Paul Craig Roberts

When Trump speaks of abolishing the income tax and
substituting tariffs, he is speaking of the restoration
of American freedom which was abolished in 1913.

The South is blamed for slavery. One encounters this false association, the product of decades of demonization of the South, everywhere, even in books about the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 in Buffalo, New York by a Polish-American, Leon Czolgosz, who was born in Detroit.

Nothing in McKinley’s presidency or in Czolgosz’s life has anything to do with the South or slavery. Yet the author of the book, Eric Rauchway, manages to use the fact that northern whites wanted to lynch Czolgosz, a white man, to pull the South into the story. “White men of the South practiced lynching to terrify black men into submission,” and blacks fled the South because of “the growing number of blacks lynched in the slow-burning race war of the late-nineteenth century South.” These are blanket and unsupported statements.

In fact, lynching was a form of community justice. There are instances of blacks lynching blacks and instances of lynchings far outside the South. On the Western frontier lynching was the punishment for horse thieves. As the author is described as a teacher at the University of California, Davis, and the book was published in 2003, perhaps the explanation is the author is protecting himself against the rising power of the university left and the doctrine of “aversive racism.”

I don’t mean to single out this particular book. It just happens to be lying at hand. The point is that no matter how remote a book’s topic is from the South, such as President McKinley’s assassination, writers establish their moral credentials with potshots at the South.

Demonizing the South has become a way for northerners and university professors to demonstrate their moral standing, but it doesn’t stop them from immigrating to the South and destroying Southern communities with their lack of graciousness,

The South has no responsibility for slavery. Nor were blacks the only people enslaved. It was not whites who enslaved blacks. Blacks were enslaved by the black Kings of Dahomey in their slave wars. Dahomey sold the blacks it enslaved to Arabs and to British, Spanish, and Portuguese who shipped them to the New World that offered resources to exploit but had no labor force. Blacks enslaved by the King of Dahomey became the labor force for colonial rice, sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations. I do not know of any incidence of a black enslaved by a white. White colonists purchased already enslaved blacks. In the US free blacks also owned black slaves

Blacks were the agricultural work force in the New World long before the United States existed. For the South slavery was an inherited institution, not one created by the South. There was no labor market in which agricultural labor could be hired. Immigrants to the British colonies simply moved westward, taking Indian land for their own.

When the United States became a country, it was a poor one in which government had scant sources of revenues and in which slavery was an established institution. One way of freeing slaves would have been to confiscate them from those who purchased them. This would have collapsed the agricultural sector of the economy and eliminated the few export revenues the nation had. Another way, if revenues had been available, would have been for the federal government to purchase and release the slaves. But thrown on their own, where was their employment? And where was the agricultural work force?

The un-enslaved blacks would have to have gone to work for the plantations where they were formerly slaves. Only now, they would be responsible for their own housing, clothes, medical care, food, and what if the wage earner drank his wage away?

It wasn’t the South that did not face these issues. It was the self-righteous North, essentially a barbaric people whose culture was the pursuit of wealth at the expense of the South and the American Indians, the native inhabitants, both of which were destroyed by violence in pursuit of wealth.

Independent scholarly investigations, without an axe to grind, have established beyond question that there were more white slaves than black ones. Arabs raided the seacoast towns of Mediterranean Europe for slaves. Arabs took American citizens off of intercepted ships and sold them as slaves, prompting President Thomas Jefferson to send the US Navy and troops to “the shores of Tripoli” as the US Marine Corps anthem reflects in order to halt the practice of enslaving American white citizens.

We have before us the total abject failure of American Universities and intellectuals, who do not warrant the name and should be known as propagandists, to provide any semblance in their histories to actual facts.

Since the 1930s when German Jewish Cultural Marxists arrived at Columbia University, the United States and all of its history, values, and institutions have been under attack. The Cultural Marxists call it “the march through the institutions.”

Donald Trump, it seems, has aroused the long docile and insouciant American population, too devoted to their entertainment to notice the erasure of their nation, to deal with the rot that insouciance has produced. Trump is up against the fact that the long neglect of their country by the American people has left him at war with an American enemy that is institutionalized in every American institution, public and private.

America, from long neglect, has acquired an anti-American character full of rot that must be cleaned out. Trump, Musk, Bondi and other appointees with integrity must not flinch. They must destroy those who have been working to destroy us and leave us in tyranny.

We all know who they are.

Despite the left’s emphasis on American Slavery, for example the Jewish NY Times’ 1619 Project, the re-enslavement of the entirety of the American people has gone unnoticed. I have tried for decades to call attention to the fact that anyone who pays an income tax is unfree.

Historically, the definition of a “free man” is a man who owns his own labor. Feudal Serfs did not own their own labor. Feudal Lords had use rights in the serf’s labor. Years ago when I studied the feudal system, the consensus was that the maximum use of the serfs’ labor by feudal lords was one-third. Anything higher produced rebellion.

Slaves do not own their own labor. The maximum tax rate on a 19th century plantation slave’s labor was 50%, as half of his labor was devoted to his food, housing and health care. Actually, as the person who purchased a slave had made a capital investment, he could only benefit from half of its output.

Americans, Europeans, Russians, indeed all peoples, are unaware that they are as effectively enslaved as 19th century slaves working on cotton plantations. No person subject to an income tax is a free person, because they do not own their own labor. The richer you are, the higher your tax rate and the less you own of yourself. We are all slaves.

It is extraordinary that in the present time everyone accepts their own slavery.

It is extraordinary that libertarian and free market economists are up in arms against tariffs but are comfortable with an income tax that enslaves them to government.

Tariffs are a tax on consumption, which is where the classical economists wanted taxation to be placed. An income tax is a tax on the factors of production–labor and capital. It is the income tax, not tariffs, that suppress the growth of the economy by reducing the supply of labor and capital.

I have been making this point for decades, and it is libertarians, those committed to freedom and liberty, who have paid the least attention. Until slavery was reestablished in 1913, tariffs were the main source of government finance. The United States developed as a powerful industrial and manufacturing economy under the protection of tariffs, not as a free trade country. Indeed, the North invaded the Confederacy and destroyed a country in order to force the South to bear the consequences of a tariff needed for the North’s industrial development.

What are we to make of this? Are we so brainwashed and indoctrinated into our own slavery that we cannot recognize it, preferring to project our present day slavery onto the 19th century South?

When Trump speaks of abolishing the income tax and substituting tariffs, he is speaking of the restoration of American freedom which was abolished in 1913.

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On Slavery and Taxation
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/02/16/on-slavery-and-taxation/