I’m generally well disposed to the idea of a serious reformation of the tax system. Within such a reformation I’m extremely well disposed to the idea that we want to move from the taxation of things like incomes to the taxation of things like consumption. So I should be in favour of the Fair Tax proposal, as espoused by Gary Johnson:

The Fair Tax calls for abolishing all federal taxes and replacing them with a 23 percent nationwide sales tax that applies only to new goods and services. For example a used car or secondhand clothes would be exempt, while groceries would not. In addition to a simplified tax, everyone would receive something called a monthly prebate check.

There are excellent reasons for wanting to place the tax on consumption rather than incomes or corporate profits. One of the largest being that all taxes have deadweight costs and consumption taxes have lower ones than income or corporate taxes. A deadweight cost being the amount of economic activity that doesn’t happen because of the tax: lower deadweights mean we can have more economic growth for any level of taxation, or if you prefer, higher taxes for any level of economic growth.

However, despite all this (and even despite the similarity between Johnson’s libertarianism and my own classical liberalism) I’m afraid I just cannot support the Fair Tax. For it simply will not work. The rate is too high for it to work as a simple sales tax: there will just be too much dodging of it.  Read The Full Story

Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey claims that the Internet sales tax mandate is not a new tax. Nor, according to Ramsey, is it an unfair tax.

Ramsey is wrong on both counts.

Currently, thanks to the 1992 Supreme Court decision Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, states are prohibited from forcing out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax on their behalf. For this reason, sales taxes are not applied when you make a purchase from an out-of-state online retailer that has no physical presence in the state to which the order is shipped. The Internet sales tax mandate, known by its misleading title as the Marketplace Fairness Act, would change that. For the first time, many of your online purchases will be subject to state sales tax.  Read The Full Story

By: Will Coley

Muslims 4 Liberty

In the aftermath of the Boston Bombing, I’ve been taken aback by the reaction of some professed advocates of liberty. People I once saw as rational, logical, objective, ‘thinking’ people, have gone off the deep end, drunk on the lemming-aide being served up to the masses by the mainstream media. The reaction of most Americans, including American Muslims, is the same. All lining up to pledge their undying fealty to the growing police state, but in the ‘liberty movement’ this has become a “separating the chaff from the wheat” moment,  and this isn’t the first time violence in Boston has resulted in the separating of the true, from those who simply pay lip service to liberty.

Nearly 250 years ago British troops were accused of gunning down American civilians in the streets of Boston; 5 were killed and many injured. Based on the statements of eyewitnesses Bostonians grabbed their torches and pitchforks and headed to the streets looking for ‘justice’, the rule of law be damned.  In the midst of that mob there was a lone voice of reason; a man who saw justice, through the rule of law, as a paramount of civilized, and free society.  Alone in his defense of liberty, he stood against the mob, armed with nothing more than reason, and a dedication to the rights of ALL men. John Adams, stood down a mob armed with muskets, pitchforks, torches and a blood lust for a target to affix their rage to.