The liberal reward of labour, as it is the effect of increasing wealth , so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest prosperity. — Adam Smith
There are those who simplistically perceive taxation as confiscatory; what they do not as a rule perceive is that the growth of capital is the direct result of the expropriation of labor. Capital branches off from the rivers of labor: the currents of intellect, material and production, which lead to further growth of continual ventures and societal obligations.
Since the dawn of the social contract, the impetus has been to protect the commonwealth of a territory, meaning that the immediate environment was unimpeded in carrying on with the production of goods and services. Crude Hobbesian governance, usually perpetrated by thugs, was to defend the assets that had been formed by the enterprising class from the great unwashed whose instinct was that its labor was subject to undue exploitation — that labor in itself and moderately for itself was being violated. The growing ruling class feared, with the exception of rare talent and intellect, the potential power of the laboring masses; consequently, confiscation of duly earned labor had to persist, resulting in greater wealth in the hands of the few.
This principle still exists in complex societies, though surely with the growth of democracies, the imbalance is curtailed by modern governments, owing in the main its obligation to majorities. Modern government has larger targets than monarchs of old in confiscatory power; in addition, modern society requires larger horizons in the jurisdiction of its governance owing to ever-increasing infrastructures and care of its citizens in order to give liberal symmetry — suggested by Adam Smith — to the social landscape as opposed to, imperial 19th Century asymmetrical indifference to democratic enlightenment that still prevails in underdeveloped nations, leaving labor to fallow or brutally exploited when needed.
Asymmetrical societies have existed in the Middle East for centuries owing to religious exploitation of the masses who labored supposedly for the indulgence of Allah, not unlike Europe’s Dark Ages. Foreign investment in oil discoveries, brought petro-dollars to the Islamic ruling classes only; and even in the 70s when Arabian countries realized the fleecing, wherein the price of oil failed to agree with the sky-rocketing inflationary costs of other industries, because of their confiscatory, asymmetrical structure ruled out the spread of prosperity to the masses of Muslims. Of course, the Western Powers reacted to this change as confiscation of their long-held profits, but the beauty of asymmetrical money structures born out of heretofore symmetrical governance, is that these costs were absorbed by the sophisticated structure of wide consumption, the consequence of which is that the capitalistic oligarchy still held close to its vest exorbitant profits because of the weakened confiscatory governance in the last quarter of the 20th Century when taxation was in the process of shifting more control of capital to private hands.
Unfortunately, this unraveling of the confiscatory power of today’s public governance in this country particularly — meaning the shift of capital control reflecting imperialism of the last century — has brought on asymmetrical capitalism with the help of the global supply of cheap labor, bordering on slavery. This has caused reprehensible injury and insult to internal labor and impairs the commonwealth to the extent that it is out of sync with the symmetrical flow of a prosperous nation. A dramatic example of this beyond increasing outsourcing is that in a time of terrorism, there are no American companies to step up to the plate and coordinate our ports. In the days of FDR were this the case, surely the government itself would take over the operation and oversight of the nation’s seaports.
Copyright © 2006 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: February 27, 2006.
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