Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

When my parents were kids, almost a hundred years ago, a highly popular preoccupation of what is now the tinfoil hat brigade was “white slavery” in which young Caucasian women were supposedly being kidnapped all the time by mustachioed villains or wily Chinamen and pressed into the fate worse than death. Young girls were supposed to look, every night, for evildoers lurking under their beds. You can get a feel for the phenomenon by watching the comedy Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Today, on the other hand, after almost a century of “progress”, if you enter “sex slavery” into your browser, you’ll get back some 3.8 million hits. The first of them says “Worldwide, it’s estimated that there are 4.5 million victims of sex trafficking.” Everyday news concerns itself with slavery operations on other continents carried out by armies of Muslim terrorists, and there are dark rumors in circulation in the West (which liberal commentators never fail to make extremely nervous fun of) about rich and powerful Americans taking advantage of Venezuelan economic failure (among other things) to obtain young, terrified girls and boys for use on millionaires’ hideaway islands and aboard their luxury aircraft. Look up The Lolita Express and prepare to be disappointed with more than one sector of the human race you once thought was respectable.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (no, I am not changing the subject), part of a package of three civil rights amendments ratified soon after the War Between the States in 1865, reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Short, unambiguous, and to the point, right? Even clearer than the First and Second Amendments? And yet we still live in a hypocritical, willfully ignorant culture that violates this amendment every single day, ignoring an important portion of the highest law of the land, to practice military conscription (one reason, a famous historian once told me, that the amendment was passed in the first place), impose jury duty, and carry out income taxation. all three of them forms of involuntary servitude. Under these three regimes, formerly sovereign individuals become mere units of property, to be moved around the board and used in any way their masters like. If you have ever heard anyone denounce Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves, point out that their beloved government (they are usually statists) does exactly the same.

Is it any wonder that the wealthiest and most powerful among us, intertwined inextricably, it would appear, with a corrupted government, its evil personnel and vile practices, feel safe to imitate the state’s brutal and immoral use of powerless human beings? Slavery is currently ascendant once again because the government sanctions it, and looks the other way when it is imitated.

When I was in college, what seems like a thousand years ago, I was taught a unique theory of criminology that held that a mixture of cultures thrown together within any given country would inevitably result in rising crime rates—it was a kind of tax we pay for an open society, the professor maintained—because people (who, to social “scientists” are nothing but mindless little balls in the Great Pinball Machine of Life) will see what’s permissible in some of those cultures—often violating a nation’s previous customs and written statutes—and give it a try, themselves. If there were anything to this theory, I suspect we’d be seeing a hideous up-tick in mercy killings and genital mutilation among white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in Nebraska. On the other hand, I have often wondered whether the rate of extortion and theft might decline significantly if the nation’s children didn’t have the Internal Revenue Service to serve as an example.

I remember well the first time I was told about taxes, after six or eight years of “Thou shalt not steal”.

But as usual, I have digressed.

There are a great many decent-minded individuals across the country, and the Internet, mostly Millennials, who for some reason call themselves “centipedes” or simply “’pedes” who are grimly dedicated to exposing and abolishing the sickening kind of commerce that I have described above. They will be mocked and laughed at by the establishment and their lapdog media until they turn up something that cannot be denied or covered up. It will be extremely interesting to see if there’s another outburst of hysterical screaming when the tender snowflakes discover that their beloved leaders and idols don’t just have feet of clay, but of a far more bucolic agricultural product.