The format evolves, but the subversion of individual dignity stays the same
“Every man is independent of all law’s except those prescribed by nature.
He is not bound by any instructions formed by men without his concent”
— Cruden v. Neale, 2 N.C338 (1796).70.
One of the hardest parts of this awakening process is recognising the ways in which we have been enslaved, because the sophistication and longevity of the deception makes it hard for us to perceive and discern our hidden shackles. Even people I consider “awake” have defended the need to pay completely fraudulent Council Tax here in the UK on the basis that society will crumble if we do not. Yet our experience is that if you give crooks an inch then they will take a mile; you have to resist tyranny when it is minor, because it will expand to become impossible or deadly to oppose if left unchecked. So let’s unpack this idea of slavery, to see how it has mutated in form.
Imagine that I came to your house, imprisoned you in iron cuffs, threatened you with death or torture for non-compliance, put you to work in my factory, took all the value of your labour, and only gave you just enough food and shelter to survive. Can we agree that is ‘classic’ slavery? I certainly hope so! You would be my ‘private slave’, a (wo)man treated like any other possession that I is part of my personal assets. Your free will would be negated, your divinity denied, and your sovereignty extinguished. The legal recognition of such a property right over flesh and blood was abolished long ago, and there is a noble history of institutions like the Royal Navy taking on the slavers.
The concept of ‘modern slavery’ recontextualises this old story into the present era. It is widely acknowledged that there are tens of millions of people held in bondage as servants. There are many people who are de facto slaves even in Britain, working in agriculture, prostitution, or as nannies. The government officially opposes the resurgence of disguised private slavery in this country as well as elsewhere, although that commitment is rather superficial. If individual rights were important to the ruling class, we would not have conducted dozens of murderous and illegal military campaigns since WW2.
From the perspective of the rentier class, the ‘problem’ with slavery is when there is rather too obviously a divide between the masters and servants, and the former become too nakedly tyrannical, so that the latter begin to violently revolt. If you are attempting to justify the forceful removal of property from one person to give to another, then a common way is to appeal to forms of equality and fairness, so make it appear moral. This in turn ensures that there are weaker incentives to work, and stronger ones to shirk, resulting in a debasement of society.
The inevitable decadence is not a new phenomenon, as this rather absorbing thread on the play Assemblywomen by Aristophanes attests:
Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; […] I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. […]
Blepyrus: But who will till the soil?
Praxagora: The slaves.
Even an “egalitarian” society (of non-slaves) presumes the existence of slaves to satisfy their pursuit of artificial equality and indulge the inevitable skewing of incentives! This temptation to enslave others (for the good of all!) is a permanent and innate part of the human experience, whether enacted or not. There never was, nor will there ever be, a society in which everyone wants to labour in fields, while nobody seeks undeserved feasts and debauched orgies. There will always be a group of people who are “more equal” than all the others, who ruthlessly direct their energies into the theft of the work of others so that they can set their ambitions on greed, gluttony, and lust.
In turn, their challenge is in how to disguise their manipulations and schemes, so that the enslavement is accepted and embraced. Obvious “private slavery” of two classes falls apart too easily. So it has to be repackaged in ways that make it harder to see it for what it really is. Would you agree…
- …that it is still slavery if you are kept in shackles but only work for five days a week instead of seven, with two days for rest?
- And it remains slavery if you are given a few weeks off a year to stay in peak working condition?
- Also, it continues to be slavery even if you have to pick among different plantations to work on, yet have some semblance of choice over what forced work you do?
- Or that presenting you with a fraudulent debt that you have to “pay off” under duress is still enslavement, just via deceit?
- As well, the physical shackles are only a symbol of slavery, so that it functionally remains as slavery even if the coercion comes in mental, legal, or financial form?
- Plus the existence of “benefits” for the slave (in the form of services delivered by other slaves) doesn’t undo the fundamental nature of the forced labour?
There are lots of ways of modulating the basic pattern of violent expropriation of human energy so that it no longer appears to be slavery. These are designed to mimic the legitimate and moral forms and flows of money and resources, such as charity. Orphans and widows are kept housed and fed, and the ends are then used to justify the means. This might all sound like Ayn Rand fan mail, and a diatribe against the nation state and its taxation — that supposedly makes for a civilised society. It took me a direct encounter with the naked corruption of our present system for me to appreciate that we had truly been enslaved, and in a way that was illegitimate by the standards of all political stances, whether of the left or right.
The kind of enslavement we face today is “public slavery”, where everyone (bar an extremely tiny class of the privileged outside the law) is subjected to a common form of legalised (but not lawful) oppression. The privileges offered to a few slaves are then marketed as freedom. There are gradations of how much of your energy is stolen, and a political system to allow the victims to engage in a kind of gladiatorial contest over who gets to be sacrificed or saved this season. There is no obvious boundary of the enslaved vs the rest, as subjugation is not merely normal, but respectable and moral. The very concept of freedom is perverted into a parody, with the “real deal” denounced as selfish or extreme.
The trick is always to insert an inversion to the “cascade of liberty” that is meant to occur. In a free society, power flows from the people to the government. The people have their fundamental customs and laws, which are a birthright and beyond the remit of the government to change. So you can never pass a law to make murder acceptable, for instance. Private property must be respected unless there is a compelling reason to the contrary, and any law that contradicts this is invalid. A constitution specifies the limits of government power, and is enforced via juries, courts, and potentially a monarch. At every step we should be able to trace back the authority of any agent in power to the sovereignty of the people, who are principals.
A slave is someone who has lost their ability to exercise free will, and forgone their sovereignty, being treated as chattel. Any time that the legislature, executive, or judiciary usurp the sovereignty of the people, then slavery has encroached, no matter how innocuous it may seem at first. The “sovereignty inversion” is when the agent (like the government) seizes the role of principal (the people), and this infringement is made “official” and normalised. In Britain, Parliament has taken upon itself the mantle of being “sovereign” over all, without acknowledging any restriction on its power. Common Law, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Act of Settlement, and the Coronation Oath are now treated as “decoration” to be used or ignored at will.
As a result of this it has become completely normal for government agencies (who are now acting as principals) to apply duress against the public for not bowing to their will and following rules and mandates that have no force in law. It is standard practise for our rights (like travel or work) to be packaged up, and sold back to us via licenses, fees, and duties. Merely existing can result in obligations to pay others, that arise out of nowhere other than statute. Fundamental rights, such as to seek shelter, are at odds with property taxes that would remove our homes for non-payment of community dues. Courts routinely operate outside of the prescribed civil or criminal procedure rules.
The outcome is a class of rich and powerful “land pirates” acting ultra vires who predate the rest of us, largely through trickery around jurisdiction. The well known case is when we are falsely drawn to consent to commercial or maritime law. Private guild courts appear to be public courts, being essentially paid adjudicators. We are manipulated into accepting liability as trustee of a trust for which we ought to be the beneficiary. As long as you are in a jurisdiction where your inalienable rights as a living man on the land are hard to assert, then land piracy can flourish.
What I have learned is that the foundation of this piracy is the restriction of access to lawful remedy. In order to access the rules of equity, and be able to assert those sovereign rights, we are forced to first engage with the corrupted lower courts. These only respect legislation, which is deliberately confounded with law to confuse people, and represents the interests of the “land pirates” in government. Thus real justice is made impossibly hard for all except the most determined.
“Public slavery” is manufactured by restricting meaningful access to remedy to only the privileged in-group. This is innately treason, since it is a deliberate plot to erode the constitutional rights of the people by opposing their sovereignty. For a society the avoid the descent into slavery, it needs to take treason seriously as one of the most serious crimes possible, up there with genocide and crimes against humanity. All treason has to be taken as being done with the intent of creating a master-slave society by force. It is worse than murder, and always deserves the death penalty, as recidivism is a society-wide ruin risk that can never be justified. One can even oppose the death penalty for murder, yet insist on it for treason.
Again, for those who might imagine that I have an Ayn Rand fetish or have become a right-wing extremist, consider if you are OK with this situation with respect to Council Tax, which is the emblematic case of “public slavery” operating today in Britain:
- A debt obligation merely to exist and be housed is being created in statute without consent of the debtor. In other words, you are forced to go out and seek paid work in order to locate funds to give to another, in order to prevent your assets being seized and maintain a roof over your head. This is in contravention of the Bill of Rights that says Parliament can do nothing to the prejudice of the people. Such bonded payments are also against the Modern Slavery Act.
- There is no proper invoice or bill of exchange for the services being rendered by the council, making it a fair contractual exchange. No council has been able to establish an obligation to pay in court, and there is not even an obligation in law to inform the council of your residence. The monies collected are also used to pay generous pensions to local officials, despite there being no lawful basis for doing so. Such a tax is also against the European Communities Act.
- When the Council Tax “debt” is unpaid, councils then forge the appearance of a court in violation of the Local Government Act. They issue fake “summonses” which are meant for criminal matters in a civil case, intimidating people into paying. These pretend to come from the court, when they do not. Thus every single summons issues for such “debt” is fraudulent, and none carries the appropriate signature or seal of a valid court.
- Magistrates courts, who are meant to only manage criminal cases, are adjudicating civil debt cases in bulk. This is in contravention of established law that the judicial mind has to be applied to each case, and that such administrative “star chambers” are unconstitutional. There is no Memorandum of Entry against the individual debtor, no personal case number, and no documentation is issued by the court to the debtor. All laws about requiring a court stamp and signature for any warrant or order are ignored.
- The councils then write to the “debtor” saying that there is a court order, but neither the council nor the court are able to offer any documentary evidence for it, so remain unaccountable. The court will sell you an extract of a printout for £20, in violation of Magna Carta 1297 that permanently bans paid justice. Councils threaten the public with debt collection when they request due process and evidence of a court order, which is blackmail.
- Private debt collectors are buying the fraudulent debt, violating the Data Protection Act, then pretending to be bailiffs, without any warrant of enforcement or deed of novation. This is theft and fraud. They will clamp your car unlawfully, which is extortion, in order to get you to pay the unlawful “debt”.
- The police and Crown Prosecution Service consistently ignore all the crimes being committed by officials, including malfeasance in public office. The government supports this state of affairs as being normal and acceptable. The whole corrupt system protects its own, and not the interests of the public.
If you are willing to accept this as being fair and reasonable, then where do you draw the line as to where slavery begins? How many “public services” does the master have to give to you, at what value, for it not to be slavery any longer? How many days of labour is it OK to coerce out of people merely for the innate right to seek shelter and have a home? How little judicial oversight is needed for debts to be issued and enforced? I am not the first person to observe that slavery was not abolished, but merely universalised, and Council Tax based on treasonous fake courts is merely slavery repackaged.
Parliamentary sovereignty is being used to steal the people’s sovereignty, which is always by definition treasonous enslavement, since the people are no longer master but instead servant. Over time, and left unmonitored, any legal system increasingly inverts the sovereignty relationship between the people and the government. Those who are most successful in society are either agents of the pirates, or are adept at playing the cunning games needed to survive and prosper.
The way out is to “break the system” by refusing the participate when sovereignty is violated. This requires personal character and a courageous refusal to become an accomplice to servitude. The weakness of “public slavery” is that its scales poorly, as there are finite numbers of enforcers, and not every functionary is a predator. Once enough of us refuse to pay up, the threats are shown as empty, and the system collapses. Tax revolts are the bedrock of successful revolutions, and this is the place to start.
I am not a slave, so I have stopped paying Council Tax, which is completely my right as there is no lawful obligation. Maybe you should stop complying with enslavement, too? Time to confront the fear of persecution, because that is what is enslaving you and future generations!
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