Jonah Goldberg misses a great opportunity to take his argument to the next level:
Well, some of it surely is. But look. According to that reason video I posted below, Americans work an average of 103 days a year just to pay their taxes. If you had to work 365 days a year to pay your taxes, that would be a kind of slavery or indentured servitude, because all of your productive labor would be going to the government. You would have no resources of your own to provide for the life you wanted. Instead the government would provide you not with what you want, but what the government decides you need.
That sounds like a kind of tyranny to me.
I don't think that working 1/3 of the year to pay your taxes is inherently tyrannical or a form of slavery. Emphasis on inherently. What makes the income tax structure cross over into the realm of slavery is that there are a large number of income earners who don't pay it and who benefit from the productive labor of those who do pay into the system. If plantation owners had paid black slaves for their labor, kept 1/3 of the fruits of their labor, and then compelled them to pay 1/3 of the fruits of their labor that they made on outside tasks, few would line up to argue that the exchanging of wages for labor suddenly marked a wholesale transformation of the plantation system from slavery to a free labor market for southern blacks.
The "progressive income tax" is a monumental, illogical joke. A child who had been taught the story of the tragedy of the commons could easily grasp the danger inherent to allowing a large number of modestly productive adults to reap public benefits with almost no tax burden.
Yet another reason that my children will not attend public-school; I am certain that the persistent root of this idiocy is the destruction of the foundation of critical-thought at a young age, supplanted with quasi-awareness and obedience to the State.