Besides savagely persecuting the Christians, Emperor Diocletian is known for decreeing that the peasant farmers who worked the land and grew the crops during his rule were legally tied to the manor – the villa rustica in Latin – or the noble who owned it. This decree sought to remedy the decline in food production from peasants quitting the land en masse to escape disease, barbarian invasion or the aforesaid persecution, and like so many executive decisions, it had unintended consequences. Forcing some peasant farmers to remain on the land seemed like a straightforward Roman way of fixing a problem (while ignoring the reasons why the farmers were fleeing in the first place) but it also created a new social class between freemen and slaves : the villeins. Villeins were required to register themselves to a specific township and once registered, they could never leave it unless they were delivering a message or going to war, thus they were doomed to a lifetime of misery, filth and backbreaking labor. Over the course of the next 1200 years, the term villain came to denote an ugly, dirty, foul-tempered scoundrel, and no wonder: With no relief from their wretched state, no hope, all their labor going to feed someone else, their only escape the sweet release of death, the villeins were only one step above the animals they tended and usually slept with. In essence, they were slaves – serfs derives from the Latin servus, meaning slave.
As the year of our Lord 2012 comes to a close, His Serene Loftiness Barack Hussein Obama, Emperor of the Americas, Priest-King, Generalissimo and Supreme Leader of the People’s Revolution, seeks to return us to the glory days of fourth century Europe but with an interesting twist: The peasants become the lords and the lords become the peasants. You see, socialist dogma demands that the industrial proletariat own the means of production and divide the wealth produced thereby equally, but that doesn’t mean that the proletariat can invent the means of production, secure the financing required to start it up, or take the risks and have the talent needed to keep it running – the proletariat just want to own the means and enjoy the profits as their medieval predecessors did. Conversely, the robber barons of the modern industrial age – meaning you and I – will be relegated to serfdom, chained to the estate in perpetuity, forced to plan and work and sacrifice so the proletariat can fatten themselves in their castles, so to speak. We cannot change jobs, we cannot retrain into some other profession, we cannot retire, we certainly cannot leave. We can only work ourselves to death for the comfort of others less able than ourselves. We are the new villeins.
When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the top Federal income tax rate stood at 25%. Twenty million jobs had been created, GDP averaged 4.1% annual growth, industrial production increased 28.5% and Federal revenue increased 28% in constant dollars during his administration, refuting the revisionist claim about depleting the Treasury. (The problem, as always, was runaway spending, which increased over 35% in constant dollars over that period. Although defense spending increased by over 50% during the period 1980-1989, the boogeyman frequently cited by Leftist politicians, it declined 15% during George H.W. Bush’s Presidency as the Cold War had been won and the so-called “peace dividend” appeared. However, means-tested entitlement spending shot up 102% over the Reagan-Bush 41 administrations, not including Social Security and Medicare, and has been climbing ever since.) In 2011, total Federal revenue was $2.3035 trillion, a staggering sum of money, but that staggering sum of money was dwarfed by $3.6031 trillion of Federal spending, a deficit of $1.2996 trillion or about $108.3 billion of new debt for every month of the year. And as colossal as this level of debt may be, the real threat is the interest that is accumulating and must be paid. The interest on the Federal debt represents about 3% of United States GDP and has been spiking during Priest-King’s administration. With a stagnant economy (2.63% GDP growth or less) and high unemployment (7.7%, above 8% from January 2009-September 2012), there isn’t enough private wealth being generated to pay down the interest on the debt, let alone start paying down the debt itself, and since Priest-King continues to spend titanic amounts of money, there is the very real possibility that interest on the Federal debt will reach 12%, an unsustainable level, and trigger a U.S. Government default. Priest-King would then blithely observe the disaster from his Presidential Library in Chicago, write his memoirs and blame George W. Bush for it all.
Socialism absolutely depends on a large group of talented, educated, hard-working people generating wealth so that wealth can be redistributed as the government sees fit. If this group of industrious people should shrink or move away or die or do anything but grind away forever, then the whole scheme collapses into the dust. (See Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and a host of cities and towns in this country. See California itself, where a bloated welfare system has attracted millions of low-wage, high-consumption illegals and driven 3.4 million more people out of the state than those who moved to California since 1990.) Subtract the incentive to work hard, subtract the profit motive, and human nature takes over. Priest-King’s absolute refusal to throttle runaway entitlement spending represents the triumph of ideology over good sense, and it is the same triumph enjoyed by the Soviet commissars before their country disintegrated. Yes, he’s upset that despite draconian taxes and stratospheric spending, the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor, he can’t admit that his approach, his political philosophy are failures, but if he cares one whit about the country le leads, he’ll make the compromises necessary to prevent the bankruptcy and depression that will surely come. Is the only acceptable answer the permanent enslavement of ten percent of the population so the other ninety percent can cash their welfare checks? If it is, and his answer fails, who will he enslave then?
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/09/30/2012-federal-income-tax-brackets-irs-tax-rates/
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500 years before the internet, Europe was changed forever by the printing press. Young and old of all classes and sexes hungered for literacy. Among the slaves called ‘villeins’ came widespread shock. Freed by the revelations of knowledge, people were outraged by tyrannies they had accepted for centuries.
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