Perhaps The Most Important Argument Against Consumption Taxes

Perhaps the most important argument against consumption taxes is Murray Rothbard's critique of them here, noting their time-preference prejudice:

"The major argument for replacing an income by a consumption tax is that savings would no longer be taxed. A consumption tax, its advocates assert, would tax consumption and not savings. The fact that this argument is generally advanced by free-market economists, in our day mainly by the supply-siders, strikes one immediately as rather peculiar. For individuals on the free market, after all, each decide their own allocation of income to consumption or to savings. This proportion of consumption to savings, as Austrian economics teaches us, is determined by each individual's rate of time preference, the degree by which he prefers present to future goods. For each person is continually allocating his income between consumption now, as against saving to invest in goods that will bring an income in the future. And each person decides the allocation on the basis of his time preference. To say, therefore, that only consumption should be taxed and not savings is to challenge the voluntary preferences and choices of individuals on the free market, and to say that they are saving far too little and consuming too much, and therefore that taxes on savings should be removed and all the burdens placed on present as compared to future consumption. But to do that is to challenge free-market expressions of time preference, and to advocate government coercion to forcibly alter the expression of those preferences, so as to coerce a higher saving-to-consumption ratio than desired by free individuals."

Rothbard goes on to ascribe this prejudice to "Calvinism", which may be entertaining to the libertarian who is interested in wine, women and song now and has a devil may care attitude about present frugality as a defense against want later. But this assumes there is no moral difference between savings and consumption, which there certainly is when the penniless old man turns up on your doorstep, hat in hand. The libertarian has his own time preference prejudice, were he to admit it, which life teaches us has serious consequences, more often than not.

Be that as it may, it is important to recognize that standard measurements of economic activity in the United States have for some time shown, in something like the following formulation, that "70% of GDP consists in consumer spending", and were it not for schemes like Social Security and Medicare there would be far more ringing of the bell going on at the front. This is quite a remarkable fact in a supposedly Calvinist civilization, a fact which argues for the moral superiority of savings over consumption because despite our better natures we in reality live otherwise. This suggests that we still ought to do everything we can to encourage the former and punish the latter, for the simple reason which the observation of human nature teaches. We are mixtures of good and evil, but unfortunately too often it turns out to be a bad mixture.

The ancient Greeks, among other things, notably taught us "nothing too much", by which we may infer that the preponderance of present spendthrifts demonstrates individual and social excess which ought to be remedied by tax policy encouraging the increase of savers. To right the ship would mean achieving a better balance between the two, and to Rothbard's main point, which is that under a consumption tax savings would inevitably be taxed in the long run anyway just as consumption is in the present because that is what savings becomes, we therefore ought to have no compunction about taxing savings in the end. That is what the death tax accomplishes, the final message to an excess of savings.

In the present context this recommends taxation of consumption in some form to encourage marginally less of it, better mechanisms of rewarding savings of which we have too little, and a death tax which approximates the same level as a consumption tax would operate at. This means that draconian schemes of estate confiscation by the government at death are in principle unjust because as consumption taxes we would never think of imposing similar levies on the living.

Unless, of course, we subscribe to The New Republic.

Libertarian "Principle" Means Republican Defeat!

Good results for libertarians = Democrat victories!

See for yourself, here.

Democrats Funded Libertarian In MT Senate Race As They Did In AZ For Rep. Giffords

The m/o in AZ in 2010 was Democrats spending money to portray a libertarian as the true conservative in order to bleed-off votes from the Republican candidate and Iraq War veteran Jesse Kelly and thus re-elect the Democrat, Rep. Gabby Giffords, who went on to get shot by a lunatic with libertarian ideas named Jared Loughner. To add insult to injury, liberals nationwide then went on to blame her shooting on Republicans and the Tea Party.

I reported on this in early January 2011, here, showing a mailer for the libertarian paid for by the Arizona Democrat Party.

Now it turns out the same strategy was used in Montana in 2012 to boost the libertarian candidate as the real conservative, funded by liberal money, in order to bleed-off votes from the Republican Rehberg and re-elect the Democrat Senator Tester.

Propublica has the in-depth story, here.

Everyone thinks the Republicans are the stupid party when in two recent elections it's the libertarians who got played for fools and tools. But the Republicans really are the stupid ones for thinking an alliance with libertarians isn't just possible but natural when far more often than not libertarians view themselves as successful when they prevent Republicans from getting elected, as they themselves say here (h/t Chris).

We know whose side they are on. Libertarians are natural liberals, not conservatives.

Libertarian Spoils Race For Republican In NH-1, Bringing Back Shea-Porter

Here's another race in 2012 which the libertarians helped throw to the Democrats. Democrat Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, defeated in 2010 by a Republican, regained her seat thanks in part to a libertarian in the race in 2012 who bled enough votes from the Republican to put her back in the seat.

The case was nearly the same in NH-2 where the Democrat faced a Republican and a libertarian but won in her own right.

Libertarians view themselves as successful, as having an impact, when they deprive Republicans of their victories. Libertarians suffer from a kind of bipolar disorder which is distinguished by a predominating social liberalism which trumps their economic conservatism and thus manifests itself politically as alliance with Democrats, which is what they really are, if only they went to therapy.

We know whose side the libertarians are on, and it isn't ours.

Follow the label in the footer to see other races libertarians helped spoil for Republicans in 2012.

Republicans need to grow a quatrain and start attacking not just Democrats, but libertarians as well.

Libertarian Louis Woodhill Panders Left And Right

Louis Woodhill, here, who wants to go over the cliff to save the country:


"The electorate, as a whole, understands economics. ... (collectively) the voters know everything . . .."

Which is why they voted for divided government. Democrats were right! Republicans were right!

Uh huh.

TAC Analysis Of Montana Senate Race Never Mentions Libertarian Spoiler

Michael Tracey for The American Conservative here spends zero time contemplating how the Libertarian Party candidate easily spoiled the race for the Republican by bleeding off his votes, thus electing the Democrat to the US Senate in Montana.

Criticizing libertarianism at TAC evidently conflicts with the program.

Memo To Jim DeMint And Heritage Foundation: Limited Government, Conservative v. Libertarian

Memo To Senator Jim DeMint and The Heritage Foundation:

Conservatives and libertarians DO NOT share the same understanding of limited government.

Libertarians believe in limited government in order to be free to do anything they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody.

Conservatives believe in limited government as the larger, necessary and inevitable political expression of the moral limitations they place on themselves as individuals who respect the laws of Nature and of Nature's God, transgressions against which hurt others and especially the individual whether he recognizes it or not.

Limited government can only exist where there is self-limitation pre-existing. It cannot be voted into existence.

It begins with the personal moral experience of a conversion taught variously in human experience, but well-expressed by the ancient Greek maxim "Nothing too much". We know it more vaguely in our time, for example, as conservation and good stewardship of resources as opposed to relentless consumption and production, or as savings and thrift in economics as opposed to repeatedly rehypothicated credit and debt, or as abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within it, or in law as a scale of punishment of infractions against these appropriate to their severity.

Libertarians can know these things only because conservatives have told them, otherwise they do not have it in them, deluded as they are that the possibilities in life are infinite. Libertarianism is thus an infantile idea from which one should grow up. 

How To Distinguish Between A Libertarian And A Conservative

The libertarian is the pot-smoking fudge-packer and the conservative would be the guy running away from him as fast as he can.

I Don't Call Sen. Jim DeMint "Demented" For Nothing

Here he is in all his confused glory:

"I think the new debate in the Republican Party needs to be between conservatives and libertarians. We have a common foundation of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government, and we can rationally debate some of the things we disagree on. I don’t think the government should impose my morals or anyone else’s on someone else, but at the same time I don’t want the government purging morals and religious values from our society. We can find a balance there. It really gets back to decentralization. The tolerance is going to come from decentralization and letting people make their own decisions, but we have to be able to put up with societal stigma of things we don’t like."

No, we don't have a common foundation.

Libertarians believe in freedom as license. Conservatives believe in ordered liberty, that there cannot be true freedom unless we respect the transcendent moral order. In recent times libertarians were easily allied with Democrats on social issues, and finally gave up on that and moved rightward on economic concerns. In doing so they demonstrated their unprincipled shape-shifting for what it is, and that Republicans have been too stupid to reject them. For example, I can't recall a single prominent Republican or so-called conservative descrying the many Republican victories spoiled by libertarians in either of the recent elections in 2010 and 2012. What is more we have idiot conservatives like Sarah Palin telling us we must make room for libertarians in the Republican Party while the Libertarian Party itself is encouraged by the races it has spoiled for Republicans by electing Democrats. This from the woman who vigorously supported John McCain and TARP.

Libertarians are not natural allies of conservatives, but they are of Republicans just as they are of Democrats, because the Republican Party has been liberalized beyond recognition. That a so-called conservative like Jim DeMint is friendly toward libertarianism tells you all you need to know about the state of conservatism in America. Conservatism in America is really and truly dead.

One of the favorite ideas of libertarians illustrates my point. The idea comes by analogy from Adam Smith's invisible hand at work in economics, namely, that the electorate always gets it right (Jude Wanniski). Is there a Republican who voted for Romney saying any such thing anywhere in the country now that Obama is re-elected? I doubt it. But that is the position of John Tamny and his ilk at Forbes Magazine. John Tamny, by the way, would like you to be a completely rootless person, with no house, no wife, no children, paying no property taxes for good schools and contributing no commitment to church and community but owning just two bags and a passport so that his beloved capitalist boss can send you wherever and whenever he needs you.

Good government, as the Scriptures teach, is a terror to bad behavior, not to good. That means there are moral absolutes, against which all libertarians do chafe, now more, now less, starting with "It is not good that the man should be alone."

To Demented Jim there are no such absolutes. He's a moral relativist who doesn't have the courage of his own moral convictions. "My morals" he says, as if they belong only to him and didn't come from the Author of Life. St. Paul, I remind you, ridiculed the Corinthian Christians for such an attitude, saying "What do you have that you did not receive?" Our faults are as ancient as the way of escape.

The Heritage Foundation had become reprehensible enough for having embraced Reagan liberalism, which contributed materially to what became the tyranny of the ObamaCare mandates. Now Heritage is to be headed up by the confused conservative DeMint, if he really isn't just a stealth libertarian. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about Heritage, that it remains to this day so intellectually confused about the meaning of conservatism that it welcomes a libertarian sleeper?

Conservatives should revolt against Heritage's choice of Sen. Jim DeMint, but don't count on it. I reckon there are only 500,000 of us in the whole country, and that's being generous. In the end, Sen. DeMint and Heritage will come to nothing, and the Republicans too if they are not careful.

"SAVE YOURSELVES FROM THIS CROOKED GENERATION!"

Libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul Recommends Going Galt On Fiscal Cliff

Gee, what a shock, a libertarian recommending "strategic withdrawal" on new taxes. Does anyone think libertarians really believe in any principles at all?

It's the one principle they do believe in which is at work here: freedom, a license to do anything.

They are no less culpable, and no less liberal, than the liberal Republicans they attack for raising taxes.

Senator Rand Paul, here:

"Why don't we let the Democrats pass whatever they want? If they are the party of higher taxes, all the Republicans vote present and let the Democrats raise taxes as high as they want to raise them, let Democrats in the Senate raise taxes, let the president sign it and then make them own the tax increase. And when the economy stalls, when the economy sputters, when people lose their jobs, they know which party to blame, the party of high taxes. Let's don't be the party of just almost as high taxes."

It's a kind of paraprosdokian like "We had to destroy the village in order to save it": We have to raise taxes in order to cut taxes.

Do House Republicans, who would have to surrender their majority and vote "present" on a Democrat tax bill, really want to be remembered for crashing the economy even more to make a political point? Haven't enough of us lost our jobs already? Hasn't the economy already sputtered for too many years?

If libertarians had their way, we'd all be smoking the dope that makes Senator Paul think this way.

How about just doing the right thing for its own sake and continuing to be the party of no new taxes in the face of economic stagnation, and let the chips fall where they may?

Tammy Bruce Needs To Have Her Head Examined, Again

Final Results Utah 4th Congressional District 2012

This morning Tammy Bruce is ranting and raving as guest host for Laura Ingraham about how a black Republican woman narrowly lost to the incumbent liberal white man, Democrat Rep. Jim Matheson in UT-4.

That's rich. A gay libertarian independent complaining about a Republican losing by 768 votes in a narrow race to a Democrat where the Libertarian Party candidate clearly played the spoiler by garnering eight times that margin.

Ideas have consequences.

Joel Kotkin Urges Republicans To Join The Class War

"It’s time for Republicans to break with the traditions of Goldwater, Reagan, and, particularly, Bush and shift to something more akin to the party’s roots in the mid-19th century. This party needs less preaching and libertarian manifestos that essentially defend plutocracy. Instead it’s time to embrace class warfare on today’s gentry, and embrace the aspirations of today’s middle-class. Honest Abe in 2016?"

Egging on the Republicans to embrace Marxist class categories and methods and pretending that's not an appeal to ideology, Joel Kotkin here thinks Republicans could win again if only they gave stuff to the yeoman class and took away stuff from the clerisy. You know, like his hero Pres. Abraham Lincoln did when he signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which gave away 160 acres out west to anyone who would improve the land, and when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which took away the property of slaveholders without compensation. Like all good dictators, Lincoln made notions of property and its value even more arbitrary than they had been before.

It is little appreciated how the Homestead Act basically destroyed the flexibility of the federal revenue system, causing the federal government to rely increasingly on tariffs and also excises which up until The War Between The States had fluctuated up and down as revenues from federal land sales did the same.

So Anderson and Martin, here, who emphasize the substitutability of tariff and land sales revenues:


"Coinciding with the rapid increase in land grants to homesteaders, railroads, and the states after 1862, the federal revenue derived from land sales fell rapidly as a proportion of total receipts. Further, the general decline in tariff rates that had occurred until the Civil War was reversed, and tariff rates began to rise rapidly. Import duty rates, which had reached their lowest level in the century in 1857, increased sharply during the Civil War and remained high for the remainder of the century (Baack and Ray 1983, p. 73). Tariffs continued to be the single most important source of federal revenue after the war ended."

So in an important sense, Lincoln and the Republicans are to blame not just for the development of Our Enemy, The State, they are also to blame for setting the untenable conditions to fund it as it henceforth and inevitably grew large. In the end, the price of Union and black emancipation would be universal bondage to Leviathan with the coming of the Income Tax in 1913.

Kotkin completely misses the significance of what's going on on the right. Conservatives in America are rediscovering the meaning of the constitution, and how people like Lincoln ruined it. Mitt Romney with his incessant talk of American supremacy in the world simply reminded them too much of him.

Kotkin's correct about one thing, though, that the socialism of Obama is misunderstood. But Kotkin doesn't call it the fascism that it is, because Kotkin himself actually advocates it himself, only that it's the good kind which helps grow the middle class.

From the comments section, Kotkin says as much:

"i am an old-style democrat who favors using government when necessary to create an ever-larger property owning class. neither party today has this as its main focus. instead both are neo-feudalist as I will explain in the coming months."

Old style democrat? You know, the FDR kind, which admired and imitated the strong men of Europe, who eventually plunged the world into a war far bloodier than, but no less reminiscent of, Lincoln's.

Conservatives want to get rid of the imperial presidency, not just get one friendly to its interests.

Joel Kotkin's "New Geography" isn't old enough.

To The Associated Press, Sadomasochism Is Just A "Subculture"

Crown Roast of Wiener

Seen here:

[Castro District] Supervisor Scott Wiener's proposal would make it illegal for a person over the age of 5 to "expose his or her genitals, perineum or anal region on any public street, sidewalk, street median, parklet or plaza" or while using public transit.

A first offense would carry a maximum penalty of a $100 fine, but prosecutors would have authority to charge a third violation as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and a year in jail. Exemptions would be made for participants at permitted street fairs and parades, such as the city's annual gay pride event and the Folsom Street Fair, which celebrates sadomasochism and other sexual subcultures.

Since about 1994 sadomasochism et cetera have not been considered mental illnesses by medical authorities when such deviancies are "consensual". Evidently the public in San Francisco no longer consents to the regular assaults against their eyes from assorted naked exhibitionists of deviancy, which should on that logic make such malefactors henceforth technically mentally ill once again.

Wow, wasn't that easy?

Accordingly we should now be able to say that, since libertarians advocate freedom for such deviancies but habitually fail at the polls, libertarians also are mentally ill because they do not enjoy the consent of the governed. 

The followers of libertarian Jude Wanniski continue to assert that the electorate always gets it right, so since the electorate repudiates libertarianism time and time again libertarians must be mentally ill.

It remains unknown if libertarianism ever was considered a mental disorder by authorities, however.

Needless to say, the date from which civilization may be said to have ended now has been postponed thanks to San Francisco Castro District Supervisor Scott Wiener.

Great name.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Libertarians Help Elect Democrat Bisexual In Arizona

There's no mention in the various stories at Politico that the controversial and expensive race between the Democrat Sinema and the black Republican Parker was spoiled for the latter by a libertarian candidate whose platform included open voter suppression.

AZCentral reported here:

The spoiler in the race may turn out to be Libertarian candidate Powell Gammill, who garnered more than 10,000 votes, despite urging voters during an October televised debate to stay home on Election Day in protest of the political system.

Libertarian In UT 4th District Helps Dem. Incumbent Get Re-elected

Libertarians in Utah's 4th Congressional District narrowly helped keep the Democrat the incumbent in 2012. The rest of Utah is a sea of red.

Matheson was a key figure in the arithmetic to passage of ObamaCare in 2010, subsequently got re-elected in November 2010 and again now in 2012, thanks this time to a libertarian who spoiled the chance for the GOP candidate.

Libertarian Mish So Inspired By MoveOn.org He Steals The Phrase 5 Times

Here.

Libertarians are Democrats in sheeps' clothes.

David Stockman Of Reagan Admin. Fame Wins Mish Raffle?

A certain David Stockman, mirabile dictu, is named as a raffle winner in Mish's ALS raffle contest, here.

If that's the David Stockman we all know, that explains a lot. Libertarian birds of a feather flock together.

Stockman's Wikipedia entry says he lives in Greenwich, CT.

Nice work if you can get it.

Libertarian Mish Is Happy Republican Mourdock Lost In Indiana

Mish is on the side of the Democrats, plain and simple, here, referencing a story at the Christian Science Monitor:

Yet this is what happens when views are too extreme. I am very pleased to report "'Red' Indiana sends Democrat to US Senate, as women fled Mourdock".

Of course Mish is happy the Democrat won in Indiana. Libertarians ran a spoiler candidate in that race to throw the race to the Democrat. When it comes down to it, social freedom is more important to libertarians than economic freedom. They cry "Freedom" all the while they mean only "License!"

Libertarians are not on the side of conservatives or Republicans. They are on the side of the Democrats, the party of death to the unborn, and soon the party of death to the elderly under ObamaCare, and eventually the party of death to the middle class, which will not long exist because of Obama.

The middle class stands in the way of the Alinskyites' real objective: the rich. Middle class people, after all, would like to be rich some day, too, not poor. So they must go first in order to get at the rich. If the middle class had any brains they'd understand that Obama's invective against the rich is primarily aimed at them because, compared to the poor, the middle class is rich. Unfortunately, they went to public schools. 

One thing at a time, making use of the useful idiots, the libertarians.

Libertarian Party Boasts Of Stopping Republican Senate Hopefuls In IN and MT

A reader points out that the Libertarian Party is actually boasting here about how well two of its Senate candidates performed in the elections a week ago, one in Montana and one in Indiana, because they threw the races to the Democrats. By doing so they prevented Republicans from winning precious seats needed in the contest against the Obama agenda.

He's right. I quote from the post:

"[T]hese are exceptionally good results:

Dan Cox (MT) 31,476 votes - 6.5% - high impact: more than margin of victory for Democrat over Republican ...

Andrew Horning (IN) 143,790 votes - 5.8% - high impact: more than margin of victory for Democrat over Republican"

It's obvious from this that Libertarians view themselves as spoilers who count Republican defeats as victories for themselves, which tells you everything you need to know about whose side the Libertarian Party is on.

Of course there is no reflection on the libertarians' bad faith in this election in the media in general, nor from conservative talk radio in particular which boasts self-professed libertarian sympathizers in people like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. 

h/t Housman2000

Libertarians Spoiled Two House Races In Arizona, Throwing Them Democrat