If Income Taxation Is Slavery...

One of the things that right-libertarians like to drag out to attempt to justify their 'my third merc is more morally important than whether you have enough to live a minimally decent life' schtick is the claim that taxes on labour are, by virtue of the products of your labour going to someone other than yourself without your consent, slavery. This is bollocks: mere coercive appropriation of the products of labour does not slavery make, as, for example, cursory consideration of a case where someone steals something from me, where I worked either to make that thing or to gain the money to buy it, indicates. What is morally troubling about slavery, I think, is not the loss of the products of labour, but the loss of autonomy, of the slave's total lack of control over their own lives.

Slaves are compelled to do as their master pleases, and admittedly, often what their master pleases includes giving up the products of their labour so the master can sell them on, but that is not the core of the problem: it falls under the broader category of being compelled to do as their master pleases. Income tax would presumably be like slavery if, rather than taking a statutorily limited part product of labour, the state had a totally unaccountable power to take as much of the product of labour as it pleased, to direct your labour utterly as it desired and to do absolutely anything it liked should you fail to do any of these things. Under these conditions, it would replicate the relationship of total dominance between master and slaves, but it doesn't, so...

What's interesting though, is that there are a set of possible institutions which would exercise slaveowner-like power over at least some of those who lived within them - the right-libertarian vision of a free society, where if I don't work, passing control over a substanial part of my waking hours to an effectively unlimited despot, unless I have assets, friends or family on whom I can rely for support, or some beneficent magnate feels pity for me, I'd starve to death. I'd say the requirement to do as the market and its associated institutions pleases, in the absence of an adequate safety net, or else risk death is fairly bloody coercive, so coercive in fact that I feel justified in saying, 'if income tax is slavery, all right-libertarians are aspirant slaveowners'.