An Absolutism That Surpasses the Sun King
We have been taught to look with horror upon the centuries of absolute monarchies, those times when a Sun King could, in a fit of magnificence or boredom, demand a portion of the harvest to build a palace.
History, however, has a perverse sense of humor.
When comparing the voracity of the Bourbons with the sophisticated fiscal machinery of our era, one cannot help but feel a certain nostalgia for the old regime.
The modesty of the past versus the ambition of the present
French monarchs, at the height of their supposedly unlimited power, rarely managed to extract more than twenty-five percent of national wealth, operating a rudimentary tax system that was constantly vulnerable to evasion.
It was a lazy absolutism, constrained by the absence of bureaucracy and, above all, by a measure of aristocratic restraint.
They understood that for a sheep to produce wool, it must first be allowed to live.
Today, by contrast, we have perfected a fiscal and technological absolutism in which the State is not only our ruler, but our involuntary majority partner.
Through an invisible web of direct taxes, indirect levies, and publicly set prices imposed by decree, total national and local extraction far exceeds the most feverish dreams of Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette.
Modern absolutism, without consultation or consent, takes more than fifty percent of your income through taxes and tariffs alone.
It maintains digital, automatic, real-time control over every movement of your banked money, restricting property rights in ways no royal ruler could ever have achieved.
It may not yet imprison you for arrears, but it enforces a form of civil death by stripping assets through fines and surcharges, producing a genuine financial extinction.
Confiscation under the banner of progress
What we now face is expropriation by drip. Governments arbitrarily determine the value of what we own.
Market prices are irrelevant. What matters is the fiscal and confiscatory interest dictated by the needs you have democratically granted to the governing emperor.
We are no longer owners of our property. We are mere users, paying a perpetual rent to the State for permission to sleep under our own roof.
Control over banked money has erased the last frontier of freedom: anonymity.
Every unit of currency we earn is tracked with hound-like efficiency, and every fine or surcharge functions as a bureaucratic whip, punishing the audacity of wanting to keep the product of one’s own effort.
The illusion of representation
The great paradox is that this modern absolutism is exercised in the name of popular will.
We have replaced a king who declared I am the State with a system that tells us you are the State, while reaching into our pockets with a depth no monarch would have dared, for fear of the guillotine.
If the madness of the past lay in individual power, the deception of our time lies in believing we are free while signing forms that transfer our assets to an entity that sets the price of our existence.