Etienne de la Boetie wrote Discourse on Voluntary Servitude nearly five-hundred years ago. He examined the motivations of tyrants, the behavior of free people, and of the relationship between them. This Discourse on Compelled Voluntary Servitude applies those timeless observations to modern America. The Discourse examines the largest change agent of America’s last century, revealing behavior De la Boetie observed in his day and would recognize now:
“Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, "Long live the King!" The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.”
A bushel of wheat has become endless agricultural subsidies. A gallon of wine, all manner of modern bread and circuses. A sesterce, Federal Reserve thievery beyond measure. De la Boetie’s tyrants - Tarquinius Superbus, Pisistrates, the Syracusan Denis, Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, Julius Caesar, Sulla - had nothing on Roosevelt(s), Wilson, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush(s), Clinton(s), Obama.
“The more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate an d destroy.”
Despots do not change. The power they exercise does, ebbing and flowing to the same degree skillful assaults on liberty are overlooked. And, of people’s willingness to fund it. But the focus of this Discourse is not despotic power. Rather, it is the people who relinquish power voluntarily, because this is where the power to change lay. That prescriptive is De la Boetie’s s elixir against progressive tyranny: “It is not necessary to deprive him [the tyrant] of anything, but simply, to give him nothing.”Etienne de la Boetie was no revolutionary firebrand. Americans need not be either, because fixing income taxation requires no extraordinary action. “If it cost the people anything to recover their freedom,” De la Boetie counseled, “I should not urge action to this end…” The medieval writer could only point to larger-than-life figures required to provoke change before his own time.[1] But looking forward he saw the effective avenue of change was anyone who lived in a way that reflected freedom as the normal state of human affairs. Non-violent remedy, a remarkable idea in his era of brutal political and religious upheaval, is accessible today on a silver platter for those with the fibre to reach for it. This may sound appealing, but consider that Americans who once revolted over a three-percent tax on tea[2] are unmoved by demands for much more in modern times.[3]
“It is the stupid and cowardly who are neither able to endure hardship nor to vindicate their rights. They stop at merely longing for them, and lose through timidity the valor roused by the effort to claim their rights, although the desire to enjoy them still remains as part of their nature.”
De la Boetie captured timeless human nature that is both the cause of America’s vision problem and its prescriptive cure. He also believed that consent of a people depended on age-old power accumulation devises of tyranny: control of education; mystification of government; divine right; bread and circuses; control of money and money policy. Today, the king plies these tools more effectively than ever. His army, however, wears suits and ties, not uniforms. It occupies cubicles, not foxholes. Its weapons are deceit and threat, because he knows better than do the people that income tax power is in the individual, not the state; that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot force the individual action that is required to implement voluntary income taxation.
Voluntary Income Taxation sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Actually Simon, it isn't. The Byzantine way the US tax code is constructed does indeed make it "voluntary". People laugh at this, but it really is true. The key is to learn how to not 'volunteer'! It took some years for us to figure it out, and how to effectively "not volunteer". within the maze constructed by 1400 IRS lawyers over a century.
Actually Simon, it isn't. The Byzantine way the US tax code is constructed does indeed make it "voluntary". People laugh at this, but it really is true. The key is to learn how to not 'volunteer'! It took some years for us to figure it out, and how to effectively "not volunteer". within the maze constructed by 1400 IRS lawyers over a century.
Great post! I read this book last year. Informative, entertaining, thought provoking, fast read. Very well written.
Just your having head of the book, much less read it, are all the bona fides you need here! People don't come across de la Boetie by mistake You'll recognize other cites from him in future writing.