“A condition of compulsory service or labor performed by one person, against his will, for the benefit of another person due to force, threats, intimidation or other similar means of coercion and compulsion directed against him.” (1)
It really is hard to find a better definition to describe what is happening with much of the federal tax system today.
Of course, we all have a constitutional obligation to financially support the federal government, and we most definitely have a moral obligation to support our fellow man. But the federal government demanding how much of our labor must be used to support our fellow man and what fellows must be supported, can be defined as nothing but involuntary servitude. If my neighbor refuses to get a job, even if he is able bodied and able to work, there are a myriad of federal programs that will transfer federal tax money to him and his family. The government feels it is my obligation to surrender a portion of my earnings to him through these programs. If I protest that he is undeserving of my property, the federal government will use escalating threats, intimidation and ultimately force to seize my property and transfer it to who the government has decided is more deserving of it. If you think I over state the case, try not paying your federal taxes.
We now have a situation where the majority of federal taxes collected do not go to maintain the government or provide for the common defense but is money confiscated from one citizen and transferred to another citizen. Just a huge, trillion dollar, wealth redistribution program that skirts, if not openly defies, the Constitution.
The founding fathers were very aware of the potential dangers of well meaning but destructive urges by elected officials to attempt to use public money collected as a tax, to correct every social ill that might befall a citizen. They were very careful to write a constitution that did not give the federal government the authority to confiscate a citizen’s property and redistribute it as the government saw fit. James Madison wrote “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." They understood not only how this practice was contrary to the founding principal of individual freedoms, but also the political reality that the ruling party might be tempted to seize money from political opponents and bestow it on political supporters in the name of benevolence.
In the mid 1850’s a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled extensively in the U.S. and later wrote a book about the American democratic experiment, wrote “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
It is hard to determine with the trillions of dollars changing hands, where the benevolence stops and the bribery begins,
