This April 15 is the 94th year that Americans have had to file an income tax. For most Americans, the day is a non-event. The federal and state governments have already collected the taxes dueby withholding from each paycheck over the course of the calendar year. Most Americans never saw the money and have no real idea that they earned it.

Some Americans have their incomes over-withheld as a form of forced savings. They look forward to tax time as it means they will receive a refund check from the government that they can use for a summer vacation, a big screen TV, a new appliance, or a down payment on a new car.

Few Americans realize that over the last 94 years they have been enserfed and have no more rights to their own labor than medieval serfs or 19th century slaves.

The 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified because the income tax was only for the rich. Some states ratified the amendment because no one in the state had an income high enough to be subject to the tax.

According to the US Department of the Treasury's history of the income tax, less than one percent of the US population was subject to the income tax. A progressive structure was applied to this less than one percent of rich Americans, with rates ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent on incomes over $500,000, a great sum of money in those days.

In the first year of the income tax, the world's richest person, John D. Rockefeller, paid $2 million in income tax, almost 3 percent of the total income tax collected.

People were happy. They had finally gotten the rich.

And themselves as well. Exemptions were reduced and tax rates were raised in rapid succession in 1916, 1917, and 1918. Within five years the tax rates ranged from 6 percent to 77 percent, and people whose incomes were initially exempt now paid tax at more than double the initial top rate that had applied to John D. Rockefeller.

In "free" America today, despite the Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush tax rate reductions, ordinary Americans have no more claim to their own labor than a medieval serf. Most are content, however, with handing over 30 percent of their income as long as they can hope to tax the rich at 50 percent, the tax rate on 19th century slaves.

Some 19th century slaves, whose skills were worth more in towns than on plantations, were leased by their owners to businesses in towns. The businesses would remit half of the slave's wages to the owner. Out of the remainder, slaves could save enough to purchase their freedom.

Today, we cannot purchase our freedom from the IRS. The only free Americans today are those who can work off the books or who can live on public welfare.

People who reject my analogy can test the analogy by refusing the government's claim on their labor. They will find that the IRS can be just as ruthless as the worst feudal lord or slave owner.

For many Americans freedom is not as important as "fairness," by which is meant a more equal distribution of income. However, a number of studies indicate that a progressive income tax doesn't achieve the kind of leveling that some desire. Moreover, rich and poor are not static groups. Studies have discovered that there is a great deal of movement between the income quintiles. Some people rise, some people fall, and some rise again. The same people do not inhabit the same quintile year after year.

Government does not seem to be the answer. Indeed, some of the largest incomes result from collusion with government, such as the Clinton/Bush financial deregulation that produced the world's first annual incomes of $1 billion.

The desire to tax the rich has caused a concentration of less accountable power in the United States as national and global corporations took over from local businesses. The estate tax, created in 1916, has forced family businesses, media, and farms into large corporate conglomerates. The corporate media, animal, chicken, and egg farming, with its inhumane conditions, antibiotics, and waste concentrations that pollute the environment, and large scale chemical fertilizer farming that pollutes rivers and oceans are, in part, unintended consequences of taxation aimed at the rich.

Today the income tax serves our interest less than ever before. The collapse of socialism and the rise of the high speed Internet has opened vast under-utilized foreign work forces to first world corporations. The consequent loss of jobs and careers by Americans cannot be rectified through the corporate income tax.

Ralph Gomory, coauthor with William Baumolof the most important work in trade theoryever published, Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests. (MIT Press, 2000), has suggested that jobs would flow back to America instead of continuing to leave if the corporate income tax were replaced by taxing corporations on the basis of whether the value added to their products occurs at home or abroad.

The ecological economist Herman Daly has suggested that the tax base be moved off of income and on to the use of increasingly scarce natural capital. Non-renewable resources are being depleted, and the over-use of nature's waste absorption services is resulting in pollution and environmental destruction.

Taxing the use of natural capital would conserve it and lead to its more rational use.

These promising tax ideas directly address the most pressing economic and environmental problems of our time, but they cannot be considered because people are still absorbed in class warfare.

A mainstay of class war is the propaganda that "the rich don't pay taxes." This myth lives on despite the annual release of IRS data that proves the contrary. In 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, Americans whose tax returns placed them in the top 1 percent earned 22.1 percent of adjusted gross income and paid 39.9 percent of all federal individual income taxes.

The top 5 percent, defined as rich by President Obama, paid 60.1 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 10 percent paid 71 percent.

Those Americans whose earnings placed them in the bottom half of the income distribution paid less than 3 percent of the individual income tax collected.

The immunity of many Americans to facts is impressive. Just as many Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and hid them in Syria, Russia, or Iran, many Americans will continue to believe that "the rich don't pay taxes."

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Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions-The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence.