Socialists always talk about going after fatcats and Big Business, but one of their highest priorities is separating working people from the value of their labor with taxes, regulations, price controls, and socialized benefits. You control only pennies on each dollar you earn.
It's part of the defining feature of socialism, namely "socializing" costs. You don't make your own decisions about what to buy. You have no direct relationship with the provider. Government takes a huge chunk of your earnings and then "gives" you benefits for "free."
You shouldn't just think of this as losing control over the purchasing process. You're also losing control over your EARNINGS. The cumulative effect of socialism is that you only control, and profit from, a tiny fraction of your labor. You work for the State 80% of the day.
This is a natural and inevitable result of "anti-capitalism" campaigns. Labor is capital. For most working people, their labor is the vast majority of the capital they control. If you sign up for anti-capitalist crusades, YOUR capital will be under attack as well.
Control over capital is the only meaningful form of control, which means it's the only meaningful freedom. This is easily understood by watching people lose control of their labor under socialism, fascism, or communism. When you control 0% of your labor, you are a slave.
The sad lesson people seem resistant to learning is that all of your other freedoms atrophy as you lose control over your capital - your labor, your property, your right to profit from them as you see fit. Other rights disappear very quickly once that one is gone.
Once you lose control of your labor, your other rights become indulgences granted by the State and withdrawn as the State sees necessary. You might THINK you can fight back by voting, but you are sadly mistaken. Votes are worth far less than capital to any individual citizen.
A powerful central State that dispenses benefits to millions will never have trouble marshaling the electoral muscle it needs to "vote" in favor of its interests. And if that doesn't work, as we've seen throughout the Trump years, the State will sabotage or ignore votes it loses.
Capital, on the other hand, represents absolute INDIVIDUAL power. If you fully own your labor and property, you must be persuaded to cooperate, instead of commanded to obey You must be paid, and you can refuse any price, for any reason. You are free.
Naturally, most people don't like the idea of working as slaves to the State, so their capital is stolen slowly and deceptively. It's not just a matter of raising taxes slowly but inexorably - that only works up to a point. You have to separate them from control of their labor.
You do this in countless ways: controlling the price of labor, using elaborate regulations to make it harder for people to profit from their labor as they desire, keeping unemployment as high as possible so labor is a buyer's market, distorting the value of money.
Most importantly, you make people afraid. You convince them to surrender control of their labor because if they don't, they'll be helpless sheep in a capitalist wilderness full of wolves. You convince them to let the State control their labor in the name of "socializing" costs.
You're not just paying more taxes to finance more government benefits, and it's not a "good deal" if you think you're getting back more than you put it. It's also not a "deal" you can walk away from when it turns sour, as it inevitably will.
You're losing control of your labor as statists and socialists take power. The hours of your workday are slipping out of your hands. And since people don't work as hard once they lose control of their labor, you'll soon find yourself on the wrong end of a whip. /end
