When rulers impose increasingly harsh rules, if they do it incrememtally, almost no one notices

There's a well-known principle in human psychology and behavior:  If a person's environment or rules imposed on them change slowly enough, years later everyone forgets how much things have changed. 

This is particularly noticeable when rulers impose gradually harsher conditions on their subjects.

And of course if schools or society doesn't teach kids history, young people automatically assume things are more or less the same as they've always been in terms of increasingly punitive condtions imposed by rulers.  How could they know otherwise?

So with this in mind, take a look at the evolution of the federal income tax, as shown below.  (No idea why this stopped in 2014; probably worse now, even after Trump's tax cuts!)  The top tax rate has gone from 7% in 1913 to almost 40% in 2014--and back in 1913 that whopping 7% rate didn't kick in until an American had an income of over $11 MILLION in today's dollars.  By contrast, in 2014 the nearly-40% tax kicks in at an income of $457,600.

But bad as those numbers are--and they should make every American sick--the "tell" is the last line: In 1913 the federal tax code consisted of 400 pages of tiny print.  Today the tax code fills 74,000 pages--still in that same small print.  People make seven-figure incomes advising the wealthy on how to take advantage of the tens of thousands of deductions corrupt congresswhores have slipped into the tax code to help them and their friends.  Hmmmm... 

How did we let this happen?  Simple: the bad people made the changes SLOWLY enough that barely 1/100th of one percent of Americans even noticed.  And the lying Mainstream Media--which should have been covering this, and blasting the corruptocrats--cheered every move by congress to take more money from working Americans and give it to...them, so they could bribe dumb Americans to vote for those same corruptocrats.

The Founding Fathers would be disgusted at how their magnificent creation has been corrupted, corroded, infected.  Destroyed.  It must surely rank was one of the greatest tragedies in all history.