WEBVTT

NOTE Can We Have a World Without Taxes?

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Mike Smith, columnist at the Province newspaper.

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It's always my pleasure, my privilege to fill in for Bill for one more day.

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I want to welcome all our listeners now along the Chorus Radio Network,

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wherever you are in British Columbia this morning.

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Well, we all know there's a lot of anger out there over the HST.

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So many people are upset about this consumer tax hit at the tail end of a recession.

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But here's a point of view on taxes that you might not have thought too much about before.

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Forget about the HST, forget about tax grabs, how about no taxes at all? Everything private,

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private roads, private courts, private police forces and fire departments, private money supply.

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My next guest is one of the most well-known libertarian thinkers around. His name is Walter

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Block. You might remember him when he was at the Fraser Institute for many years. He is now a

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professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans and I'm very pleased to welcome him to the

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Show.

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Hi.

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Hi.

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It's a pleasure to be with you.

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Thanks for having me.

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Thank you for coming on the show.

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I appreciate it.

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Now, the HST...

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Now, you still live in Vancouver, right?

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No.

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I am a resident of New Orleans.

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Okay.

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I have a...

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My wife lives here and I visit her a lot when school is not in session.

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All right.

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But you're from North Van?

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My wife has a house in North Van, yes.

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Right.

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Okay.

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Because you were with the Fraser Institute for a long time.

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The HST, which I'm sure you're familiar with Walter and how it's provoked pretty much kind

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of a brush fire of anger here in the province, I know you're against the HST but maybe not

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for the same reasons that a lot of people are angry with this tax.

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Yes, well I'm sort of angry with all taxes.

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As far as I regard taxes as akin to highway robbery and Armageddon, I think that the problem

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with them is that they're compulsory, and it seems to me that there are two ways that

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we can deal with each other.

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One is as barbarians and the other is as civilized people.

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Now, if you have something I want, like I admire your socks, I have two ways of getting

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your socks.

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One, I can come up to you with a point of a gun and say, give me your socks or I plug you,

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which I take as the barbaric, uncivilized way, and the other way is I say, hey,

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I like your socks, I'll give you a hundred bucks for them, or I'll be your best friend forever, or something like that,

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and if you agree, then I get the socks, and if you don't agree, I don't get the socks. That's the civilized way of behaving.

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Well, what are taxes? Taxes are people come to you with a point of a gun and say, look,

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we need your money, give us your money, we're going to give you some services, but

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The choice is not up to you, you have to pay.

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And I don't regard that as particularly humane.

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Okay, well I guess you're articulating a kind of a free market theory or a libertarian point

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of view on this, but I guess most people would consider it counterintuitive if we're going

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to have the civilized society that you're describing, that we have to have taxes in

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order to pay for the common goods and services that everybody needs, whether it's roads or

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Well, my most recent book is on why we should privatize roads, highways, streets, avenues,

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whatever.

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In the U.S., some 40,000 people a year die on the roads.

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In Canada, it's about 4,000.

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We have roughly one-tenth their population, so it's roughly 4,000, give or take.

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And most people, you know, like how many people, how many Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan,

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about 120 or so?

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and each life is precious and each life is a shame and that is a shame that it was lost

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and then there were Afghanis that were killed but you know Canada is very upset about that

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hundred and twenty roughly number of soldiers that died but four thousand people die every

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year on the Canadian roads and nobody says boo about that I mean that's much worse than

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the AHST or you know this problem or that problem I mean every time someone drowns or

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or a little girl gets lost in a well, our hearts go out to that. What about the fact

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that people buy like flies on our socialist roads, our roads run by government?

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How would private roads make a difference?

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Well, you'd have competition. Look, the reason we have pretty good restaurants and pretty

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good grocery stores is if you've got a lousy one, people don't go there. And when people

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don't go there, they go broke and someone else takes over their premises. Well, you

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You don't have that in roads. If one road is, people are dying like flies on it, nobody

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loses money, nobody ever goes broke. You don't have the benefit of competition. Look, suppose

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restaurants were run by government. Every restaurant was a government restaurant. Well, if you

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didn't like Restaurant X, you know, you didn't go there. Restaurant X stays just like the

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post office or the motor vehicle bureau or any other government bureau. See, what I'm

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What I'm trying to do is apply the insight that all economists have, that competition

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brings a better product, and apply it to esoteric cases that are unconventional, such as roads

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or hospitals or what.

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Speaking of hospitals, I guess there's obviously a radical notion that you're espousing when

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it comes to healthcare services.

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I mean, even right-wing conservative thinkers here in Canada would be hard pressed to argue

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against a health care service in which vulnerable people or poor people are not protected by

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some kind of health insurance.

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We take a look in the United States, where you are, at the millions of people who are

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uninsured or the millions of people who go bankrupt just because they get sick.

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You're quite right that right wing conservatives would be hard put to find a right wing conservative

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who would say that, but I'm not a right wing conservative, I'm a libertarian.

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The Equidistant from Right-Wing Conservatives and Left-Wing Liberals

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We are the only ones who really favor free enterprise

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Look, if you were right, by the way, health care is important

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But if you don't have health care, suppose we had a magic wand and we just got rid of

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all health care

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How many people in Canada would die today?

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Oh, I don't know, a dozen or so, or maybe a hundred or so

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Suppose we got rid of all food

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How many people would die today or tomorrow?

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Well, the whole country would die.

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Namely, if you take all food versus all health care, food is more important.

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Well, if food is more important than health care, and it's important to have the government

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run things that are important, which seems to be the idea here, well, why don't we get

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the government to run all food?

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Namely, why don't we go to the Soviet system of centralized planning and collectivized

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farming and stuff like that?

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The reason we don't is we know we'll starve if we go that route, as the Soviets and the

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Okay, when you approach these problems from the libertarian point of view that you do,

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Walter, is it essentially an efficiency argument that you argue that if we privatize these

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systems that the invisible hand of the free market will just effectively make everything

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more efficient and will eliminate the waste?

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I think it's a two-shot or a two-barrel approach.

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One is the ethics, which I talk about when I try to grab your socks and say that there's

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a moral way and an immoral way, and the moral way is the voluntary market way.

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And also there's an efficiency argument, namely that markets bring about a better product

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at a lower price through competition than governments do.

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In some ways we have a government here in British Columbia that is trying to introduce

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more of a user pay principle.

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You specialize in roads and your last book was about privatizing roads.

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Here in BC we've got a lot of things called P3s, private-public partnerships and toll

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booths going up on roads and highways.

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Do you like that idea?

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No.

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Private-public partnerships is just a synonym for fascism.

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Under socialism the government owns all the means of production as in the Soviet Union.

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In fascism, think Mussolini and Hitler, without the racism, fascism doesn't require the racist

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or the anti-semitic stuff.

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We have a lot of fascism and socialism in Canada and in the United States and in other

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Western democracies.

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No, public-private partnerships are just a name for fascism.

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There's no reason to...

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I mean, government is in effect a criminal gang because what they're doing, even though

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So they have majority, they have tyranny of the majority, they are using force and compulsion.

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So it's sort of like a horrible miscegenation to have public and private together.

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What we ought to do, I think on moral and efficiency grounds, is to get rid of the public

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insofar as is possible, keep reducing it, that government is best, which governs least,

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and keep reducing it, whereas these public-private partnerships are just a way of tapering over

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for Government Inefficiencies and Immorality with a veneer of private enterprise which

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is both moral and efficient.

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I guess that these ideas you come up with and write about, this is strictly an intellectual

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exercise I suppose, I mean the idea of everything private, no public services or institutions

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at all, no taxes, I mean has this ever been tried anywhere in the world, ever?

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Well, no, unfortunately, unhappily, we've had countries that have come closer to it than others.

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For example, the Fraser Institute, the rating of the economic freedom of the various nations,

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that was one of the projects I worked on when I was at the Fraser Institute.

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Hong Kong and Singapore are the freest countries in the world, and Switzerland is up there.

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And those are the ones that most closely resemble this ideal, even though they haven't reached it.

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There were some cases in Ireland and in Iceland in the 16th century or so that closely approached this.

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No, we never have really achieved it, but that's no argument against it. Look, we're all against crime and we're all against rape, right?

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And yet we've never achieved no rape and no crime and no murder, have we?

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That doesn't stop us from proposing a society free of murder, rape and theft, does it?

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Your ideas, of course, I think, are much more on the minority in Canada, I suggest to you,

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than they are in the United States, where a guy like Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman,

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has a large following, and I'm sure you're a fan of his.

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Oh, actually, I've just invited Ron Paul.

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He's going to be speaking at my college, Loyola University, New Orleans, and I'm one of his advisors.

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Yes, I'm a big fan of his, but there is a libertarian movement in Canada also.

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The Libertarian Party gets its 1 or 2 percent of the vote, and the Libertarian Party in the U.S. doesn't do much better than that. Oh, it gets 3 or 4 percent of the vote. Ron Paul, by the way, did once run for president on the Libertarian ticket, and he got his usual 3 or 4 percent. He made great inroads when he ran as a Republican, but he certainly is a Libertarian, and of all politicians that you might have heard their name of, he's certainly the one closest to my views.

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This is libertarian economist Walter Block, got some calls for you Walter.

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I remember when I was a young guy at school I once read a book called The Fountainhead.

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Ah, magnificent, magnificent book.

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It didn't, and it was like a lot of young people would check that book out sometimes,

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maybe not so much these days, I don't know.

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But I remember reading it and being somewhat intrigued or interested.

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It did not change my life, but Anne Rand kind of changed your life though, right?

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Well, you know, there's a modern library or some librarian-type group of listing of the top hundred books, and Ayn Rand has got four out of the top ten.

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I think Atlas Shrugged is second, and The Fountainhead is third, and then there are two others, We The Living, that are seventh and eighth, something like that.

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You met her, right?

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Oh, yes. I wouldn't say I was a buddy of hers, but she was certainly a mentor of mine, and it's because of her and her colleague Nathaniel Brannon that I became a libertarian.

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at one time I was a pinko New York City Jew socialist, which is a redundancy.

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I'm just kidding.

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And then you went to one of her lectures, I understand.

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Yes.

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And that was the turning point.

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Well, I had private discussions with her and Nathaniel Brennan, and I went to many of her lectures.

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I'm not a Randian, but I am very sympathetic to her, and I wasn't so much of a fan of her movement,

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The movement, which I think is a bit cultish, because if you disagree with her on anything, you're going to get kicked out, very brutal, but I still revere her, her writings. I don't favor the movement so much, but I'm a big fan of her and her writings.

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Okay, let's take some calls in the open line now. Alex, hi.

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I support what you're saying. I'm totally in favor of smaller government, lower taxation. You're not going to find any sympathetic support here in Canada.

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Canadians support, from the time they go to school, their condition to accept a giant, overwhelming, overburdening, stifling government.

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This is the way we live up here. It's disgusting. I bang my head against the wall every day.

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I will pay way too much taxes, and the services are getting worse, and they're being diminished.

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It's just a bad scene up here, so maybe you can get some better luck taking care of the

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states and pushing the movement down there.

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Thanks for the call.

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I think we definitely have a different cultural outlook on government, perhaps in our country

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than in the United States.

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What do you think, Walter?

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Seymour Martin-Lipsud has written several books on Canadian-U.S. comparatives, and he

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bases it on the Loyalists who were sort of more

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pro-king in 1776 coming to Canada.

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I think he's right. The Libertarian Party does much better in the U.S. than in Canada.

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But there is something, I mean,

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you know, talking about the overburdening that this caller mentioned, the

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serfs during the age of serfdom, only had a

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work two or three days a week for the master,

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and yet the Frasers to Tax Freedom Day now shows that it's three and a half, four days

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a week that we have to work for our surf masters in Ottawa and in Victoria.

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Are you telling me the surfs were better off?

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Well, no, obviously not. They weren't better off. They lived two, three hundred years ago when

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technology wasn't good. But I'm just saying that the proportion of their income

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that they had to give to their masters was less than the proportion that we now have to give.

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We've only got one minute left, Pat, hi.

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Yeah, there's a reason why you get the same percentage of votes as the rhino parties because

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you both have kind of wacky ideas and people understand that they're wacky.

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My question is, do you believe in democracy?

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Because democracy is where we entrust the government with our money, and if we don't

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like the way they spend the money, we get to kick them out every four years.

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Okay, Walter, you've got 30 seconds to prove you're not a wacko.

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Well, I'm not sure I want to prove I'm not.

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I'm happy with the wacko, at least if that means minority position. Look, Hitler came

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into power as a result of a democratic vote, and that doesn't give the imprimatur to what

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he did. There is such a thing as turning the majority, just because a lot of people agree

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to something doesn't make it right or efficient.

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Thank you for being on the show today.

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I have spoken.

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You have indeed. Thanks a lot for coming on.

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Thanks, Pat.

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I appreciate it. Walter Block, Loyola University.