Our return to serfdom

In the future we can expect a return to serfdom as business supplants the government for our needs. The wealthy few will partition the land and belongings among themselves and you will owe every payment to them. That’s the meaning of debt, and it’s the reason why we have fewer freedoms each day.

Business has slowly carved away our rights by privatizing all things with the argument of efficiency over equality. Business sells itself to the public as the ‘only way to make it happen.’ They bring stability and peace at a price. Always a price. And always more today than the day before. That’s the price of freedom. And business impoverishes us while imposing a locked-labor on each family, and we become anchored to the land on which we live, too poor to change jobs at whim, and smaller numbers able to afford the toll of public roadway, a new house or apartment.

The roads will be sold to privateers and profiteers on the ruse that we the public cannot afford to build and maintain the surfaces of travel. Taxing to support roadways is sold as unpopular, but the insidious truth is that government has allowed the wealthy to lie to us. They’ve allowed the wealthy to indebt us so that taxation is unreasonable. And after the wealthy reap the public’s money, they invest in land with a few cows or trees to diminish the tax. They can hold tracks of land that would otherwise be affordable to ordinary folks which drives up the price when the magic bullet of development whistles past. That’s why tax will never touch the concealed wealth of the few who own the right to all the creative financing and all the property.

The wealthy will get the roads from us. Tolls on the road will start as a penny or more as all taxes do, but behind the scheme are the powerful few who are fighting to take more from others of their own ilk and we the people are caught in the middle. Yes the roads will be sold to the roadbuilders and the roadbuilders are owned by bigger frogs which are owned by the biggest frogs, each beholden to the handful of giddy frogs at the top.

The public right of way will be diminished beyond what it was in the past. The old will remember and the young will take the change for granted. But once the great prairies of America belonged to no one. Those were days when people lived freely, they had no right to health care but they could ride a horse where they wanted. Since those few years ago, the right to freedom has been dripping away like water in a tin can with a nail hole in the bottom. The erosion of freedom is about the battle of ownership and you don’t own a thing. The few at the top are playing a big checker game over the top of you so they can wrest more market monopoly from another monopolist.

What else is new in history? Wars have always been fought over ownership. And the battle waged today is not about your ownership. The battle is how the wealthy can use what little ownership you possess and convert it into a mass of proxy, and the proxies will accumulate. In the end, the war you waged to preserve freedom is nothing more than giving your proxy to someone who will sell it to the highest bidder. Why else do laws come into being without public discussion? Why else do the great business interests negotiate with our elected and not with the people? Nary a word is said after we discover what we knew from the beginning. That privatizing electricity does not lower the cost of electricity. Instead it encourages the wealthy to conjure another scheme for tomorrow’s malleable fear-ridden populace.

Yes we are afraid. We are kept in a constant fear of some damn thing on TV or a billboard. We are told flat-out that we do not possess the strength to do anything on our own. Perhaps since fear is oft-discussed, do you think that might change our destiny? Do you think government will have courage to forcibly remove all the advertisements? Well it doubtful since the reality of conversation in our society is that we hire bleeding heart stories to distract us in order to promote an oversized truck that can race over a mountain while pulling a giant boat. Why is that important? And there is Sanja Goupta holding a dear iguana from Brazil while he talks about disappearing rainforest. And cleverly ignored is that everyday in America, more trees are cut for a concrete slab than ever before in the history of the planet.

The fear is properly channeled away from the wealthy and responsible and put on your shoulders. Just try to dissolve your debt. And that’s why we are told that the American public must sell it’s roadways to privateers. We are told that if we don’t sell, then our children won’t have roads and ultimately our property will be rendered worth nothing more than actual value – which is the amount a person can produce on that land – which is damn near nothing with an oversized house sitting atop a skinny lot of land. And when that house was built by the developer, did you notice how he skinned the topsoil off for sale to another market schemer?

Yes the great truism of the age. Our property is not worth what we paid for it. We cannot grow enough tobacco or soybeans on our paltry little lots of land to fill the tanks of our vehicles. The land that we say we own is not even owned by us. It’s an illusion. Someone else owns all the land and you are simply leasing it. If you fail in payment of tax or coupon, the land you say you own will be taken without a public word. The king’s men will not defend you or be outraged when the collectors take your house and the hard-earned down-payment is gone forever. The king’s men defend only the noble rich people, and never you or your land. They will take your land and if you protest inappropriately they will laugh at you or throw you behind bars with the drunks – or both. Tell ‘em to go to hell and see how the Taser stings. And the noble will send his boys a bag of doughnuts in thanks. It’s a rip-snorting good time as they bullfrog those doughnuts down, thinking they rubbed elbows with the best.

You own nothing and down deep we all know this strange fact of illusion. That’s the fear that keeps the rich where they are, and you tilling the fields more eagerly each day to fend off the stark reality that you don’t even own your job. The rich are allowed to shop your job around the world but you are not allowed to adventure abroad for your medicine. You don’t even own a right to medical service. They will throw you out in your illest moment in the greatest free-market rush of greed that history has recorded.

Stand up and make sense or demand sense from our leaders, and see how far that fat brick can be thrown against the free-market exaggeration that wanting-more-than-your-neighbor is the meaning of self.

Gene Haynes