LumberHawk™

A good definition of a slave is someone whose tax rate is 100%. All the fruits of their labor, all of them, 100%, go to a tax authority, the slave master. On the other side of that spectrum, someone with a 0% tax rate would be someone that’s fully self-owned, someone that’s fully sovereign. They keep all the fruits of their labor and they trade them freely with other self-owned people. That’s the opposite of a slave. You could call that a sovereign. We don’t have many of those people in the world today. They’re mostly what we refer to as sovereign nations. Most of us normal people just have some effective tax rate that we pay across all the activities in our life. Buying, investing, consuming, dying, everything gets taxed at every transaction in the modern world. So if you do all that math and figure out your effective tax rate, let’s say it’s 30%, my argument would be that you now know what percentage of a slave you are. You’re 30% slave and 70% sovereign, or free man. I’ve said it this way in the past and it triggers a lot of people, but I think it’s hard to argue with. We’ve come a long way. Today, something like slavery rubs all of our moral intuitions wrong, and most normal people would consider it abhorrent. Slavery still exists, less so in the whips and chains of traditional chattel slavery and more so in the less visible version called taxation, inflation, and statism. The Bitcoin mission and the Bitcoin thesis is all about creating a world with more sovereigns and ideally no slaves at all. Ideally, we want to get to a world where inflation is at zero, the central bank has been eliminated, and the market for money, the biggest and most important market in the world, is free. People are free to choose whatever money suits them best, interest rates are discovered freely in the marketplace, and slavery is finally reduced to 0% worldwide. That’s what we call the big bright orange future.