The West is leading on many important metrics such as wokeness or marginal tax rate. Paying an income tax of less than ten percent would be a sign of the dark ages and indicate that you live in an authoritarian and brutally oppressive regime. In contrast, in the West there is wide buy-in when it comes to the multiculturalization of society, which is why the idea of a tax revolt is completely unknown. Instead, people are happy to pay 50% or more in income taxes. In Europe, this is the case in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Spain, and a few smaller countries as well.

That being the status quo, I still wondered why our politicians have decided to pick such a seemingly arbitrary number. I imagine tax policy to work like this: you start with the amount of money you want to spend on improving the world, which includes noble goals like paying the debts of third-world countries, sustaining the welfare aristocracy, and funding pride week. Then, the issue is how you get the money. As Western governments don’t run their own businesses, at least not directly, they need to fleece the taxpayer. Yet, there are many tax sources such as VAT and other consumption taxes. They could get the same amount of tax revenue by taxing the top income bracket at 40% and simply increase other tax rates.

Having 30 or 40% of your earned income taken away from you would be bad enough. Taking exactly half is evil and if the tax rate is above 50%, it is downright diabolical. I think a big reason why in a country as progressive as Sweden the marginal income tax is currently 52% is that it constitutes a ginormous fuck you to the taxpayer. It’s all about those Marxist politicians signaling to the private-sector employee that they own him. No, they not just get half, they get half and something extra on top! How else would you describe a relationship in which more than half of what you earn you have to give to someone else? It doesn’t end with the income tax either. Should you invest your taxed income and make some extra money, you pay capital gains tax. That may amount to another 25 or 30% in our socialist utopias in Europe. Then there is the fact that your employer pays payroll tax, so the actual tax burden of your income can reach 70% and beyond, which is absolutely mind-boggling.

In a sane society, you’d expect the government to reduce the tax burden if the services they provide deteriorate. A genuine utopia like Singapore even reduces the tax burden or hands out cashbacks if the government took in more taxes than it needed. That’s not how things work in the West, though. According to our societal fiction, we pay a lot of taxes but get healthcare, police protection, and education for our children in return “for free”. Yet, today socialized healthcare is shit, the police are getting defunded and the less said about public edumacation, the better. Yet, how come we pay more and more for ever-worsening services? Again, this is by design. You have some smarmy politicians on a cocaine-induced power trip who love to revel in the feeling that they own you. They’ll squeeze you as much as you can, believing that you’ll just take it. They view you as nothing but cattle whose sole purpose is to finance their socialist utopia. They also think that you’ll never quit or leave.

Some Western countries have experienced a rather shocking brain drain. Germany comes to mind first and foremost. Hundreds of thousands of highly educated Germans have moved to Scandinavia, Switzerland, or the United States as they were unsatisfied by the conditions back home. In the various Scandinavian countries, you have sky-high taxes, but on the plus side, working conditions are really good, so if you want to maximize your work/life balance, it’s arguably a better place to live than Germany. Work doesn’t feel like work and you get 30 days of vacation per year. Plus, as politicians lament, segregation is very high. This means that if you’re willing to pay, you can live in a relatively clean and safe neighborhood. In Germany, this is a lot more expensive. It’s arguably no longer doable if you can’t afford to plunk down 500.000 Euros for an apartment, and that won’t even buy you much in big cities anymore.

The only way this kind of modern-day financial slavery will end is if the Western countries collapse. Well, it’s probably more of a ‘when’ rather than an ‘if’. We are not quite there yet, but we’re getting there as the productive members of society are getting squeezed more and more, which has now led to a cultural acceleration: the parasitical left is getting more and more unhinged, welfare costs explode, and the productive members of society either leave or decide to drop out of the rat race. Meanwhile, we import millions of alleged “doctors and engineers” whose financial contributions to the welfare state are not always easy to determine.

I presume that a large number of MGTOWs are men who are simply fed up with society. They realize that the deck is stacked against them, so they downsize their standard of living and maximize their happiness. This doesn’t necessarily mean that armies of men live in their mother’s basements. Instead, it may mean that those guys negotiate contracts that favor their goals, like working three days a week instead of five or working on month-long assignments as freelancers, followed by extended time off. Incidentally, I’m meeting more and more people in that category. All of this harms society in the long run, but I’d argue it benefits the individual.

Our politicians have torn up the social contract. Instead of aiming for arrangements that can be described as fair because you know you get something in return for your tax contributions, you get basically nothing in return nowadays, or nothing positive. Instead, your labor is abused to finance clown world. Paying a marginal income tax rate of 50% or more is such a wonderful symbol for this. I can’t imagine a more powerful message from the elites to the herd than telling you that you have to give them at least half of what you make, and you’ll have to like it. It’s pure evil.

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