marian perry retweetledi
An entire empire was overthrown over a two percent tax on a breakfast beverage.
Look at what you tolerate now.
You are taxed when you earn it. Taxed when you spend it. Taxed when you save it. Taxed when you invest it.
And when you die, they tax whatever is left.
That is not a system. That is a harvest.
You commute in a car you paid sales tax to buy. You drive it on roads you were already taxed to build. You fill it with gas taxed by the gallon.
When you sell that car, the next buyer pays sales tax on it again. The same car. Taxed every time it changes hands.
You arrive at a job where your salary is cut before it ever touches your hands.
If you work for yourself, you pay both sides. Two people on paper. Neither one keeps what they earned.
Then you go home.
Every bill you open has a government standing behind it with its hand out.
You buy a house with money they already took their share of. Then they charge you property tax on it every year for the rest of your life.
You want to renovate your own kitchen. You need a permit. You want to build a deck on your own land. You need a permit.
You pay for the property. Then you pay for permission to use it.
Stop paying property tax and they seize your home.
Not because you missed a mortgage payment. Because you missed a payment to the government for the privilege of keeping what is already yours.
You do not own your home. You rent it from the state.
If you leave something behind for your children, they are taxed on what you were already taxed to earn.
The same wealth. Taxed at every stage of your life. Then taxed one final time because you had the audacity to die.
They found a way to monetize your absence.
We are told this is the price of civilization.
It is not. It is architecture.
The most effective prison ever built is the one where the inmates believe they are free.
They did not take your freedom. They priced you out of it.
If you kept the full value of your labor, you would be free within years. Not decades. Years.
The system cannot allow that.
A machine built on consumption needs a consumer that never stops.
You did not sign a social contract. You were assigned one.
Now pay attention.
They spent decades perfecting the extraction of your productivity.
Now they are building the technology to replace you.
AI is not coming for your job because corporations are greedy. It is coming because a system that already takes half your output just realized it can take all of it. Without needing you in the equation.
You were never the point of this arrangement.
You were the input.
And the moment they engineer a cheaper one, you become a rounding error on a quarterly earnings call.
They did not build AI to free you. They built it to finish what the tax code started.
It was never about the tea. It was about the precedent.
Today we hand over half our waking lives and thank them for the potholes.
You do not live in a free economy. You live in a subscription you never signed up for.
And the penalty for canceling is everything you have.
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