All Posts Tagged With: "taxation"
The Chimera of Tax Fairness
Let’s hear no more about tax fairness, unless it’s to point out that fairness is approached as tax rates move toward zero.
27Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 21 comments | ContinuedRegime Uncertainty, Then and Now
In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]
4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | ContinuedGovernment Is No Friend of the Poor
You’ve heard it all too many times to count, I suspect. Apologists for big government—the New York Times’s Paul Krugman and Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson being good recent examples—are convinced there’s just no good alternative to government social services. Without the government, people will go hungry. They’ll die in the streets. We’ll lapse back into [...]
4Jan2012 | Gary Chartier | 22 comments | ContinuedVivien Kellems: Giving the Taxman Hell
If principles are expressed through people, then Vivien Kellems’s life shouts out that business is not the handmaiden of government.
3Jan2012 | Wendy McElroy | 21 comments | ContinuedTaxation Is the Lifeblood of the State
The cliffhanger debate over whether or not to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling threw U.S. fiscal policy into brighter relief than it has been in recent memory. Suddenly people were calling for significant cuts in government spending in the face of a rapidly growing national debt. As often happens, calls for cuts in government [...]
26Oct2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Other Test: Debts and Taxes
States and polities—or rather the ruling classes that control them—face two great tests in the course of history. Failure to meet them typically leads to disaster and even the dissolution of the State. The first and most familiar is war, armed conflict with other States (or more accurately, other ruling groups). By analogy wars can [...]
26Oct2011 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedElizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur
Boiled down, Warren’s argument is that since everyone has paid taxes to provide services without which wealthy people couldn’t have made their money, they should pay more. How does that follow?
23Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 82 comments | ContinuedLysander Spooner: American Anarchist
It was in the early 1970s that I first learned of Lysander Spooner’s ideas. The six volumes of his Collected Works, which were published in 1971 and which I purchased soon thereafter, played an important part in my intellectual development as a voluntaryist. I was the person who in 1976 unearthed Spooner’s essay “Vices Are [...]
24Aug2011 | Carl Watner | 7 comments | ContinuedEnd the IMF
The sex scandal involving the recently departed International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn—criminal or not—was never a reason to abolish the agency. But then we didn’t need another reason. The agency, centerpiece of J. M. Keynes’s inflationary Bretton Woods brainchild, should never have been created in the first place, since it was another calculated step toward [...]
24Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedTaxation Is Still Robbery
It is sad that most self-styled lovers of humanity embrace a money-raising system grounded in the threat of physical force – violence — against people who themselves have not used force.
15Jul2011 | Sheldon Richman | 28 comments | ContinuedThe Preamble They Should’ve Written
Did the Founding Fathers get it right? Is the Constitution they drafted a secure basis for limited government? Many conservatives suppose so and believe the drift to big government has simply been a case of not reading the directions on the package. Last January these conservatives ordered that the Constitution be read aloud at the [...]
22Jun2011 | James L. Payne | 21 comments | ContinuedPrivate Investment and Public “Investment”
Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]
22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedShakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy against the American Taxpayer
Politics has one feature that sets it apart from all sorts of voluntary action: It employs coercion. Politicians can raid the wallets of taxpayers, forcing them to part with money they would rather spend, donate, or invest according to their own desires. Much of the money thus confiscated is then spent to succor special-interest groups [...]
22Jun2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | ContinuedBudget-Cutting Resistance
So here’s the problem: While polls show that people want the government’s budget deficit and the national debt reduced, they don’t want the biggest spending items cut. In the April 17 ABC News-Washington Post poll, 59 percent said that the deficit should be reduced through a combination of unspecified spending cuts and tax increases. But [...]
22Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedAnti-Interventionism Is Cold Indifference?
Presidents frequently garner applause when they go to war. Violence as a knee-jerk response to a crisis—do anything, but do something!—is surprisingly popular. Pundits doubtless expect that they too will reap acclaim for urging action, whether or not it’s well considered. Who wants to be thought of as a bump on a log, after all? [...]
22Jun2011 | Gary Chartier | 3 comments | ContinuedAbout Those Oil Company Tax Breaks
You won’t catch me saying anything positive about any tax, but I reserve a special animus for a system that gives politicians the power to treat different productive activities differently.
13May2011 | Sheldon Richman | 12 comments | Continued-
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