A popular point to make amongst the liberty crowd is to point out that if you are paying X percent of your income in taxes, then you are X percent a slave. In The Slave Test, assuming you didn’t pass, I promised to offer a method of determining what percent a slave you are. If my method were based on the percent of your productivity stolen then it could be quite a difficult number to calculate.
Taxes are pervasive, incorporated into almost every activity we engage in, and often evasive as well. There are the obvious ones that we see on our pay stubs and the fees we must pay to governments to partake of things we often presume to be the rights of free people, like traveling, or buying goods and services, or owning a home, but there are hidden ones like the fees that your employers must pay to hire you which comes straight out of the same employment budget they use to determine your salary. And that’s only the most obvious impact on your livelihood imposed by our masters.