal freedoms across the board.

As the need for money as a key to the access of basic resources continues to grow, economic slavery seems to be the method that will be used to bring the population of the world into lock-step as we all shoulder our assigned burdens and shuffle-march into an unknown future.

 

I was at the doctors recently for a minor thing. It was minor only because of technology existed, as 100 years ago I would have in all probability died a painful death. Technology exists because people love this system we have that forces us to accept technology.
Prior in our existence in the USA governments did not force technology onto its people. But we live in a society where many think they would die without a smart phone glued to their hands. This dependence exists because we breed it, we breed its dependence on seeking cash like a drug addict to get our next fix on a new phone or app its sounds funny but reality is there is now people addicted to their phones. And cash has to come somewhere we have no money so lets make sure we force your dependency on credit like a drug dealer giving you a fix we as a nation line up to sell our selves in future incomes even before we have earned it. This whole idea of our usage, our dependence allows us to freely and unknowingly sell our future and sell our freedom of choice. Where this goes from here is pretty scary thinking just 30 years ago people never really had credit cards and people met and talked, not texted and email. Is this division on purpose so we become more dependent and accept the process of giving up more and more of our lives to credit and sales as the market of who we are ?

 

If I may add this link;

Lochner v. New York: Fundamental rights and economic liberty

How Libertarians Are Changing Conservative Views on Economic Liberty and the Constitution

And this link may assist in understanding the links of socialist and dot gov..

Economic liberty, free speech, spook the American Left