Dependency Economy and Human Freedom: When Human Need Becomes an Instrument of Power

Freedom and Dependency

A free human being is not merely someone whose hands and feet are not chained. Freedom begins to have meaning when a person is able to make decisions about life, wealth, time, body, and future, and when the continuation of an ordinary life does not require constant submission before a system that profits from that person’s weakness or need.

Dependency can take many different forms. A person may become economically dependent on a lender, physically dependent on a substance such as tobacco, alcohol, or narcotics, materially dependent on goods without which daily life has become difficult, medically and bodily dependent on food that the body and habit constantly demand, and in the modern world even psychologically and neurologically dependent on a device that has taken possession of attention and time.

The subject of this essay is not opposition to the natural human need for others. Social life is impossible without cooperation and mutual dependence. The problem begins when the dependency of one human being produces benefit for another party, in such a way that the person’s liberation becomes a loss for the system that gains money, social power, or political influence from that dependency.

To understand how “dependency” can become an instrument of power, it is useful to begin with one of its simplest and oldest forms.

War, Taxation, and Power’s Constant Need for Money

Throughout history, states, especially when they entered wars and military campaigns, faced enormous costs. Soldiers had to be paid, armies had to be fed, weapons had to be produced, roads and fortifications had to be maintained, and with technological development the costs of ships, artillery, military factories, railways, airplanes, fuel, and more complex equipment were added as well. Naturally, the larger and longer the war became, the more the government’s need for money increased. One of the most common ways to finance these costs was to take more resources from society: taxes on land, crops, and trade; taxes on property, income, imports; and various duties. For this reason, across a large part of history, the expansion of war and military power was accompanied by the expansion of the tax apparatus and the increasing ability of government to extract wealth from people.

This method was simple for government, but it had a serious weakness: people could clearly see how much of their property the government was taking. The heavier taxation became, especially when the king or royal family was also accused of extravagance, corruption, military failure, or mismanagement, the more public resentment grew. Almost every king had enemies in the court, in the royal family, and among the nobles, and those enemies could turn the oppression and financial pressure of the government into a tool for mobilizing people. A rival could present himself as a savior, promise justice and lighter burdens, and use the same public dissatisfaction to weaken or overthrow the government.

A contemporary example of this same pattern can be seen in Donald Trump’s campaign against the Democrats. In the 2024 election, he made the high cost of food, housing, energy, and the general cost of living one of the most important weaknesses of Democratic rule, and repeatedly promised that if he returned to power, people’s cost of living would come down. This message was deeply attractive to millions of voters who had grown tired of several years of sharp price increases, and the question of livelihood became one of the important factors in the election contest. But after Trump returned to the White House, the broad “cheapening” that had been promised in campaign language did not appear. Official statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that by July 2026 the general price level was still rising: the Consumer Price Index was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, food prices were 3 percent higher, and some costs such as energy and gasoline had risen much more sharply.

But changing the ruler did not necessarily solve the people’s problem. The new government still needed money to compensate for the damage of the previous war, pay debts, reward its allies, stabilize power, form a new army, or enter the next war. In addition, the new court also had its own expenses. Therefore, whether a rebellion succeeded or failed, the financial need of the governing apparatus usually continued to increase. People might see another king, but the system that extracted resources from society did not disappear.

It cannot be claimed with certainty that no tax in all of history was ever reduced. For example, Britain’s income tax was temporarily repealed in 1816 after the Napoleonic wars under wide public pressure, and later returned. But the larger historical trend is clear: as states, armies, and government functions grew larger, the capacity to collect taxes also increased, and broader groups of people entered the tax network. Wars repeatedly created major jumps in this process. In Britain, the wars of the eighteenth century and then the two world wars were among the most important stages in the expansion of taxation and public debt.

Parliament, Monarchy, and the Legalization of Resource Extraction

With the growth of early parliaments, the conditions of monarchy changed. These early parliaments did not mean democracy in the modern sense; political power and membership in parliament were still largely in the hands of landowning classes, nobles, and privileged groups. But the king could no longer impose every desired cost on society as easily as before, because the interests of those powerful groups were also affected by taxation and confiscation.

As aristocratic parliaments developed, the interests of part of the aristocracy gradually became tied to the interests of the crown. The king was no longer the only center of power, and for taxation, war, and many major decisions he had to obtain the consent or cooperation of groups of landowners, nobles, and wealthy people. In return, those same classes benefited from political stability, the protection of property, commercial privileges, government offices, and the security of the existing order. In this way, the constant rivalry between crown and nobility was partly transformed into participation in power. This participation could reduce repeated coups, civil wars, and political chaos, because powerful groups now had a share in decision-making and did not have to destroy the whole structure of government in order to replace each king. But this political compromise did not necessarily mean a lighter burden for ordinary people. What changed was mostly the method of deciding about taxes, not the government’s need for revenue. A tax that might once have been imposed by the direct will of the king could now become legal through the consent of a parliament that itself mainly represented privileged classes. War, state administration, the court, and the economic interests of the aristocracy still had costs, and as the state expanded, the need for revenue also increased. Therefore, the division of power between crown and aristocrats was able to restrain part of political instability, but it did not remove the structure of extracting resources from ordinary people; in many cases it only made that structure more organized, more legal, and more durable.

Paper Money, Fiat Money, and the Inflation Tax

A more important transformation happened when paper money gradually replaced heavy gold and silver coins. In the beginning, many banknotes were in fact representatives of a certain amount of precious metal; that is, the holder of the note could in principle convert it into a specified amount of gold or silver. This made trade, the transfer of wealth, and large payments much easier, while also giving states and banks the ability to create a wider financial system. But in later periods, especially with the spread of central banking and the need of states for more resources for wars, crises, and public spending, the direct connection between paper money and gold or silver gradually weakened and in many countries eventually disappeared.

From here the concept of “fiat money” becomes important. Fiat money is money whose nominal value is no longer convertible into a specified amount of gold, silver, or another commodity. A one-hundred-dollar note today does not mean that the central bank is obligated to deliver a fixed amount of gold in exchange for it. Its value comes mostly from the fact that the state recognizes it as official money, accepts taxes in it, the banking and commercial system treats it as a means of payment, and people expect others to accept it in exchange. In this way, money moved from being an object that either had commodity value in itself or directly represented a definite commodity, into a unit whose value depends above all on trust, law, and the structure of economic power.

This transformation also changed the fiscal structure of government in a fundamental way. A state that worked with gold coins or fully gold-convertible money was ultimately faced with the limitation of physical reserves. But in a fiat money system, the amount of money is no longer directly tied to the amount of gold in the treasury. The state and the monetary apparatus can increase the quantity of money and purchasing power in the economy through money issuance, expansion of the monetary base, central bank operations, and the development of bank credit. This ability can be useful in conditions of crisis or shortage of liquidity, but at the same time it places very great power in the hands of the governing and financial apparatus. If the expansion of money and credit runs far ahead of real growth in production and goods, the result can be the decline of the value of money and the rise of prices.

From here, taking resources from people also takes a more complex form. Government no longer collects money only through visible taxes on land, property, or income. Tax can be embedded in the price of goods, the state can borrow and transfer today’s cost into the future, and if monetary policy produces inflation, part of the purchasing power of money that people had already earned and saved through their labor also declines. Therefore, the move from coins and convertible money to a fiat money system was not merely a change in the form of banknotes; it deeply changed the relation between money, debt, taxation, and the power of government.

The state no longer had to collect all of its spending directly from people as tax in the same amount. It could finance part of its deficit by creating new money and expanding the monetary base. If the amount of money increased faster than the real production of goods and services, the result could be inflation. In such a case, the government had apparently taken nothing from people’s bank accounts, but the purchasing power of the money that they had earned and saved through years of labor had declined. A person who had one hundred thousand units of money in the bank still saw the same number, one hundred thousand, in the account; but if prices had risen, that money could no longer buy the same amount of goods, housing, food, or services as before. In this sense, part of the real value of people’s savings was taken from them without issuing a tax bill, which is why economists use the term “inflation tax.” The state could spend today, while people later paid part of the real cost through the decline of their money’s purchasing power. In this form, the tax was not taken from the number in the bank account, but from the real value of that same number: an invisible withdrawal from the fruit of people’s work and savings, felt most strongly by those who held more of their assets in cash and fixed income.

Dependency-Producing Goods and Continuous Revenue

From here a more important stage began. A good that a person buys only once creates profit and tax once; but a good that the consumer wants again every day or every week creates a continuous flow of revenue. If that good, in addition to repeated consumption, can also create bodily and psychological dependency, the matter becomes still more serious.

The more important point is that bodily and psychological dependency turns “wanting” a product into something beyond an ordinary choice. At first, a person may use a substance such as tobacco, alcohol, or a narcotic for pleasure, calm, or a temporary experience; but with repeated use, the brain and body can adapt themselves to the presence of that substance. In bodily dependency, tolerance develops, and sometimes a larger amount is needed to reach the same previous effect. When use stops, withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, restlessness, sleep disturbance, pain, irritability, or feeling unwell may appear. Alongside this, psychological dependency forms: environment, stress, friends, places, and even a specific hour of the day can become “cues” that reactivate a strong desire to use. In more severe stages, the person no longer uses the substance only to reach the first pleasure; sometimes the person uses it in order to escape the discomfort caused by the absence of the same substance. Neuroscience regards this movement from initial reward to habit, withdrawal symptoms, and compulsive use as one of the essential components of the addiction cycle.

When such dependency is created in a large population, a market very different from the market for ordinary goods emerges. Someone who does not need a nonessential product can easily stop buying it when the price rises. But a dependent person may reduce other expenses even when the product becomes expensive in order to continue consumption. For this reason, if the production or distribution of such a substance is monopolized by a government, company, or limited group, the dependency of consumers gives great economic power to the owner of supply. He can raise the price, and the government can place heavier taxes on it, while a significant portion of consumers still continue to buy. This power, of course, is not unlimited. A large price increase can truly reduce consumption, push some people to quit, or drive them toward cheaper products and even illegal markets. But demand for dependency-producing substances usually does not collapse with price increases to the same degree as many optional goods. In the case of cigarettes, broad research has shown that price increases reduce consumption, but the decrease in consumption is usually smaller than the percentage increase in price. This feature is one of the reasons tobacco has been both a major tax source for states and a case where higher taxes can at the same time raise government revenue.

Opium was a much more severe example of this logic. The British government in India gained enormous revenue from the production and sale of opium and directed it largely into the Chinese market. In official debates of the British Parliament, the net opium revenue of the Government of India in 1867-1868 was recorded at nearly seven million pounds. Here we are no longer dealing with an ordinary commodity; a substance that could create severe bodily dependency was at the same time one of the sources of government revenue.

Alcohol and tobacco remain important taxable goods in many countries today. The point is not that every government first sat down and planned to make people addicted. Even without proving such an intention, the conflict of interest is clear: if the treasury, company, or monopolist receives money from every act of consumption, then reducing consumption may be desirable for human health, but it is not necessarily desirable from the viewpoint of the apparatus that profits from that same consumption.

Tobacco is a very clear example. Different governments not only taxed it, but in some lands turned its trade directly into a state monopoly. In Mexico under Spanish rule, the royal tobacco monopoly was created in 1765, and at its height it formed nearly one fifth of all government revenue. In other words, the repeated consumption of people had become directly one of the most important sources of the treasury.

The Qur’anic Criterion: Wealth, Life, and Healthy Consent

In one of its most foundational economic principles, the Qur’an says:

The placement of “do not consume one another’s wealth through falsehood” beside “do not kill yourselves” deserves reflection. The verse is not speaking only about the movement of money. It places human wealth and human life within a single ethical frame. “Do not kill yourselves” should not, without reason, be restricted only to one direct form of killing. From its general direction, one can also understand a warning that the human being and society should not enter structures that gradually wear down the body, psyche, and life, and bring them near destruction.

Severe bodily, psychological, or economic dependency can make a human being so vulnerable that distorted powers gain control over basic needs and ultimately begin to decide over livelihood, freedom, and even the fate of life and death. From this angle, “do not kill yourselves” can also be a warning against structures that step by step strip human beings of agency.

Consent in this verse also does not mean merely that someone has outwardly paid money with his own hand. If bodily dependency, economic pressure, or psychological vulnerability has severely limited a person’s power of choice, then one must ask how far that transaction still remains the same “trade by mutual consent” of which the Qur’an speaks. In such a case, the issue is no longer simply the sale of a product. The issue is whether one party’s profit is being built from the exhaustion of the other party’s wealth, agency, or health.

The same logic can be seen in the Qur’an’s treatment of khamr and maysir. The Qur’an does not merely say that these two should not be consumed or practiced; it explains how they can affect human life:

From the total logic of this language, one may conclude that if economic, bodily, or psychological dependency grows so far that another apparatus can profit from a person’s inability to separate from it, that relationship must be questioned by the criteria of the Qur’an.

Riba, Zakat, and the Opposite Direction of Wealth

One of the clearest Qur’anic examples of economic dependency is riba.

This verse is very deep in its economic structure. In riba, a person’s wealth seeks to grow inside the wealth of other people. In zakat, the movement is in the opposite direction: wealth leaves the one who has capacity and moves toward the needs of society.

Surat Al-Baqarah makes the same contrast clear again:

And immediately after that it says:

Then a more explicit command comes:

Debt, Banking, and the Modern State

Then, exactly where one might expect the creditor to think about recovering his wealth, the Qur’an brings the condition of the weaker human being into the equation:

This path is highly meaningful. The Qur’an does not say that because the debtor has become weak, pressure should be increased so the money returns more quickly. On the contrary, it asks the creditor to grant time, and even presents remission as better. In other words, the debtor’s weakness must not itself become an opportunity for greater profit.

From this same angle, one can understand why zakat and sadaqat stand against riba. Riba can feed on human need; zakat must reduce human need. One relationship may produce more profit through the continuation of debt, while the other relationship draws nearer to its purpose when the needy person is no longer needy.

In the contemporary economy, this issue is no longer merely the relationship between one lender and one debtor. Money, banking, credit, and debt have become a wide structure. When commercial banks lend, they can at the same time create new bank deposits; in other words, a large portion of new bank money enters the economy through the process of creating debt. This is not a fringe theory; it has also been explained in research by the International Monetary Fund on fiat monetary systems.

The conventional banking system is also founded, in a large part of its credit activity, on interest. A person borrows for a house, education, a car, business, or sometimes even basic needs, and from that moment commits part of future income. The larger the volume of debt in a society becomes, the larger the share of people’s future income that has already been allocated to payments and interest before it even reaches them.

Alongside this system stands fiat money: money that, unlike a gold or silver coin, does not have independent commodity value and does not promise conversion into a fixed amount of gold or another specified commodity. This money operates within a framework of law, state, central bank, banking system, economic production, and public confidence. That same structure gives the state and the financial apparatus a flexibility that does not exist in a system fully limited by physical gold reserves.

This flexibility can have useful functions for the economy, but at the same time it creates a large possibility for transferring costs. The state today does not have to collect direct taxes from people that same day for all of its expenses. It can borrow, issue government bonds, and transfer part of the cost to later years and later generations. States borrow precisely so that they can spend more than the amount of tax they are collecting at that time.

This difference becomes very important in wartime. In the past, a massive military campaign very quickly became visible tax increases. The modern state still taxes, but it can also finance a large part of war cost through debt, and the monetary apparatus can serve the purpose of making that financing cheaper. During the Second World War, for example, the U.S. Federal Reserve kept the interest rates on government securities low so that the government could finance war debt more cheaply, and to maintain those rates it purchased a large volume of government securities; the result of this policy was also an increase in the money supply.

Therefore, for a contemporary government to enter a large political expense, it does not necessarily have to show the entire price to people on the same day in the form of visible taxation. Part of the price can be transferred into public debt, future taxation, or the decline of the real value of money. This distance between the time of decision and the time of payment is one of the important features of the financial power of the modern state.

If the government deficit is financed through money creation and this process leads to inflation, part of the purchasing power of the money people hold declines. Economists use the term “inflation tax” for this very phenomenon. The International Monetary Fund has also explained that financing expenditures through money creation and the rise of the price level can act like a tax on holders of money, because the real value of their balances falls.

Here, no one needs to enter a family’s bank account directly and take part of its savings. If the purchasing power of those savings declines, part of the family’s past labor has in effect lost its value.

Of course, this effect is not the same for everyone. Someone who holds most of his assets in cash is not in the same position as someone who owns land, stocks, or other assets. But this difference itself raises an important question: if one group can protect its wealth against inflation more effectively while another group mainly has wages and cash savings, then the pressure of the decline in the value of money is not distributed equally across society. Aristocrats and elites know this. They move their wealth into land and physical property; ordinary people carry the burden of inflation.

Food, Health, and Hidden Dependency

Dependency is not created only by narcotics and debt. One of the important arenas of the contemporary age is food, because a person cannot decide not to consume food at all. Everyone must eat; therefore, the food industry has a market whose basic need never disappears.

In this market, ultra-processed products have a major economic advantage: they are often ready, fast, storable, palatable, and designed for repeated consumption. The combination of refined carbohydrates, sugar, fat, and other features of these products can strongly stimulate the brain’s reward system. Research continues over whether all of this phenomenon should officially be called “food addiction,” but there is significant evidence that some ultra-processed foods can produce intense cravings and degrees of compulsive eating, and can engage reward circuits similar to some addictive substances.

On the other hand, food choice is not merely a matter of will. Money, time, place of residence, and access also determine what a person eats. The privileged class of society usually has more choices: it can buy fresher ingredients, have more time to prepare food, reach better stores, and bear the higher cost of quality. A low-income family may face lack of money and lack of time at the same time, and fast, ready, cheap food may be not a “fully free choice,” but the most practical option available.

This pattern is not the same in every country, and the relation between income and consumption of ultra-processed food differs depending on the society. But a review of national studies in 32 countries showed that consumption of these foods is connected with income, food insecurity, education, and social status, and that its distribution among social groups is not equal. In the United States and Britain, for example, in many datasets higher consumption has been associated with lower income or lower social position.

Therefore, the gap between classes is not merely that one goes to an expensive restaurant and the other to a cheap one. The deeper issue may be that one group has more ability to choose fresh, healthy, high-quality food, while another group becomes dependent on a food environment whose fastest and cheapest options are not necessarily the best options for long-term health.

If the result of this pattern is obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses, another dependency may also be created: long-term dependency on medicine, healthcare, and treatment costs. If one economic apparatus makes money from selling more unhealthy food, and another part of the same economy earns revenue from treating chronic illness, prevention may be the best social outcome, but it does not always produce the greatest commercial profit.

The same question returns: does the structure benefit more from the human being becoming healthy, or from continuous consumption?

Dependency in the Digital Age: When Even a Product Is No Longer Needed

In the digital age, this logic has reached a subtler stage. To generate revenue, it is not always necessary for a person to buy cigarettes, take a loan, or even pay money. Sometimes it is enough for him to give his time.

A large part of social networks and entertainment platforms is built on the attention economy. The longer the user remains inside the app, the more opportunity there is to show advertisements, collect data, understand the user’s interests, and predict the user’s next behavior. For this reason, human attention itself gains economic value.

This issue is more sensitive with children and teenagers, because their brains are still developing. During this period, systems related to reward, excitement, novelty, and social approval are highly active, while the parts related to self-control and impulse inhibition have not yet fully developed. For this reason, stimuli such as likes, messages, new videos, and the approval of others can activate the brain’s reward system very quickly and, through repetition, habituate the child or teenager to constantly return to the same stimuli.

When a child plays football with peers, in order to reach the feeling of success the child has to run, learn skill, fail, be patient, cooperate with others, and try again. When the child builds something, paints, or learns a skill, there is a distance between wanting the reward and reaching it.

But on a phone or tablet, that distance can be only a few seconds. One movement of a finger brings a new video, the next movement a new song, then an interesting image, then a message, a like, or content that the algorithm has selected based on that same child’s previous behavior. Gradually, the brain learns not only from the content itself, but also from the speed and pattern of receiving reward.

The features of these applications are not accidental either. Infinite scroll removes the natural point of ending. Autoplay causes the next content to begin without a new decision by the user. Notifications bring the user back after leaving the app. Likes and comments create social reward, and recommendation systems learn what kind of content is more likely to keep the person present. The American Psychological Association has specifically mentioned likes, recommended content, infinite scroll, and notifications as features that should be appropriate to adolescents’ developmental capacities; and it has explained that infinite scroll and autoplay can make disengaging from the app more difficult.

The Real Issue Is Not the Tool, but the Creation of Dependency

The aim of the company is not necessarily to “make the child sick.” The economic aim is simpler: keep the user longer. But that same aim creates a conflict of interest. For the child’s health, it may be better after some time to put the screen aside, go outside, exercise, speak with family, or sleep. But for a platform on which every additional minute of presence produces economic value, continued presence is more desirable.

Here, the human being may not pay money, but gives something else that is even more limited than money: life-time.

Money lost today may perhaps be gained again tomorrow. One hour of life never returns.

Further Reading

The purpose of making this discussion long was not to tire you; the purpose was to show how dependency can quietly and gradually limit human agency. Do not build dependencies for yourself and for the generations after you. Be alert in the use of technology, the choice of food, the care of health, the consumption of substances, the taking of debt and unnecessary loans, and other decisions of life. Every dependency that we normalize for ourselves today may tomorrow become a means through which others gain control over our wealth, time, health, and agency. If we do not preserve the degree of agency and freedom that we still hold today, our children and future generations may not even possess this much. Let us not keep freedom only for ourselves; let us hand it to the next generation healthier and greater.

Wa min Allah al-tawfiq. And from The God comes success and enabling.

For further reading on the place of zakat, its social role, and the difference between it and what later became religious taxation, read this essay:

Zakat and Its Historical Distortion: From Qur’anic Tazkiyah to Religious Taxation, Takfir, and Political Authority

For a wider study of riba, debt, banking, money, and the structure of the contemporary economy, you can also read:

The Book of Riba: Beyond Interest