The Servant and the Citizen
Companies have become tax collectors disguised as merchants. They gather VAT from their clients, income tax and social contributions from their employees, and hand everything over to the State, which merely extends its hand. It produces nothing, creates nothing, serves nothing, it only demands. Seated upon the throne of legality, it forces companies to do its dirty work and still appear, in the eyes of the people, as the ones to blame for the plunder.
If every man had to hand over, month after month, half of what he earns, he would understand what it means to be robbed. For what the State gives back, in roads, papers, and promises, does not compensate for the amputation of freedom it silently exacts.
Now even the act of buying has become servitude. Companies want you to be your own employee: you scan the barcode, weigh, label, pay, and carry. No discount, no thank you, only the gaze of the security guard, the humiliation of being inspected for doing someone else’s work. The machine replaces the human, and the consumer becomes an anonymous servant of the system that exploits him.
I, however, choose another way.
I only buy where I am served, for I pay for the service, the service of being looked in the eye and recognized as a person. I pay in cash, without a taxpayer number, not because I have something to hide, but because I have nothing to tell the State about what I ate or did not eat.
I do not play lotteries, not even free ones. Personal information is sacred, it belongs to each of us and should not be shared with anyone, least of all with the State.
To be free today is a silent act of disobedience. It is to refuse the comfort of automatism and reclaim the human gesture. It is to remember that the simple right to pay in cash and to be served by another human being is already a cry of resistance.