The American Dream: Work Yourself Into Slavery

The land of the free? When that was first uttered, Americans were free, at least most of them. But today, who in America is really free?

If you own a home, congratulations, you’ve worked hard and directed the fruits of your efforts toward the American dream. Oops, but keep working, because if your property taxes go unpaid, your state will seize your house, sell it and pay the tax…so long dream. How free are you when the government can take your property if you don’t pay?

Unless you are a member of the ultra rich, you are a slave to your income source.

The government is your master.

Look around. Right now people everywhere are scurrying to get their income taxes completed. The government insists that it is entitled to between one quarter and one half of your income. That means that one fourth of your time has been conscripted by the government. If one man works for another for no pay, that is slavery. Where has freedom gone?

Is it reserved for the ultra rich? Not necessarily. There is another segment of our society, a fast growing segment, that possesses a quality of freedom similar to the ultra rich.

In America, the poor are taken care of. They are constantly pampered by a society that is afraid of damaging the self-esteem of those less fortunate.

Government assistance used to come with a stigma—to be avoided by a population determined to be self-sufficient. Today, however, people receiving assistance feel entitled and even insulted sometimes by any insinuation of the inappropriateness of their actions. These people aren’t worried about property taxes, or having one fourth of their time conscripted—stolen—by the government via the tax system.

The poor can move about freely, secure phone service, cable television, and all of the “staples” of today’s life that didn’t exist for the Americans of the 1970s.

Credit is passed out as fast as possible to the poor by the private sector, and many times is backed by the government. The poor in America have managed to shrug off the old-fashioned ideas about paying people back. Forget about bankruptcy restructuring, wages cannot be garnished unless one has a job.

The poor don’t worry about money—they get it from you, the wage earner, via taxes. They don’t worry about taxes—they don’t pay them. They are happy renting their abodes, and because we capitalists are by and large greedy, they can always find someone else to lend them money.

This is not meant to be an indictment of the poor, or even of the way in which our system handles the poor. Rather, this should serve as a jarring and stunning reflection about the way our system inflicts incredible damage upon the middle class. For the middle class to have withstood so much government interference in the last fifty years and still be so stable is nothing short of miraculous—which may not be inaccurate since the United States middle class is primarily Christian in its makeup.

The government knows the U.S. middle class, with its money, work ethic, and morals is still the backbone of society. It knows that the family unit is the only thing holding the country together. It should be thankful that a majority still strives to be part of it.

Once the middle class goes away—once the family unit goes out the way it did in the inner city—the American experiment will be over.

What will be left will be unrecognizable. But one thing will be certain. The rigid controls the government uses to keep today’s middle class in check will be useless. The moral ties that allow the government to keep the middle class in check, enslaved as was asserted earlier, will be ignored. The government services offered to the middle class will not be worth one-fourth to one-half of their time and money. They shall experience the freedom that comes from no longer being controllable by conventional means. The freedom that today is experienced only by the classes at the top and bottom of American society. Until then, tote that bail you little people of the American middle class.