Today in the mail I received a copy of the movie, Amazing Grace, courtesy of the Foundation for Economic Education. The film tells the story of William Wilberforce and his struggle to end the British slave trade in the late 18th century. FEE is distributing the film as part of their “Blinking Lights Project,” a new effort designed, in their words, “to highlight and emphasize the vital link between personal character and a free society.”

I haven’t watched the film yet. But it looks good, and Wilberforce is certainly a heroic figure. I’m glad that FEE is distributing it. And I am favorably inclined to the effort to link considerations of virtue to the case for a free society.

But still…

Included with the movie are a set of “suggested discussion questions” for educators who choose to show it. One of those questions read as follows:

Slavery deprives the slave of the right of private property in his own person, as well as the right to sell his labor in a  free marketplace. In effect, it is taxation at the rate of 100%. America’s Founders objected to British rule in part because they thought “taxation without representation” was a form of slavery, but British taxes on the colonies then were nowhere near as high as taxes in America today. Is there a point below 100% where taxes could be high enough to say that taxpayers are effectively enslaved?

Of course, the claim that “taxation is slavery” is pretty much a commonplace among libertarians. And I’ve expressed my doubts about it, and its variants, before. But what struck me about this particular passage was the way in which it drew out that common idea to its logical conclusion. If (partial) taxation is (partial) slavery, then 100% taxation ought to be 100% slavery. In other words, 100% taxation would be morally or “effectively” identical to slavery.

Except that it isn’t. It just clearly isn’t. Even with a rate of taxation of 100%, no one would be forcing you to labor, they would merely (“merely”) be forcibly extracting 100% of the proceeds of your labor. If you chose not to work at all (and why wouldn’t you choose this?), no one would be stopping you. A taxation rate of 100% does not give anyone else the right to physically beat you just because you aren’t working hard enough, or because they didn’t like the tone in your voice, or because you looked at a white woman the wrong way. A taxation rate of 100% doesn’t give anybody the right to forcibly separate you from your family. It doesn’t give anyone the right to buy you or sell you, or tell you where you have to live, or prevent you from learning how to read or from speaking your mind, etc., etc., etc…

None of this is to say, obviously, that taxing people at a rate of 100% wouldn’t be a gross moral wrong. I wouldn’t even deny that it would be wrong for many of the same reasons that slavery is wrong. But it’s not the same thing. And it’s not anywhere close to the same magnitude of wrong.

Libertarians have a genuinely valuable insight, I think, when they claim that the power to tax the proceeds of another person’s labor gives the holder of that right a partial property right in the other person. But a property right is a bundle. And even a right to tax all of the proceeds of another person’s labor still falls well short of the kind of property right that masters had in their slaves in the context of the African salve trade.

All of this is obvious to most people. Even if taxation and slavery are both bad, and both bad for many of the same reasons, there are obviously morally significant differences between them. And so when libertarians act like those differences aren’t there, or that they don’t matter, other people don’t think – “Wow, what a principled and radical idea!” They just think we’re kind of thick.

So please, let’s stop talking this way.