www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wt1ZjXv8Lg

On 18 December 1865, the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, by which it is claimed that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall never again exist in the country.

At that time, this appeared to many as a very radical step. It even led to debates on whether slaveowners would be harmed. Today it is something officially unimaginable, though a trade in “white meat” does exist. Slavery would never have been abolished had its opponents not set such a goal and had they not cried out for it decades previously. Its abolition came at practically a single blow, not gradually or compensationally.

But with the extinction of the direct form of servitude there came and grew its other form. There appeared that plundering band called known as the state, which, just as the slaveowners did, usurped without consent and under threat of violence not only a portion of the labor and life of their thralls, but their property as well.

Lower taxes, broader privatization of “public” services, a less-extravagant state budget, less state intervention? No. No taxes, complete privatization, and neither the state nor “its expenditures and investments”. That is the path to freedom.