Consider the following.

1. If you pay an income tax to the United States government, this can be interpreted as saying a percentage of the time you spend laboring is not your own, but the government’s. (In principle, so long as the government can tax labor, then all your labor is the government’s, but that aside …) If your income tax is say 20%, then 20% of the hours you work is labor done for the government. What is it called when no matter how hard you labor, a certain percentage of what you gain will be given to someone else?

2. One of the largest expenses the United States government must pay is to service its debt. The United States government currently has a debt that numbers in the trillions of dollars (perhaps $9.1 trillion). Just as you must pay interest on your credit card debt, the US government must pay interest on its debt. While I’m not sure what the number is, I would guess that perhaps about 10% of money raised through income tax is to pay interest on debt that the US government owes. Note that’s only interest. Debt is never paid down. (Here’s a link to the Federal budget. Net interest payments for 2007 are estimated to be about 8.6% of the budget. )

3. Now putting 1 and 2 above together, that means that if you are a United States citizen and you pay income tax, then a percentage of your labor is for interest payments on the money the government has borrowed (and has no plan to pay back). So 2% of your labor is to make interest payments on government debt. You have no choice over this, as the government legally owns this portion of your labor.

4. Now that’s not all. I would guess that about 25% of United States debt is held by foreigners. That would be mostly Chinese and Japanese along with some others (Saudi Arabia for example). So what’s that mean? If you consider all of the above, a portion of the time that you labor each day is so you can pay foreigners interest payments on money that your government has borrowed from them (and has no plans to pay back). Very roughly about 0.5% of your time. If you work 250 eight hour work days in a year, then about 10 hours for that year would have been spent laboring for foreigners.

These are admittedly very loose numbers. However, they do make their point. Every year, if you are an American and pay income tax, you spend a portion of your time laboring for foreigners.

Note, that as you are only laboring to pay interest, this claim on your labor is infinite. So long as the debt is never paid down, you must pay interest payments to your foreign creditors forever. The claim they have on you and your labor is infinite and forever so long as the debt continues to exist.

To the extent that creditors own their debtors, and to the extent the US government owns your labor, then these foreign creditors own you, at least if you are a US citizen.

For now all they ask you to do is to labor about one and a quarter days a year for them. It’ll probably be more next year and more the next.

Only a day or so you say. Hm. Well, the point is, you’ve been bought and paid for, by foreigners. And it’s your government that has sold you. Is that what you sent your local representative to Washington to do? Ironically, the revolution of 1776 was to end tax payments to foreigners (the British). How strange it would have sounded to the founding fathers if you told them all Americans labor over a day a year to send money to foreigners.

Anyway, that’s how income tax and foreign debt work. When deciding which candidate to support in next year’s presidential election, look for the one who wants to reduce government debt and end the income tax. That’s the candidate who is fighting to have your liberty returned to you. That’s the one who doesn’t want you to spend a portion of your time each year working for foreigners.

That would probably be Ron Paul.