Year: 2012

Releasing Income Taxes

foldvary Economics, Politics

Disgusting!  is my reaction to calls to candidates to release their income tax returns.

First of all, income tax records are supposed to be able to be kept private.

I can understand wanting to know candidates’ special-interest connections, but these usually do not show up in tax records.

Also, criticism of the low tax rates paid by some candidates is unwarranted. It is not a crime to seek to minimize one’s taxes. Moreover, given an income tax, there are good reasons why dividends and capital gains have lower tax rates. Dividends are already taxed by the corporate income tax. Long-term capital gains have already been taxed by inflation.

Ron Paul said regarding his taxes that his income was low compared to other candidates. What he should have said is, “my taxes are none of your business!” Moreover, the income tax should be abolished. Calls to reveal income tax forms imply approval of income taxation.

Disgusting!

Reading John Locke

Brandon Christensen Books, History

My MLK Day will be spent finishing up an assigned reading project for a political theory course: John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.  Most of the arguments seem pretty self-evident to me, a testament to the soundness of his writings.

But I know that there is much more to Locke than meets the undergraduate’s eye.  Does anybody out there have any thoughts (or tips on what to keep an eye out for) about John Locke’s musings on private property?  Are there any closet monarchists out there who believe that Locke was wrong about the beginnings of political society?

Happy MLK Day folks!

Laundry Day!

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , ,

Links from around the web by the consortium.

Brian Gothberg wants to save the whales.

In an oldie but goodie, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel writes about Federal Reserve accounting and insolvency.

Jacques Delacroix feels remorse for singing the praises of Newt Gingrich.

And Fred Foldvary gives his take on the Israel-Palestine mess.

Happy Friday, and enjoy your weekends!

A Libertarian sales-tax party?

foldvary Economics, Politics , , , ,

Is the Libertarian Party becoming a sales tax party?  The past several LP candidates for president have favored excise taxes.  I don’t recall any of them declaring, “Taxation is Theft!”  Now we have former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson as a leading candidate for the LP nomination for president, having abandoned the quest for the Republican Party nomination.  His tax plan as a Republican was a national sales tax, and that remains his tax plan as a Libertarian.

The main organization pushing for a national sales tax calls it a “Fair Tax.”  That is excellent propaganda, but a sales tax is no more fair or just than a tax on wages.  A sales tax violates free trade, makes products more expensive, and indirectly taxes wages and other incomes.  The advocates claim that a shift from income to sales taxes would not raise prices, since the income tax already raises prices, but they are wrong, because much of the burden of a tax on wages is on labor.  A sales tax has about the same excess burden or deadweight loss as an income tax.  Income taxes punish savings, but sales taxes punish borrowing, and there is no logical reason to favor savings over borrowing.  Savings and borrowing should be voluntary individual choices not skewed by taxes or subsidies.

The “Fair Tax” plan exempts business purchases, putting the burden on households.  That invites massive tax evasion, as folks would claim to be buying stuff for a business.  The response of government would be a sales tax gestapo.  If you did not have a receipt for your purchase and could not prove it was for business, you could go to prison.

If the Libertarian Party becomes a sales tax party, it will be unpopular and get little support.  Historically, sales tax advocacy has been a political loser.  This may well be why Gary Johnson got so little support as a Republican candidate for president.  If the LP nominates a sales taxer, I for one will promote the Free Earth Party (http://free-earth.foldvary.net/) as a truly libertarian alternative.

What exactly IS socialism anyway?

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , ,

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  – From the tatters of an ancient Greek poem

I recently had an ugly exchange on Facebook with some acquaintances that started out being political in nature before descending into the gutter.

Two young graduate students pursuing studies that have nothing to do with political economy and who, unsurprisingly, consider themselves to be socialists simply turned what could have been a great teaching moment for a large number of people into an affair that was more deserving of spot on the Jerry Springer Show than in public, polite discourse.

Now, it must be noted that I am to blame for how the debate turned out, as I took the bait set for me that would lead the discussion from the intellectual arena and into the garbage.  You win some, you lose some, and I am quite certain that my vituperative attacks on socialism will cause them to think twice about posting such dim-witted, reactionary posts to their Facebook walls in the future.

I initiated the venomous exchange after my acquaintance posted this link written by a British aristocrat calling on socialists everywhere to simply begin ignoring capitalism as a way to further its (quite hideous and inhumane) demise and become replaced by a benevolent and voluntary form of socialism.

Here is what I said: Continue reading →

Wow

Brandon Christensen Current Events , ,

Check out this piece by John Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations, on Iran. An excerpt:

“It has long been clear that, absent regime change in Tehran, peaceful means will never persuade or prevent Iran from reaching its nuclear objective, to which it is perilously close.”

Is this guy actually advocating a war with the Iranian state? Hasn’t the neoconservative movement, an offshoot of Trotskyism, learned its lesson from the failure in Iraq?

Also, why would we expect Iran to do anything less than pursue nuclear weapons? Quite a few of its neighbors have “the bomb”, and nuclear deterrent obviously works (just ask the Libyans and the North Koreans). Isn’t this obvious?

We are at peace with China, Russia, and a whole host of other states with nuclear weapons. It is absurd to argue that we can’t have peace with a nuclear Iran as well.

Austrian Economics and the Left

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, History , , , ,

Matt Yglesias has a post up over at Slate.com on Ron Paul and Austrian Economics.  I won’t get into the details of what he got right and wrong about his largely honest attempt to explain the Austrian School to Leftists (the word “crank” was only used once!  A new high for the Left).  Instead, what I’d like to do is hone in on this whopper:

Many of the original Austrians found their business cycle ideas discredited by the Great Depression, in which the bust was clearly not self-correcting […]

Has Yglesias conveniently forgotten about Hoover’s attempts to prop up wages and his signing of the protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariff?

Why don’t Hoover’s policies get more attention by economists and journalists trying to understand and explain the Great Depression, or am I missing something?

Leadership, International Trade, Hormuz and Ron Paul, Minorities and Ron Paul: The Last-Before-Last Republican Follies

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

Well, I am just about debated out. It’s difficult for all the candidates or pretend-candidates to maintain their dignity while answering complex questions in sixty seconds with thirty seconds for rebuttals. It’s worse when the debate is moderated, and many of the questions formulated, by one local unknown and two liberals, one of whom has been an air-head for as far back as I can remember. I am referring to Dianne Sawyer, of course, and I can remember at least thirty years.

Two general comments about the Saturday night New Hampshire debate. (I missed the Sunday morning debate, sorry.) First, as usual, much time was wasted with questions and answers about “leadership.” I don’t understand the questions. I don’t understand the answers; I suspect (strongly) that the candidates understand neither the questions nor the answers about leadership. Leadership is a word that is worse than useless. Trust me, I taught management for about 25 years. If the concept were useful, I would have noticed. It’s useless the way baby-talk is useless. To the average one-year old, everything is a “wah.” It takes all the resources of parental love to assign to or to invent a meaning for each “wah” utterance. I don’t have such love for anything politicians say. Any politician who made it a rule to eschew completely the use of the word “leader” and of its derivatives would instantly gain in clarity and in sincerity.

My second comment is that, as happens every time, the candidates demonstrated their deep ignorance of basic concepts of international trade and of international economics in general. It makes me feel good that I taught the topic for about thirty years. I feel retrospectively, that I must have been doing something useful. I expect such ignorance among liberals. It’s disheartening to encounter it on the conservative and libertarian side. Continue reading →

Welcome

Brandon Christensen Liberty

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