In mediaeval Europe, serfs got their subsistence by cultivating a plot of land owned by their lord and master. In Russia serfdom survived until 1861, but Europe was more benign.
Queen Elizabeth I ended British serfdom in 1574. The French, however, were so attached to the institution that it was banned only in 1789, two centuries later.
But the longing for servage evidently remained, and it was so strong that serfdom has made an official comeback. Yesterday the French senate finally stopped beating about the buisson and passed a law forcing everyone to work one extra day a year without pay, or rather with the pay going straight into the government’s coffers.
What’s new about this innovation isn’t so much the concept as the honesty of its announcement. Anyone with a calculator at hand can calculate that anyway, if the government extracts 45 per cent of GDP in taxes, people work for the state until 13 June, only using what’s left of the year to provide for their families.
But at least the French government had been coy about this until yesterday. Now subterfuge has gone out of the window: tout le monde must devote one day a year to unvarnished servitude. This raises state control to a new height, although the French shouldn’t feel smug about this.
Our own government isn’t far behind in satisfying its extortionist urges: our GDP is looted to the tune of almost 44 per cent. Yet the perfidious British have so far refrained from announcing a day of serfdom with Gallic forthrightness.
This brings back fond memories of the Soviet Union, where wages and salaries didn’t exist at all. The words stayed in the vocabulary, but they in fact denoted the paltry crumbs tossed to the populace from the laden table of the state.
Everybody toiled for the state as its serfs, or slaves in all but name. The state then gave the masses a few pennies to keep body and soul together — or not, as the case might have been and often was.
In my day the usual starting salary of a university graduate was about 100 roubles a month, barely enough not to starve to death but not nearly enough to buy such luxuries as meat, fruit or clothes. The people responded the way slaves so often do, by going through the motions at work. “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work,” was the popular refrain.
Yet the pretence to pay was abandoned every year at harvest time, when thousands of university-educated Muscovites were sent to collective farms to help out the shorthanded peasants – and to redeem their hoity-toity sins through the honest goodness of unpaid physical labour.
That exercise in serfdom was par for the course in a totalitarian state buttressed by violent coercion. But today’s France, Britain and the rest of the West are different, aren’t they? Yes they are, for the time being. But the tendency towards closing that gap is unmistakable.
When you add up all the local levies, sales tax, parking charges and a whole raft of other hidden taxes, our governments extort upwards of 60 per cent of the economy for themselves. That’s no longer taxation. It’s confiscation.
Such is the state’s way of communicating to us that our money isn’t really ours. We may earn it, but the state has the power to decide how much we’ll be allowed to keep for our families.
This is actually the language used by politicians all over the West, which testifies both to their cynicism and our gullibility. When he was Chancellor, Gordon Brown would make frequent references to ‘letting’ people keep more of their incomes, citing such munificence as proof of his government’s generous nature and good intentions. The poor chap never realised that he was making a proclamation of tyranny as unequivocal as those made by Marx or Lenin. We can only let people keep what in fact belongs to us.
Free people don’t work for the state. They work for themselves and then kindly offer the state a tithe to maintain public services. This is exactly what they ought to be: the state should serve the people, not the other way around.
That’s why John F. Kennedy’s famous entreaty (“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!”) could only have impressed a modern society that was resigned to relinquishing much of its liberty.
Replace ‘country’ with ‘state’, and the exact reversal of this statement would have made more sense to anyone living in a free society. Wouldn’t you rather hear something like “Ask not how you can serve the state; ask how the state can serve you”? Wouldn’t this be closer to the principles on which all Western states were constituted?
We accept it as an inevitable fact of life that modern states don’t pay their way. They all spend more than they receive in tax revenue, covering the deficit by increasing the money supply through borrowing or printing. This produces inflation, which is another tax in disguise. Thus in 2022, when the inflation rate in Holland was 10 per cent, the Dutch were effectively paying that much more in taxes by another name.
Promiscuous public spending is justified by bien pensant nonsense about the state having to tax – in essence to rob – the more fortunate to look after the less fortunate. Such Robin Hood references can only fool those who don’t understand what’s really going on.
For we don’t just pay for state expropriations with money. We also pay with our freedom because, when the state does a lot for the people, it always does a lot to them.
Such is the inner imperative of all modern states, however they describe themselves. The state’s desire to lord it over the people supersedes everything, including its own laws and regulations.
Thus France’s deficit spending is currently twice the three per cent limit mandated by the EU as a condition for belonging to the euro. Yet I haven’t yet heard even a whisper of France being forced out of the common currency.
Whenever a total collapse beckons, Western governments sometimes try to curb their instincts and slow down the growth of public spending. When the Tories made that attempt a few years ago, it was called ‘austerity’ and savaged in the left-wing press.
Yet even conservatives used that misnomer without realising that’s what it was. Austerity properly means spending less, not spending more but at a slightly slower rate than before.
That’s why real austerity is taboo for modern governments. They are committed to growing their own power at the expense of people’s freedom, and confiscatory taxation along with rampant inflation are the control levers they hold in their hands.
The day of serfdom introduced by the French senate is a reminder of this situation and also a taste of things to come. The slope is getting more slippery by the day, and we are all sliding down at an ever-accelerating speed.
P.S. Learn something every day. I’m grateful to the media for adding a new word to my vocabulary: ‘demisexual’. Apparently it describes the quaint practice of establishing an emotional connection before rutting away. Now if that’s not perverse, I don’t know what is.