You know what’s a rip-off? The fact that such “laws” as property taxes essentially mandate participation in commerce or the labor force — both tightly regulated by the government.
In earlier times, people could live off the land, trade, or produce for themselves without having to sell their labor or report their every activity. Today, that’s nearly impossible.
If you want to keep a roof over your head, you must earn money — and to earn money, you must enter the taxed economy. Whether by labor or capital, your participation isn’t optional. It’s enforced.
More of personal productivity is now measurable in monetary terms. And because it’s measurable, it’s taxable.
Governments tax human activity wherever currency is involved — through income taxes, capital gains taxes, sales taxes, and more. As more of life gets mediated through money, more of it gets taxed. Meanwhile, all this economic activity — forced or voluntary — bids up the nominal price of assets.
This doesn’t just raise the cost of ownership — it raises the risk of ownership. And that’s if we can even realistically call it ownership, considering the unending obligations imposed through property taxes.
You never truly own your home if you can lose it for failing to pay rent to the state. These risks aren’t limited to personal misfortune like job loss, business failure, or illness. They are structural — and there are few allowances made for those struggling just to stay current on tax bills. Miss a payment, lose your property.
And it gets worse.
Governments, regardless of whether tax rates are relatively “high” or “low,” actively pursue policies that ensure property values continue to rise — policies that actually force people out of their homes where they cannot afford (or otherwise refuse) to continue paying onerous taxes. Subsidies, mandates, and incentives all align to push nominal prices progressively higher, and (measurable) economic development and government policies often combine to make simple living in small towns and remote areas less viable, simply by way of pricing people nearby out of those lifestyles; whether those lifestyles consist of simplicity or eschewing the monetary and the material, the people are eventually brought into conformity with the ever-evolving “social contract” which serves to promote the interests of, and generate revenue for, the establishment. The few who protest against the injustices are generally, over time, dismissed and forgotten, if they haven’t either succumbed to the pressure to conform or otherwise dropped completely out of society.
Consequently, the tax base grows and the dissenters disappear or go silent, and the pressure on the individual increases, whereafter he can either concede to giving up ever more of the product of his labor (and help maintain the illusion of that “social contract”) or otherwise reject it and pay the consequences, whether socially, financially, or in his quality of life. Either way, as it is, it’s not enough to survive, it’s not enough to just keep food on the table and provide for your family under the roof you thought you “owned” — you must be economically viable, and endlessly so, just to stay where you are, just to keep and enjoy that which you thought you already owned, in a country where you once considered yourself free, or at least relatively so. Little did you know, you were and you remain most fundamentally a slave to an establishment often treating terms like “freedom” and “liberty” as little more than punchlines or poetic device.
Contrast that with the past. People once survived, and often thrived, through private, informal activities like barter, farming, hunting, and fishing — and these essential life skills were once honed and passed down between generations, before they were gradually overshadowed by the need for money thrust upon them by external forces. Those activities, proceeding without (or with little in the way of) currency, were largely outside the scope of taxation. Today, they’ve been regulated into oblivion, fenced off by licenses, fees, zoning codes, or outright bans; and the skills themselves have largely vanished among a modern populace groomed by political propaganda and money matters, convinced that their “progress” and “civility” eliminate any need for the antiquated skills, ideas, and traditions that, according to them, belong to the bumpkins and hillbillies of the past, or the unrefined numbskulls of the present. What once was freedom is now considered illegal or, at best, suspicious; and what was once considered honest living, and what was once true ownership (over oneself and one’s own property), has become a society rich on credit and arranged around a “social contract” succinctly described as financial slavery.
Ironically, where money evolved to optimize trade — to improve on the inefficiencies of barter — it has, instead, become the preferred weapon of despots. It’s no longer merely a tool of exchange, but a means of coercion, a mechanism of control.
Just as serfs once owed their lords a share of the harvest, modern workers owe the state a share of their wages — not in grain but in dollars. Miss a payment, lose your land. Only the terminology has changed.
So here we are: every constructive human activity now has a price, a tax, and a regulation. Every attempt to live must be tracked, monetized, and rendered legible to institutions that assess, collect, and enforce — all backed by central banks that control the very money supply that not only influences these activities but eminently forms the basis by which property is appraised and taxed.
It’s the financialization of all things, and with it the hollowing out of meaningful living. The actor Neal McDonough once captured the essence of this change in American life, when speaking on his immigrant father and the spirit of a bygone era:
“My father was in the military; he was in the Army in the ‘50s. He just came over from Ireland and went straight to the Army office and said, ‘Make me an American,’ and they shipped him overseas for five years. That’s the dedication that people of that era made. People nowadays, the dedication is a little different. We tend to gravitate towards more just making money in our lives instead of making a life of our lives.”
Part of this change has its roots in the propaganda of a public ‘education’ system indoctrinating the youth and fomenting hostility against American heritage and traditional values; another factor is the necessity born from a country whose government has gone to great lengths to not just divide the people and dilute the American identity but to continually drive up the cost of being an American, to the point that Americans remain ‘American’ in name only, chasing the elusive ‘American Dream’ — a dream which was once the image of the rugged individual standing tall on the frontier as the architect of his own destiny, but which is always being rebranded by propagandists hellbent on selling something else and conning the people out of what they have (and what they too often underestimate) in the form of their freedom.
It’s a rip-off, indeed — hiding chains inside contracts, and in many cases (such as with the so-called “social contract”) it’s a contract never fully articulated, rife with contradictions (implied or otherwise), and never actually signed by any of the assumed parties.
It’s more insidious than the road to serfdom. It’s the erasure of self-ownership; it’s the death of that which makes life worth living. It’s Death by Socialism.
But you know what’s not a rip-off? The book that says it all: Death by Socialism. At only $17.76, it’s the best deal anywhere for the map to navigating and understanding our history, our current circumstances, our freedom, and that which makes life worth living. And the best part: while the sale is taxed, the wisdom is yours forever.
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