Chains, and the dropping of pretense

According to the Constitution's 13th Amendment:

Section 1. 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.

These words are rightfully celebrated for having abolished chattel slavery in the United States. But as I've noted before, nominal freedom for African Americans came at the expense of creating a Federal system powerful enough to reduce all--white, black or zebra-stripped--to government servitude. Through taxation and regulation, Uncle Sam has applied an ever-heavier hand in guiding our lives in the directions HE finds appropriate.

And now, some openly want to give him the power to demand a portion of our very lives for whatever service he decides. The idea citizens exist to serve the State, rather than the other way around, inverts the philosophical underpinnings of the American Revolution, substituting a alien totalitarianism that has been trying to take root here for a century or more:

Bernard Baruch, chairman of (President Woodrow) Wilson's War Industries Board (and the son of a German who fled that country to avoid conscription) unflinchingly espoused the concept of state ownership of its subjects in an August 7, 1918 newspaper editorial:

"Every man's life is at the call of the nation and so must be every man's property. We are living today in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is his only as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and possessions at the call of the state."

Writing of Germany's National Socialist regime, Baruch proudly noted: "German military experts have said, ‘Except for a few minor changes, the German economic mobilization system was conscientiously built in imitation of the similar American system.'"

War has ever been the health of the State--our participation in two World Wars followed by a shadowy Cold War cemented the growing power of Leviathan in the U.S. Now we have a nebulous "war on terror," by definition an open-ended struggle through which the State's minions can demand ever-increasing servitude.

I draw the line at my children when it comes to the State's demands. Should they choose to serve in some capacity, in return for scholarships or other compensation, I have little problem with it. As for the clamor of the statists that I owe myself or my children as a sacrifice to their god and his mad global schemes, I can only say I refuse to pay a blood tax. Let them try to claim one at their own peril.