In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick recounted ‘The Tale of The Slave’ the theme of which is that income taxation is slavery. For a long time, I thought this was Nozick’s own idea; but upon visiting the footnotes it turns out the story is actually Herbert Spencer’s.
The Reading Room
Herbert Spencer, Slavery & Income Tax
Along with a number of fantastic essays in The Man Versus The State, originally published in 1884’s England, ‘The Coming Slavery’ sets out Spencer’s argument that all income taxation is slavery in little over a page. Does it still stand up to recent socialist scrutiny?
Following an evisceration of the British welfare state, Spencer mounts his slavery argument. He begins by claiming ‘that which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another’s desire’. This isn’t a binary state though: ‘The relation admits of sundry gradation’. His story starts by getting us to agree that the slave ‘which is treated as an animal’ where ‘he has to expend his entire effort for his owner’s advantage’ is an obvious case of ‘a harsh form of slavery’.
A slightly modified case is one where the slave master grants his slave ‘a short time in which to work for himself’; clearly, he remains a slave. That label still applies even when said work is carried out on the slave’s own land. Many British West Indies slaves from the American Revolution onwards under the provisioning system were in this condition. ‘Then we come to the still more moderated form…what we distinguish as a serf’ where ‘he give[s] to his owner each year a fixed amount of labour or produce, or both: retaining the rest himself’. Spencer mentions the fourth step where the slave is ‘allowed to leave his owner’s own estate…under the condition he shall pay an annual sum’ as having arisen in Russia before serfdom’s abolition in 1861.
At this point, Spencer explains that ‘the sundry gradation’ of slavery is ‘the greater or lesser extent to which effort is compulsorily expended for the benefit of another’. The fifth step has the slave owner sell his slaves to a company. The sixth step is put as a rhetorical question: ‘Suppose that for a company we substitute the community; does it make any difference to the slave if the time he has to work for others is as great, and the time he has to work for himself is as small, as before?’ Spencer answers no; finishing off the analogy by claiming income taxation clearly makes each person ‘a slave to society’ because people are forced to give up their efforts to the state.
This is an excellent argument. However, I’d add, each individual must also face the threat of actualised control, e.g., imprisonment, for failure to pay or work to actually be a slave, otherwise, a thief would count as a slave owner too. In Self-Ownership, Freedom & Equality, G.A. Cohen attacks Spencer’s argument. His main attack, via the medium of Nozick’s work, is that slavery is only slavery where an individual(s) has a right with discretionary control to extract labour or the fruits of labour from another. However, Cohen maintains, redistributive taxation can arise from an obligation on us to ensure a certain state of affairs, e.g., equality, with a corresponding specific right with no discretionary control. Hence, Cohen claims redistributive taxation doesn’t institute any slavery.
Spencer scholar, Eric Mack, disagrees. He asks us to imagine two plantations belonging to Scarlett and Melainie who both work their slaves as hard as they can to maximise their profits. Scarlett does this because she enjoys wealth; Melainie, contrastingly, does it because she has made a contract to support her old mother as best as she can, which she does by giving up all the profits from the plantation to her. Unlike Scarlett, Melainie has no right of discretionary control over her slaves. Mack’s cutting conclusion is: ‘Cohen’s position seems to imply that, where as Scarlett’s is indeed a slave plantation, not a single slave can be found on Melainie’s plantation!’ Slavery exists even without a right of discretionary control.
Cohen however did discover a fault in Nozick. This being the taxation allegedly warranted by him to finance the minimal state is just as much slavery as taxation to finance the welfare state. Now Herbert Spencer of 1850’s Social Statics could not be accused of this fault, as a minarchist himself, because he included the chapter ‘The Right to Ignore the State’ which explained why opting out of state services and taxation must be allowed. However, Herbert Spencer of 1892, only six years after The Man Versus The State, could not dodge this bullet because he removed said chapter from the updated edition of Social Statics due to a renewed belief in compulsory taxation. A great shame to say the least.