Virginia Libertarian

boortz.com:Todays Nuze

Wealth envy is nothing new. In fact, we can thank wealth envy for our current income tax system. When the 16th Amendment income tax was being sold to the American people the proponents of a new federal income tax needed a way to get people to ask their states for ratification. Wealth envy was the key. The people were told that only rich Americans would ever have to pay the income tax, and virtually all of these rich people lived in the Northeast; generally in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York. The voters in states like Michigan or Kentucky had nothing to worry about. They would reap the benefits of all of this new federal spending without having to pay a part of the tab. Only the evil rich would be hit. The 16th Amendment sailed through.

You know, I think that what most of the people fail to realize is that government likes to play with wedges. The original issue of getting the 16th Amendment ratified was a wedge to enable the government to levy more and more taxes upon the people and to concentrate power in Washington. Everyone in Washington realized this fact, but, as was evident by how people reacted to the proposal, most people outside Washington did not. If they had, they would surely have shouted down this obscenity, for who wants government overlords constantly looking over your shoulder asking “how much money have you made today?”, or telling you “you can’t spend your money on that”? People did not, and still do not, realize that the government is taking us by a divide and conquer tactic. They divide us on the issue of the income tax, getting it passed so only the “rich” have to pay it. Once they have the wedge in the door, they can then expand the tax to lower incomes, because the “poor” still don’t have to pay, so vote for it, and the rich are now already paying, so why should they bother voting against it, because if they do, they are hamstringing themselves in the competitive market, so now the tax has spread lower, and will continue to do so until everyone is covered. They divide us on prostitution, gambling, and drug laws, and get away with it because the majority does not indulge in the activity prohibited. In prostitution, the majority do not want to appear in the eyes of their neighbors as adulterers, so they go along with the laws against prostitution, not realizing that the government is driving in a wedge to restrict behavior more and more down the road. Prostitution is illegal in almost every state because the people didn’t fight to keep government out of their private lives. Next government takes another step in controlling your lives, like they did in Georgia. If that succeeds, which thankfully it is looking like it will not, they will take another step, if it does not succeed, do you really think they won’t try again, only next time they will limit the law a little more so it will get passed, maybe only ban certain types of sex toys, instead of all of them. Drugs are classified according to schedules of restrictions, with those that are deemed to have “a high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” to be illegal. We are finally starting to get some push back on the classification of Marijuana, but only because it has been deemed to have some medical benefit. This is the wrong reason to be pushing back. The reason to be pushing back is because it is not the governments business what you do with your body! Who are they to be telling you what you can and cannot smoke, what you can and cannot inject, what is and is not bad for you? And do you think it will stop there? Are you kidding? (Each word is a separate link, you should read them all)

The fact that people are blinded by envy of what someone else has or does is just what the government uses to drive in the wedge. Don’t like it that your neighbor makes 10 million a year? Well, we’ll hit him with taxes for you and give some of that money to you! Do you think that there is someone who might be more poor than you are that will hit you next? Don’t like it that your neighbor goes to a brothel every night and gets all the poon tang he wants? Well, lets pass a law against that. Do you think that there may be someone out there more puritanical than you that doesn’t like what you do in your bedroom? Don’t like it that your neighbor enjoys pissing away his paycheck gambling and not providing for the upkeep of his property? Well, let’s pass a law against that. Do you think that there is someone else that doesn’t like some of the things you spend your money on? We must not forget that government is force, and that it can be used against you just as easily as for you.

If people were to look at any laws that the government passes as wedges to get their foot in the door, not as laws that benefit the majority of the people, because that’s never how they’re designed, then, and only then, would we cry “Stop! We don’t want that!”. The problem is, how do you educate the people on this, when government controls most channels of communication? Well, you’re reading it now.  I think we have a unique opportunity with the rise of the internet, if we can keep the government from regulating it long enough, to educate the people against the evils of government, and to make some real progress back towards a free society.

RichmondLiberty.org: Company Wants Workers to be Healthy, Silent
The claim that unhealthy people are a financial burden on their healthier neighbors and coworkers because of insurance is an illusion manipulated by those who decide insurance premiums and company policies. A parent can teach their children to share by saying if one child takes two cookies the other gets none, because he holds the cookie jar. It is classic manipulation to draw people’s attention toward each other and away from the decision-makers.

Again, I have to question the “libertarian” bent of this site, if it goes about spewing this kind of drivel, and not even mentioning the fact that govenment forcing employers to provide health insurance for their employees is wrong, government forcing insurance companies to provide everyone with certain benefits, whether they want them or not, is wrong, and goverment forcing individuals to purchase health care insurance is wrong.  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Everybody should have one of these:

Among other issues, Paul also voiced support for abandoning the war on drugs, allowing gold and silver to serve as legal tender, repealing the Seventeenth Amendment - which lets voters directly elect U.S. Senators - and ending the practice of withholding taxes from one’s pay. Instead, taxpayers would have to actually write checks to pay their taxes, a move Paul figured would soon end what he called the present tax-and-spend philosophy of government.

I just got a call from Christine Smith about 45 minutes ago. She called because of comments I left over at the LP web site. She was interested in what areas that I disagreed with her on where she stands on the issues and how she intends to implement them. The main thing that I could remember being concerned with was how she intended to go about abolishing the income tax, whether she intended to replace it with something like either the fair tax or flat tax. She said that she didn’t really think either of those were the answer, as they just replaced one form of taxation with another. I expressed my opinion that the withholding tax has been the biggest issue in quite some time, and that if people had to write those checks to give to the government, they would be a lot more reluctant to do so, and more inclined to ask what the hell the federal government is doing with half their money. We spoke some on education, where we are in agreement that government needs to be out of the business of schools, and federal authority, which congress seems to overextend all the time. I found it to be quite an enjoyable conversation with another libertarian (note the small “l”). After going back over her page on where she stands on some issues, the only other thing I can find that concerns me in the least is her position on Iraq. I am of the opinion that we should not have been there in the first place, but I’m not sure that we can just start pulling out immediately. I think that we owe it to the Iraqi’s now that we have destroyed a lot of their infrastructure with our nation-building, we need leave them with some form of government they can live with. I think we need to have a concrete set of goals (I don’t know what those should be, I’m not a military person), and once those are reached, we need to get out.

Her positions on shrinking the government, returning power to the states, foreign policy, education, private property, guns, privacy, marriage, the War on Drugs, free trade, freedom of speech, and even abortion will, I believe, resonate with the great majority of libertarian minded people out there. Hopefully there are enough of us, along with those frustrated with the polarizations going on between the Republocrats to put her in office.

The Forecast is Grim, So What Are We Going to Do About It?

By Bruce Bartlett
May 2nd, 2006
Reaction EssayLike David, I am very pessimistic about the prospects for conservative/libertarian reform. He is exactly right that demographically-driven federal spending is rising rapidly as the baby boom generation nears retirement, and the best political opportunity for restructuring Social Security and Medicare has passed. As the percentage of voters benefiting from these programs in their current form rises, it is unrealistic to think that spending for them can be reduced except marginally.

David is also right that the Republican Party has become deeply corrupt and appears to lack any leaders with the potential for pushing it back in a more conservative direction. It is going to have to suffer a defeat of Nixonian proportions in order to cleanse the party and create opportunities for new leaders to emerge that may be able to right its course.

From this, David concludes that small government-types should just suck it up, try to slow the rate of growth of spending and do their best to shame the Republicans into behaving more responsibly. He dismisses the prospects for a third party that would embody a more libertarian/conservative philosophy.

In many ways, this is my perspective as well. Because of it, I concluded that conservatives and libertarians need to think seriously about how best to finance the government spending that is in the pipeline. Given the magnitude of that spending growth—on the order of 10 percent of the gross domestic product over the next generation even if no new government programs are enacted or current ones expanded—I have suggested that it is time to think about a value-added tax for the U.S.

The VAT is the most efficient form of taxation ever devised, in the sense that it discourages less economic growth per dollar of revenue raised than any other tax—what economists call the dead-weight cost of taxation. The alternative, I believe, will be to increase tax rates or raise revenue in other ways far more burdensome to the economy and liberty than the equivalent amount of VAT.

This suggestion has been anathema to conservatives and libertarians alike. They view it as surrender to Big Government. Many also believe that a VAT is a “money machine” that will raise revenue so easily it will fuel an even greater increase in spending than would otherwise take place. Some see the inefficiency of alternative revenue-raising options as a virtue—by making the economic cost of taxation as burdensome as possible, it will slow the growth of taxation and spending, they hope.

If government spending were dominated by discretionary programs—those requiring annual appropriations—then I would be more likely to agree. Under such circumstances, the idea that one can “starve the beast” and hold down spending by denying government the revenue that feeds it has some validity. It is supported by the theoretical work of James Buchanan and others. [1]

However, today government spending is totally dominated by interest on the debt that is impossible to cut, entitlements that are almost impossible to cut, and national defense, which is unlikely to be cut for the foreseeable future. This means that more than 80 percent of the budget is effectively off limits. Even if domestic discretionary programs could be cut back to Reagan era levels, it would reduce total federal spending by just 2.4 percent—not nearly enough to offset rising entitlements. To offset the entire projected rise in entitlement spending would require the abolition of virtually every other thing the government does, as documented in numerous studies from the Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office. This may be fine to extreme libertarians, but it hardly constitutes a realistic political strategy for reducing government.

At this point, my friends must think I have totally thrown in the towel on bigger government. This is not so. What I have discussed thus far is simply a forecast of what I see coming. It doesn’t imply anything about my desired outcome. Just because I might predict that a recession is coming, based on my analysis of economic data, it doesn’t mean that I want a recession to happen. And if I predict that a recession will cause the deficit to grow, because recessions automatically raise spending and reduce revenues, it doesn’t mean that I like budget deficits.

In other words, the first thing that libertarian or conservative small government advocates need is a clear-eyed understanding of where we are and where we are going, absent drastic and unlikely changes in law and policy. In my observation, many—even most—tend to be ignorant of the actual fiscal facts and excessively optimistic about what it would take to change current trends. And because many of them hate the federal government and view all those who serve in it as crooks, imbeciles and fools, they tend to know almost nothing about the legislative process or the actual operation of the political system.

Implicitly, many in the small government community put themselves in the position of the world’s most powerful dictator, able to simply slash government programs willy-nilly, without regard to programmatic details, the real world consequences for those who depend on such programs, and without having to worry about where the votes will come from to achieve their goals. I often hear libertarians says things like just cut spending across the board, eliminate X department, or abolish this or that program, as if slashing government is as easy as waving a magic wand.

When they come to realize the extreme difficulty of making even minuscule changes in the growth path of federal spending and the inherent contradiction of their implicit position—needing non-libertarian means to achieve libertarian goals—many libertarians and conservatives withdraw from the political process altogether, refusing even to vote because they see it as lending credibility to a system they find abhorrent. The result of this disengagement is to leave the forces in favor of bigger government with even less resistance to their goals.

Occasionally, a third party effort such as Ross Perot’s in 1992 will tempt the politically alienated small government constituency. But the result of all third party efforts is to undermine the major party closest to it ideologically, often delivering victory to the greater threat from its own point of view. Thus, Ralph Nader’s quixotic campaigns only had the effect of helping George W. Bush—certainly a greater danger from Nader’s perspective on the issues than either Al Gore or John Kerry.

I would add that the net effect of the Libertarian Party over its history has been to drain political activists with a libertarian bent away from the two major parties, thus reducing the ranks of those with such a bent in the major parties and strengthening the hand of the statists. In my opinion, libertarian goals would be much better advanced by abolition of the Libertarian Party and its replacement by an organized libertarian interest group along the lines of the National Rifle Association or the pro and con abortion groups that could mobilize libertarian voters, contributions, and other resources within the existing two-party structure, instead of outside where it is and always will be impotent. The constitutional requirement that a president receive an absolute majority of votes in the Electoral College effectively means that we can never have more than two viable political parties.

Theoretically, a third party could supplant one of the major parties, as the Republicans did with the Whigs. While this sort of thing happens fairly often in other countries such as Canada, it has only happened in the U.S. when one party found itself incapable of dealing with an issue of overriding importance, such as slavery, which is what doomed the Whigs. It is not inconceivable that the ongoing redistribution of income and wealth from relatively poor young people to the relatively wealthy elderly, which will accelerate in coming years, could be the sort of issue that will give rise to a party readjustment like that which saw the Republicans replace the Whigs.

The problem with this theory is that those who must pay for the promised Social Security and Medicare benefits, the youth, are the most politically alienated group in society. Very few of them bother to vote or participate substantively in the political process. This allows politicians to easily ignore them and concentrate instead on the elderly, the age group most likely to vote and the one that is most politically engaged. So until the youth become politically activated and motivated to work for change, it is hard to see where meaningful support for political reform will come from, thus leaving us on the path of least resistance, which is to raise taxes gradually to pay for higher spending programmed in current law.

Another problem is that we all expect to join the ranks of the elderly eventually and thus become the beneficiaries of the government’s largess. Thus young people in France recently revolted against changes in labor law designed to make it easier for young people to get jobs. They preferred the current system, where jobs are very hard to get but almost impossible to lose if you have one. Therefore, one cannot assume that the logical reaction of young people to the unfairness of the current fiscal system will be to overthrow it. They may become even more determined to make sure that they get theirs, too.

I would welcome a serious debate among libertarians and small government-types on a realistic political strategy for achieving their goals. Simply damning the existing system and withdrawing from it is just a prescription for accelerating the trend toward bigger government.