I agree with you, we not approaching socialism, we are a democratic communist country where we have the right to vote for the leader that will continue to remove every last vestige of rights or protection from the governing use of violence to achieve their desired end.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property”. The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20m the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn

The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.

The records of the Slave Compensation Commission are an unintended byproduct of the scheme. They represent a near complete census of British slavery as it was on 1 August, 1834, the day the system ended. For that one day we have a full list of Britain’s slave owners. All of them. The T71s tell us how many slaves each of them owned, where those slaves lived and toiled, and how much compensation the owners received for them. Although the existence of the T71s was never a secret, it was not until 2010 that a team from University College London began to systematically analyse them. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, which is still continuing, is led by Professor Catherine Hall and Dr Nick Draper, and the picture of slave ownership that has emerged from their work is not what anyone was expecting.

The large slave owners, the men of the “West India interest”, who owned huge estates from which they drew vast fortunes, appear in the files of the commission. The man who received the most money from the state was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. He was paid £106,769 in compensation for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations, the modern equivalent of about £80m. Given such an investment, it is perhaps not surprising that William Gladstone’s maiden speech in parliament was in defence of slavery.
The records show that for the 218 men and women he regarded as his property, Charles Blair, the great-grandfather of George Orwell, was paid the more modest sum of £4,442 – the modern equivalent of about £3m. There are other famous names hidden within the records. Ancestors of the novelist Graham Greene, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott all received compensation for slaves. As did a distant ancestor of David Cameron. But what is interesting Is women numbered 40% of "owners".

The British Empire ended slavery before we did. In fact, slavery was a universal condition, until the early 19th century, by which time most of the civilized world ended it.

If you read the Constitution, you will see that the importation of slaves was stopped before 1809. In any event the British ended slavery de jure in 1772. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboliti...

Freedom of religion was added to the Constitution via the Bill of Rights. It is not in the original Constitution. Furthermore, if you read the Bill of Rights, you will see that it applies only to the Federal government: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" The states had that power. Massachusetts and Virginia collected taxes for their state churches. In other states the Church Tax was levied on all, but you could say which church got your tax money.
Again, see here: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion...

"the ballot box or revolution"
I'm generally an optimist, but I don't see how the ballot box solves this particular problem. The incentive to support good causes with money from the Treasury is still there, even if we get one set of politicians who resists the pressure to spend.

I am not for revolution in general, and certainly not without a clear solution to this problem ready to implement, so I hope for a third way that I haven't thought of yet.

I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but during the recession of 08-09 and its aftermath, we went borrowing more than a trillion a year. That settled down to 500 billion a year range. Now we have President Trump and a Congress supposedly completely opposed to President Obama. I predict the borrowing will continue and that gov't spending will continue to increase every year. The expansion of executive branch power will continue. The gov't intrusion into citizens' lives will continue. I predict a) supporters of Senator Sanders will merge will supporters of President Trump OR a Sanders-like figure will be elected president soon. I'm not happy about that, but it won't affect the trend of gov't metastasis. The gov't will slowly increase in size until a fiscal mini-crisis makes it difficult to borrow more.

Obviously, I hope I'm wrong.