Fmr. Assitant Treasury Secretary compares and contrasts slavery to today

[La_Serpiente]

Find out for yourself. This guy is :crazy:

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Fix The Flaw In The Freedom Index

The Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal’s tenth annual Index of Economic Freedom pulls the wool over our eyes. The deception is unintentional and arises from a fatal flaw in the index.

The index delivers the comforting conclusion that the US is the 10th most free country, far ahead of 155th ranked North Korea.

However, the index ignores the simple truth that people who do not own the product of their labor are not free. People subject to an income tax do not own the product of their labor.

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Compare an American taxpayer’s situation today with that of a 19th century American slave. Not all slaves worked on cotton plantations. Some with marketable skills were leased to businesses or released to labor markets, where they worked for money wages. Just like the wages of today’s taxpayer, a portion of the slave’s money wages was withheld. In those days the private owner, not the government, received the withheld portion of the slave’s wages.

Slaves in that situation were as free as today’s American taxpayer to choose their housing from the available stock, purchase their food and clothing, and entertain themselves.

In fact, they were freer than today’s American taxpayer. By hard work and thrift, they could save enough to purchase their freedom.

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Fix The Flaw In The Freedom Index

Check out this guy's credentials here He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and was an assitant Secretary of the Treasury during Raygun.

Shocked? I would be.

[jonoboy]

1. British PM Ted Heath called it :"the unacceptable face of capitalism

[DarkPhenyx]

2. While his points are valid to a point...

...The overriding tenor of his comments is extremist and reactionary. So often it is the way an argument is presented taht defeats it, and not any flaws in it's logic. This is the same reasonoing that hold true for why the Bush = Hitler analogies fail with the wider public.

As to the individuals credentials? There are a lot of people with credentials who are, or have become, raving lunatics. Many more of them don't have a lick of common sense.

I am not attempting to undermine the premise put forth by the author, simply pointing out a few things before the dabate really kicks off.

It would be interesting to hear how the author would propose to pay for certain services such as law enforcement, fire protection, and service maintainance. We won't even bring up the subject of civil defense.

[VelmaD]

3. One big flaw in his argument...

is "In fact, they were freer than today’s American taxpayer. By hard work and thrift, they could save enough to purchase their freedom."

He totally neglects to mention that once they had purchased their freedom they were in the exact same position you or I are in today...they still had to sell their labor to survive. What makes this guy think that the relationship between "free" workers and their employers was any different back then than it is today? Workers were just as exploited as they are now, maybe more given that there were no safety regulations, minimum wage, overtime pay, or child labor laws.