Monday, November 6, 2017

The Layered Approach to Power

I'm still amazed at the level of detail that internet censorship has come to. It had never occurred to me that individual blog posts would be suppressed within a blog that is already suppressed. However, that's quite clearly the current state of affairs. Certain ideas are more heavily suppressed than other ideas.

This shouldn't have surprised me, though. After all, the suppression is easy to put in place. All that's required is a list of keywords and a general ranking of blogs. Anyone with some basic programming skills can put together the algorithm. With most large internet corporations openly stating that they will combat fake news, it's not even a secret that censorship is being put into place at every level. It's just not talked about much, and posts that do are of course suppressed. Such posts do not disappear. They are just a little harder to find and often mixed up with flat earth conspiracies and other nonsense, just to make it extra difficult to figure out if it is true or not.

Every other aspect of our lives are similarly regulated in layers, so why not the internet too. It makes perfect sense.

Taxes, for instance, are not collected as a single charge, but in multiple stages. There is income tax and sales tax. The two are both a drain on people's finances, but because they are split, the total tax burden is not immediately apparent.

In some countries, like Norway, the total tax burden for an average citizen is a massive 70% when all taxes and fees are summed together. This is not a secret. The information is freely available on the web. In the case of Norway, the information was even available at the tax collectors' own web pages for a while before they took it down. Now, everyone will have to do the calculation themselves.

Everyone can sit down and add up the fees and taxes paid from the moment money leaves the hands of an employer, until it reaches the end point where a good or service is purchased by the employee.

Very few people in the west will find their tax burden lower than 50%. Government agents are in other words in control of people's finances. The average person is left with the smaller share of their earnings.

Had all these taxes and fees been paid as a single lump sum at a specific date every year, everyone would be up in arms. However, under the current layered approach no one seems to care. Those who protest are quickly silenced by someone pointing out how little they are paying in income tax relative to all the services they get. The fact that the income tax is but one slice of the total tax burden is of course bypassed in silence. The information is freely available but suppressed. Most people have no idea that they are taxed as heavily as they are.

The beauty of this system is that it is often defended by its victims. People who point to income tax as if it was the only tax in existence are not in most cases the politicians, but victims of high taxes themselves. People who defend minimum wages are completely unaware that it is nothing but a law preventing the low skilled from getting a job.

Some people are so misinformed that they are willing to die in order to defend their current level of enslavement. They join the army. They go abroad killing people who stand in the way of their ruling masters. It's beyond stupid. Yet this mentality is the norm. Most people believe that they are free even as they stand in line for government handouts.

As Adolf Hitler once said: "What good fortune for governments that the people do not think."

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