WEBVTT NOTE Binary Intervention: Taxation II 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.320 Before I get into the topic for today, I had a few preliminary remarks. 2 00:00:04.320 --> 00:00:09.880 I know that there'll be formal thank yous, but I just wanted to express my thanks to Lou and Christy 3 00:00:09.880 --> 00:00:13.720 and the Mises Institute staff, to Alice Lilly and all the donors, 4 00:00:13.720 --> 00:00:17.960 especially to Floyd Lilly, who gave a speech on, you know, three seconds notice. 5 00:00:17.960 --> 00:00:20.440 That was magnificent. 6 00:00:20.440 --> 00:00:23.200 I want to talk about errors. 7 00:00:23.200 --> 00:00:27.160 I'm a big believer in rooting out all errors. 8 00:00:27.160 --> 00:00:31.660 I think that this is good for its own sake because we want to build a beautiful edifice, 9 00:00:31.660 --> 00:00:37.780 we want to build a Rembrandt or whatever, and also I think that the stronger the austro-libertarian 10 00:00:37.780 --> 00:00:43.440 edifice is, the better the implications for liberty. 11 00:00:43.440 --> 00:00:50.240 When speakers give speeches extemporaneously based on notes, you get errors, slips of the 12 00:00:50.240 --> 00:00:52.640 tongue, what have you. 13 00:00:52.640 --> 00:00:55.160 Joe made one, I discussed this with him. 14 00:00:55.160 --> 00:01:03.160 He said that the weather is an uncontrollable thing, and in our view, Joe certainly agrees with me this, 15 00:01:03.160 --> 00:01:07.160 the weather is really government's fault. 16 00:01:07.160 --> 00:01:11.160 Look, they take half the GDP, roughly, and they've done it for decades. 17 00:01:11.160 --> 00:01:19.160 If they hadn't taken half the GDP, the cloud seeding and all that technology would have been progressed a little bit more than it is now. 18 00:01:19.160 --> 00:01:24.160 You know that in 500 years there'll be no typhoons or earthquakes or any of that stuff. 19 00:01:24.160 --> 00:01:31.160 We might have saved some lives and, you know, made the rain come in between 2 and 4 in the morning or something like that. 20 00:01:31.160 --> 00:01:34.160 So weather is not an uncontrollable thing, it's government's fault. 21 00:01:34.160 --> 00:01:39.160 I've made a few errors myself, I think much more serious. 22 00:01:39.160 --> 00:01:43.160 One of them is I screwed up the difference between hypocrisy and a performative contradiction. 23 00:01:43.160 --> 00:01:47.160 Hypocrisy is saying, you know, charity is good but you don't give to charity. 24 00:01:47.160 --> 00:01:54.160 I'll give to charity a performative contradiction, I am dead, and not I am dead tired, just that I am dead, 25 00:01:54.160 --> 00:01:59.160 would be that the very saying of it is undermined by the saying of it. 26 00:01:59.160 --> 00:02:04.160 So there's a difference between a performative contradiction and hypocrisy. 27 00:02:04.160 --> 00:02:08.160 Another thing I screwed up on royally was the secession. 28 00:02:08.160 --> 00:02:12.160 Marion asked me a question and I really didn't understand the sophistication of it, 29 00:02:12.160 --> 00:02:16.160 and it was really unfair of him to do it because he's more of an expert in this than I am. 30 00:02:16.160 --> 00:02:17.860 I wrote a PhD dissertation on that. 31 00:02:17.860 --> 00:02:20.800 For me, secession is, you know, one of many, many issues 32 00:02:20.800 --> 00:02:23.200 and he's more of an expert on that. 33 00:02:23.200 --> 00:02:24.220 The way I see it now, 34 00:02:24.220 --> 00:02:27.800 and I discussed this with my buddy Roderick Long, 35 00:02:27.800 --> 00:02:29.000 states have no rights. 36 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:34.000 So the big state has no right to allow a little state to form, 37 00:02:34.400 --> 00:02:38.680 a little state has no right to secede, individual people do. 38 00:02:38.680 --> 00:02:41.040 And as a matter of practicality, 39 00:02:41.040 --> 00:02:44.080 you never usually get gigantic differences 40 00:02:44.080 --> 00:02:46.640 between the libertarianness of the big one 41 00:02:46.640 --> 00:02:48.480 and the libertarianness of the little one. 42 00:02:48.480 --> 00:02:50.900 But you could imagine one where the overall state 43 00:02:50.900 --> 00:02:52.380 was pretty good, but the little state 44 00:02:52.380 --> 00:02:54.080 that was seceding was horrible. 45 00:02:54.080 --> 00:02:57.080 Nazis or commies or something like that. 46 00:02:57.080 --> 00:03:00.380 And what Roderick says is nobody has any rights here, 47 00:03:00.380 --> 00:03:03.000 states don't, but individuals do. 48 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:07.240 And if the individuals secede, which they have a right to do, 49 00:03:07.240 --> 00:03:10.680 and then they violate the rights of the smaller group 50 00:03:10.680 --> 00:03:13.440 within that smaller seceding state, 51 00:03:13.440 --> 00:03:25.760 Well, then we should send in a Lincoln Brigade or something like that, well-named because they were a bunch of Marxists, the ones that went into the 1936 Spanish Civil War. 52 00:03:25.760 --> 00:03:29.920 And we send individual people in, or individual people just go in and help. 53 00:03:29.920 --> 00:03:38.480 Or you make some sort of deal when Quebec wants to secede from Canada, you say, sure, but when Montreal wants to secede from you, what do you say about them, Apple? 54 00:03:38.480 --> 00:03:42.360 So you try to promote some consistency. 55 00:03:42.360 --> 00:03:47.360 The difficulty with these questions, you get a lot of second-bestness and you get a lot 56 00:03:47.360 --> 00:03:51.600 of empirical issues where praxeology just can't apply. 57 00:03:51.600 --> 00:03:58.600 So there are rational people, all of whom subscribe to the basic premises, sometimes 58 00:03:58.600 --> 00:04:03.120 disagree. 59 00:04:03.120 --> 00:04:08.760 Another thing I wanted to mention, I didn't think that, who was it that asked about professors 60 00:04:08.760 --> 00:04:11.560 who teach at public schools? 61 00:04:11.560 --> 00:04:17.060 I think that the answer, I'd like to give a different answer or what I think is a better answer. 62 00:04:17.060 --> 00:04:26.060 I think that the approximation, the first approximation of tax payers versus tax recipients is a very good one. 63 00:04:26.060 --> 00:04:29.060 But I think we can do a little bit better than that. 64 00:04:29.060 --> 00:04:37.060 The way I look at this, and I've published several articles on this, well I've published several articles on everything so there's no exception. 65 00:04:37.060 --> 00:04:39.060 The way I look at this is through the Nuremberg trial. 66 00:04:39.060 --> 00:04:44.060 Suppose the libertarians had a Nuremberg trial, what would we do? 67 00:04:44.060 --> 00:04:49.060 And I think that all the tax recipients would be in a dock, but some of them would be innocent. 68 00:04:49.060 --> 00:04:55.060 For example, free enterprise teachers who teach in public schools such as me. 69 00:04:55.060 --> 00:04:58.060 And the way I look at it is this. 70 00:04:58.060 --> 00:05:02.060 What I have here is two axes. 71 00:05:02.060 --> 00:05:06.060 One axis, the leader, the middle guy, the bottom guy. 72 00:05:06.060 --> 00:05:10.860 And then I have a bad to worse axis. In other words, this is horrible stuff. 73 00:05:10.860 --> 00:05:14.660 This is okay, but it's bad when the government does. 74 00:05:14.660 --> 00:05:19.860 In other words, we would have education in libraries and museums in the free society. 75 00:05:19.860 --> 00:05:24.460 So that's the least bad. The very bad would be the Fed, because we wouldn't have a Fed. 76 00:05:24.460 --> 00:05:28.860 Even worse would be public highways, because they kill 40,000 people a year. 77 00:05:28.860 --> 00:05:32.060 And much worse than that would be a concentration camp. 78 00:05:32.060 --> 00:05:35.020 So in other words, we have an axis of horribleness. 79 00:05:35.020 --> 00:05:38.420 To the right is more horrible, to the left is less horrible. 80 00:05:38.420 --> 00:05:39.460 And here are the leaders. 81 00:05:39.460 --> 00:05:43.500 And then I have this sort of a demand curve, if you will. 82 00:05:43.500 --> 00:05:47.980 Namely, the very top people, the education secretary 83 00:05:47.980 --> 00:05:50.140 and the undersecretary, like Bill Evers. 84 00:05:50.140 --> 00:05:51.700 I think he's the under. 85 00:05:51.700 --> 00:05:54.180 Those people would be guilty of something, 86 00:05:54.180 --> 00:05:58.220 whereas the ordinary person who works in a library 87 00:05:58.220 --> 00:06:01.980 would not be severely dealt with. 88 00:06:01.980 --> 00:06:09.460 The chief of the Fed would be in trouble, but the people who wash the bathrooms in the Fed would not be a simile for the highways. 89 00:06:09.460 --> 00:06:13.220 Some guy who sweeps the highways would be okay, but the leaders of it. 90 00:06:13.220 --> 00:06:17.380 And I'm not sure about even people who push a broom in the concentration camp. 91 00:06:17.380 --> 00:06:19.700 That's why I put the thing crossways. 92 00:06:19.700 --> 00:06:25.260 Now, I do have a Marxist professor and a pre-enterprise professor, and it matters what you're teaching. 93 00:06:25.260 --> 00:06:31.180 Now, of course, it's a little self-serving because I would be down here because I taught at public universities. 94 00:06:31.180 --> 00:06:34.780 But the Marxist professors who taught at public universities would be in trouble. 95 00:06:34.780 --> 00:06:40.460 If they taught at private universities, this would be free speech. 96 00:06:40.460 --> 00:06:42.620 So this is just an alternative way of looking at it. 97 00:06:42.620 --> 00:06:49.900 These are very controversial areas, but I thought I'd pipe in and give what I thought would be a good answer to that. 98 00:06:49.900 --> 00:06:59.020 Okay, with these preliminaries, I now want to talk about the subject to which I've been assigned. 99 00:06:59.020 --> 00:07:07.020 And that's taxes. Jeff Herbiner and I are sort of partners on this. He did like the first half of this and I do the second. 100 00:07:07.020 --> 00:07:13.020 I'm very much given to diagrams. Somehow a picture says a thousand words. I see things easier in diagrams. 101 00:07:13.020 --> 00:07:22.020 So I'll offer this diagram. This is the way most public finance courses are taught, 102 00:07:22.020 --> 00:07:28.020 where you have progressive, proportional and regressive. And over here you have 15 different kinds of taxes. 103 00:07:28.020 --> 00:07:34.420 And the usual course is you go over each tax and you compare progressive, proportional and regressive. 104 00:07:34.420 --> 00:07:43.720 Sometimes, rarely, you get a course where you just go the first third of the semester, you take all progressives and compare them and then all proportionals and compare them. 105 00:07:43.720 --> 00:07:50.320 You get, at the end, you cover everything, but that's sort of the way most public finance courses are organized. 106 00:07:50.320 --> 00:07:57.320 Here is a way of looking at progressive, proportional and regressive. 107 00:07:57.320 --> 00:07:59.320 Over here I have Y for income. 108 00:07:59.320 --> 00:08:03.320 Over here I have the tax rate and over here the tax revenue. 109 00:08:03.320 --> 00:08:06.320 Progressive goes this way, proportional is the flat tax. 110 00:08:06.320 --> 00:08:09.320 Regressive is flat or decreasing. 111 00:08:09.320 --> 00:08:14.320 And this wouldn't be bending backwards, but I couldn't make it better than that. 112 00:08:14.320 --> 00:08:22.320 So, it would be increasing at an increasing rate, increasing at a proportional rate, or increasing at a decreasing rate. 113 00:08:22.320 --> 00:08:27.320 So, these are just ways of looking at the tax business. 114 00:08:27.320 --> 00:08:31.320 Okay, what does Murray have to say about taxes? 115 00:08:31.320 --> 00:08:33.320 Boy, that's a stupid question, isn't it? 116 00:08:33.320 --> 00:08:35.320 He's not in favor of them. 117 00:08:35.320 --> 00:08:41.320 And the word, if I had to pick one word to summarize his view on taxes, he's relentless. 118 00:08:41.320 --> 00:08:47.200 sort of the way that that Bob Murphy said that Boehm-Bawerk was on fallacious 119 00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:51.560 interest rates he just sort of goes over and over you saw almost you're almost 120 00:08:51.560 --> 00:08:55.160 cheering for the underdog I mean you know if you sort of favor the underdog 121 00:08:55.160 --> 00:08:58.040 when you read Boehm-Bawerk you sort of say well you know maybe these guys aren't 122 00:08:58.040 --> 00:09:02.480 so bad so as I'm reading this I'm saying well maybe taxes aren't really so bad I 123 00:09:02.480 --> 00:09:07.160 mean it's a little sick but and I came to my right senses pretty quickly but 124 00:09:07.160 --> 00:09:14.560 But Murray just pulverized it, it's magnificent to read this stuff. 125 00:09:14.560 --> 00:09:18.580 The first point he makes, and again this is a continuation of what Jeff said so I'm not 126 00:09:18.580 --> 00:09:21.960 going to repeat what he said. 127 00:09:21.960 --> 00:09:28.520 The conservative economists are very biased in favor of saving, you know, if any tax lowers 128 00:09:28.520 --> 00:09:31.120 saving they get all upset. 129 00:09:31.120 --> 00:09:33.600 And Murray is saying, you know, what's so great about saving, I mean not that we're 130 00:09:33.600 --> 00:09:37.040 We're against saving, but the ideal is not to promote saving. 131 00:09:37.040 --> 00:09:38.800 We're not saving uberallis. 132 00:09:38.800 --> 00:09:43.400 It's rather you want to have the proportion of saving and consumption that is compatible 133 00:09:43.400 --> 00:09:45.600 with time preferences of the people. 134 00:09:45.600 --> 00:09:51.840 And you don't want to have less saving, but you don't want to have more saving either. 135 00:09:51.840 --> 00:09:54.160 He asked, do the poor rob the rich in taxes? 136 00:09:54.160 --> 00:09:59.120 And he says, no, the state robs both, which I think is very good. 137 00:09:59.120 --> 00:10:03.320 He makes a very good point about, you know, all the... 138 00:10:03.320 --> 00:10:07.800 If you look at the conservative economists, you know, progressive taxes are horrible, 139 00:10:07.800 --> 00:10:13.400 and proportional taxes or the flat tax is supposed to be the free enterprise idea. 140 00:10:13.400 --> 00:10:19.240 You know, that if you favor free enterprise, then you favor flat taxes or proportional 141 00:10:19.240 --> 00:10:20.240 taxes. 142 00:10:20.240 --> 00:10:21.240 And Murray says, this is ridiculous. 143 00:10:21.240 --> 00:10:28.440 Look, which would you rather have, a flat tax of 90% or a very progressive tax where 144 00:10:28.440 --> 00:10:33.600 The lowest income paid one-tenth of one percent, and the highest income paid two percent of taxes. 145 00:10:33.600 --> 00:10:37.800 It would be very progressive, but it would be very low. 146 00:10:37.800 --> 00:10:45.240 And Murray says, of course, we would favor the less harm, and the less harm means less government tax take. 147 00:10:45.240 --> 00:10:54.320 Talks about tax illusion, which is similar to money illusion, which is people think that they base their decisions on their gross income, which is nonsense. 148 00:10:54.320 --> 00:10:57.960 Rather, they base their decisions on the money that they actually get. 149 00:10:57.960 --> 00:11:02.920 They're not fooled by having a big gross income and their take-home pay is much less. 150 00:11:02.920 --> 00:11:06.720 They base their decisions on their take-home pay. 151 00:11:06.720 --> 00:11:11.160 Okay, now we get to Henry George. 152 00:11:11.160 --> 00:11:15.480 Before we get to Henry George, I have to acquaint you with a Murray Rothbard rule. 153 00:11:15.480 --> 00:11:17.880 The Murray Rothbard, he has many Murray Rothbard rules, 154 00:11:17.880 --> 00:11:23.640 but one of the Murray Rothbard rules is that people, that is other people, not us guys, we're the good guys. 155 00:11:23.640 --> 00:11:28.040 Other people specialize in what they're the worst on. 156 00:11:28.040 --> 00:11:30.600 For example, Milton Friedman is really sound as a bell. 157 00:11:30.600 --> 00:11:37.840 He's wonderful on minimum wage, rent control, tariffs, the AMA, you know, like medical licensing. 158 00:11:37.840 --> 00:11:39.120 He's really, really good. 159 00:11:39.120 --> 00:11:40.120 What does he specialize in? 160 00:11:40.120 --> 00:11:41.120 Any of them? 161 00:11:41.120 --> 00:11:42.120 No. 162 00:11:42.120 --> 00:11:43.120 He barely mentions them. 163 00:11:43.120 --> 00:11:46.460 Instead, where did he leave most of his money in his estate? 164 00:11:46.460 --> 00:11:50.200 To the voucher plan where, you know, he's not that good. 165 00:11:50.200 --> 00:11:52.840 What does he otherwise specialize in? 166 00:11:52.840 --> 00:11:57.960 Murray policy, business cycles, where he, from our point of view, is not good at all. 167 00:11:57.960 --> 00:12:04.360 It's very similar with Henry George. Henry George was magnificent on everything, except 168 00:12:04.360 --> 00:12:09.640 the single tax, the land tax. There he was horrible. And what does he specialize in? 169 00:12:09.640 --> 00:12:13.440 On the single tax. He's known only for that. Other than that, he was a laissez-faire, free 170 00:12:13.440 --> 00:12:21.000 enterprise good guy. So what's going on here? Murray says the one good thing about Henry 171 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:35.000 Murray George's tax scheme is that he would eliminate all of the taxes and just have a single tax on land and Murray likes the first part, eliminate all of the taxes and he doesn't like the tax on land. 172 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:45.000 He makes the initial point that the tax can't be shifted, it gets capitalized, it goes back to the factors of production and land is a preeminent factor of production so it can't be shifted to anyone else. 173 00:12:45.000 --> 00:12:51.000 The people who it is put on, there'll be no incidents to anyone else, they'll end up paying it. 174 00:12:51.000 --> 00:12:54.000 But then he asks, well how do you establish ground rent? 175 00:12:54.000 --> 00:13:00.000 I mean, if they're going to take 100% of it and I'm a landowner, why should I charge you anything? 176 00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:02.000 I might as well charge you nothing because I'm not going to keep anything. 177 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:04.000 So what should the tax be on? 178 00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:10.000 In other words, the idea is my land is worth a lot and in a free enterprise system would be 10,000 a month rent. 179 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:11.000 Fine. 180 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:14.000 But why should I charge you that if I know that they're going to just take it? 181 00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:16.500 I charge you zero, so I'll pay zero tax. 182 00:13:16.500 --> 00:13:19.500 So he says that the zero tax won't get any revenue, 183 00:13:19.500 --> 00:13:21.500 which I guess is good. 184 00:13:21.500 --> 00:13:23.200 Maybe we should convert to the single tax. 185 00:13:23.200 --> 00:13:26.400 No, I'm not serious here. 186 00:13:26.400 --> 00:13:33.100 Okay, so what's the deal with, why does he hate, 187 00:13:33.100 --> 00:13:34.600 why pick on poor land? 188 00:13:34.600 --> 00:13:37.100 I mean, land is inoffensive. 189 00:13:37.100 --> 00:13:39.700 Henry George has this thing, well, idle land is no good. 190 00:13:39.700 --> 00:13:42.600 It's the devil's workshop or something like that. 191 00:13:42.600 --> 00:13:46.400 And Murray makes the point that it's idle for a reason, and there are several reasons. 192 00:13:46.400 --> 00:13:50.400 One of the reasons is that we've got more land than labor, so we can't use all land. 193 00:13:50.400 --> 00:13:54.800 I mean, there's land up in Alaska or in the Rockies that nobody uses. 194 00:13:54.800 --> 00:13:58.400 And happily, because if it was the other way around, you'd have unemployed people. 195 00:13:58.400 --> 00:14:01.200 Better to have unemployed land than unemployed people. 196 00:14:01.200 --> 00:14:06.000 And the other reason, even for land in a downtown area, sometimes you'll see an empty lot, 197 00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:10.300 which is obviously not sub-marginal land. 198 00:14:10.300 --> 00:14:16.460 People are waiting to figure out who to give the land to, to most maximize revenues. 199 00:14:16.460 --> 00:14:20.860 We don't have instantaneous knowledge, the entrepreneur of land, the land owner, doesn't 200 00:14:20.860 --> 00:14:26.580 know how he can maximize the value of his holdings and he has to try and figure it out 201 00:14:26.580 --> 00:14:29.100 and during that time there's idle land. 202 00:14:29.100 --> 00:14:34.540 Sometimes you see idle stores or idle apartments, not, you don't, idle hotel rooms, you don't 203 00:14:34.540 --> 00:14:42.500 can have 100% occupancy of everything and there's nothing wrong with that. 204 00:14:42.500 --> 00:14:47.080 While I'm on idle land, I want to take a little bit of a detour and talk about immigration 205 00:14:47.080 --> 00:14:51.780 because my view on immigration, I think, is very related to this idle land business. 206 00:14:51.780 --> 00:14:56.820 See, the way I figure it on the immigration issue, and by the way, immigration is a very, 207 00:14:56.820 --> 00:15:01.620 very divisive issue, Murray, when he initially wrote about immigration, was a free borders 208 00:15:01.620 --> 00:15:16.620 and his later writing about it was a closed borders type. Hans Hoppe, who I revere as an Austrian and libertarian theorist, is a closed borders person and there are others among them myself who are open borders. 209 00:15:16.620 --> 00:15:28.620 What's my view? My view is we should have open borders, complete open borders and anyone can come in here and nobody should be stopping them as long as there's one square inch of private land. 210 00:15:28.620 --> 00:15:35.420 Namely, if you want to keep the Gaia out, if you want to keep the outsiders out, what 211 00:15:35.420 --> 00:15:41.820 you do is you privatize everything, privatize the roads, privatize the parks, privatize 212 00:15:41.820 --> 00:15:47.660 everything, and then if anyone comes in, it'll be an invasion or a trespass. 213 00:15:47.660 --> 00:15:52.340 You see, what Hans says is, look, there are three things that enter into international 214 00:15:52.340 --> 00:15:53.340 trade. 215 00:15:53.340 --> 00:15:57.720 One is the free movement of goods, the free movement of investment, and the free movement 216 00:15:57.720 --> 00:16:04.360 of Labor or People. Well, with regard to goods, there are two agreeing partners, the exporter 217 00:16:04.360 --> 00:16:10.000 and the importer. With regard to investment, there are, again, two people who agree, the 218 00:16:10.000 --> 00:16:14.760 investor and the investee. But, Hans says, but in the case of immigration, there's no 219 00:16:14.760 --> 00:16:20.720 such thing. Somebody just washes up on our shores with no buy or leave from anyone. Well, 220 00:16:20.720 --> 00:16:29.720 Look, if there's empty land in the middle of Colorado, in the middle of, you know, Utah, Montana, 221 00:16:29.720 --> 00:16:37.720 what violation is created by somebody coming in with a helicopter and landing on that un-homesteaded land in the middle of Alaska? 222 00:16:37.720 --> 00:16:40.720 What libertarian crime did they commit? 223 00:16:40.720 --> 00:16:48.720 The problem I had, and I'll have to revise my thinking and my writing on this, is with regard to sub-marginal land. 224 00:16:48.720 --> 00:16:54.320 The point is, land is sub-marginal in a certain context, and in other contexts it's not sub-marginal. 225 00:16:54.320 --> 00:16:59.720 In other words, if there are people desperate to flee from foreign dictator types, 226 00:16:59.720 --> 00:17:07.120 land in the middle of Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains, 227 00:17:07.120 --> 00:17:11.320 won't be sub-marginal even though it was in the absence of them. 228 00:17:11.320 --> 00:17:14.520 So what I have to do is modify my claim and say, 229 00:17:14.520 --> 00:17:19.040 As long as there's one inch of non-submarginal land around, 230 00:17:19.040 --> 00:17:20.160 we should have open borders. 231 00:17:20.160 --> 00:17:22.880 So if you don't want people to inundate us, 232 00:17:22.880 --> 00:17:25.560 just privatize everything and then it'll be a trespass 233 00:17:25.560 --> 00:17:27.440 unless they come in with permission 234 00:17:27.440 --> 00:17:30.200 and then it's compatible with libertarianism. 235 00:17:30.200 --> 00:17:32.680 So this is a connection between the immigration 236 00:17:32.680 --> 00:17:34.640 and the Georgist view on land. 237 00:17:36.600 --> 00:17:38.360 Okay, Murray says that Georgists ignore 238 00:17:38.360 --> 00:17:41.000 the importance of time in production. 239 00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:46.800 What China and India lack is not land. They've got plenty of sub-marginal land. 240 00:17:46.800 --> 00:17:51.200 What they lack is time or investment, development investment. 241 00:17:51.200 --> 00:17:59.800 Land speculation is good. It's trying to get property into the hands of the people who can use it best. 242 00:17:59.800 --> 00:18:04.900 The Georgians don't like land speculation because it's non-tangible. 243 00:18:04.900 --> 00:18:10.500 But there was a time when the economic community was against services because they were non-tangible. 244 00:18:10.500 --> 00:18:23.500 There was a time, the physiocrats I think, I might be wrong on this because I'm no historian of thought that they thought that only farmland was good and anything else was questionable. 245 00:18:23.500 --> 00:18:33.500 And Murray's point is that anything between voluntary consenting adults in an economic setting is legitimate, certainly including land speculation. 246 00:18:33.500 --> 00:18:46.500 Okay, now we get to canons of just taxation, and this, you know, I was once asked to write a book by my former employer at the Fraser Institute, The Goodness of Government, 247 00:18:46.500 --> 00:18:54.500 and I said it's going to be a very short book. Well, you know, if I were asked to write about just taxation, I would say, well, I can write about it, and you know, here's a blank page. 248 00:18:54.500 --> 00:19:03.860 Murray stretches it out. He is relentless. He goes over every jot and 249 00:19:03.860 --> 00:19:08.380 tittle of every possible objection or every claim that there is such a thing as 250 00:19:08.380 --> 00:19:12.380 just taxation and he bats them all out of the park. I don't know that I'll have 251 00:19:12.380 --> 00:19:16.700 time to go over all of them but to just give you a flavor of what he's doing, let 252 00:19:16.700 --> 00:19:23.300 me proceed. Okay, so first we're seeking after the just tax and he makes an 253 00:19:23.300 --> 00:19:27.700 an analogy between the just tax on the one hand and the just price on the other hand. 254 00:19:27.700 --> 00:19:31.580 And what is the just price? Well, the just price is the market price. So if the just 255 00:19:31.580 --> 00:19:36.060 price is the market price, then the just tax should be the market tax, if you follow that 256 00:19:36.060 --> 00:19:41.340 syllogism. Of course, there is no such thing as a market tax because in the market you 257 00:19:41.340 --> 00:19:45.580 can't have a tax because in the market it's voluntary trade and the tax is compulsory 258 00:19:45.580 --> 00:19:52.160 trade so you've got a little bit of a contradiction here. So Murray is saying before searching 259 00:19:52.160 --> 00:19:59.720 Looking for the just tax, justify taxation at the outset, and if you can't justify taxation 260 00:19:59.720 --> 00:20:02.560 at the outset, how are you going to find a just tax? 261 00:20:02.560 --> 00:20:06.560 It's a shimmer. 262 00:20:06.560 --> 00:20:13.160 Okay, so what's the first candidate that he is going to bat out of the park? 263 00:20:13.160 --> 00:20:14.160 CCCC. 264 00:20:14.160 --> 00:20:20.860 I sometimes remember things with those ways, collection costs, convenience, and certainty. 265 00:20:20.860 --> 00:20:23.520 Collection Cost, Convenience and Certainty. 266 00:20:23.520 --> 00:20:27.820 The idea here is that if collection costs are minimized, if tax is more convenient and 267 00:20:27.820 --> 00:20:30.620 if it's certain, then it's a better tax than not. 268 00:20:30.620 --> 00:20:36.100 And Murray says, reducing collection costs, well the bureaucrat, if you reduce collection 269 00:20:36.100 --> 00:20:39.980 costs, the bureaucrat doesn't have a job and he says, you know, he favors higher collection 270 00:20:39.980 --> 00:20:47.860 costs and who can say him nay because you can't have interpersonal comparisons of utility 271 00:20:47.860 --> 00:20:51.660 And the idea is that if there's anyone who objects on a reasonable ground, 272 00:20:51.660 --> 00:21:03.360 then you can't unambiguously conclude that collection cost reduction is a good thing or a thing in the direction of a just tax. 273 00:21:03.360 --> 00:21:06.760 What about convenience? Well, he says the more convenient, the more taxes they'll be. 274 00:21:06.760 --> 00:21:10.560 And since we're against taxes in the first place, let's make it less convenient. 275 00:21:10.560 --> 00:21:12.260 Let's make it really difficult. 276 00:21:12.260 --> 00:21:19.260 You know, none of this tax simplification thing where you just sort of figure out your tax on a postcard and you send it in. 277 00:21:19.260 --> 00:21:25.260 Let's make it impossible for anyone to figure out their taxes and nobody will be able to figure it out. 278 00:21:25.260 --> 00:21:32.260 Here I have to mention the withholding tax and my favorite whipping boy or punching bag, my man Milton Friedman. 279 00:21:32.260 --> 00:21:35.260 Milton Friedman came up with the withholding tax. What's the withholding tax? 280 00:21:35.260 --> 00:21:41.260 The withholding tax is, see without the withholding tax all of your taxes would be due on April 15th. 281 00:21:41.260 --> 00:21:51.260 And if you make $100,000 a year and your tax burden is $40,000 a year, you've got to send in a check for $40,000 on April 15th, and that's going to hurt. 282 00:21:51.260 --> 00:21:55.260 People are going to say, whoa, $40,000 I give to those rascals? 283 00:21:55.260 --> 00:22:00.260 But instead what they do is they withhold it every week, a couple of bucks, so it's painless. 284 00:22:00.260 --> 00:22:08.260 And sometimes they withhold a little bit more than $40,000, so the government actually gives you a refund and you say, oh, isn't the government great? 285 00:22:08.260 --> 00:22:15.260 It gave me 3,000 bucks back. They're not so bad, contrary to the, you know, these weirdos who were saying government is bad. 286 00:22:15.260 --> 00:22:17.260 That's the withholding tax. 287 00:22:17.260 --> 00:22:21.260 Milton Friedman was very active in creating this. 288 00:22:21.260 --> 00:22:23.260 To his credit, he later apologized for it. 289 00:22:23.260 --> 00:22:28.260 But can you imagine Murray Rothbard going down to Washington, D.C. and working on a withholding tax? 290 00:22:28.260 --> 00:22:32.260 I mean, it just sort of boggles the imagination. 291 00:22:32.260 --> 00:22:39.260 Certainty, Murray says, well, if it's certain, then you can't bribe, and if the bribe is less than the tax, this is good. 292 00:22:39.260 --> 00:22:43.260 So we don't want certainty, we want uncertainty in taxes. 293 00:22:43.260 --> 00:22:45.260 How about tax evasion? 294 00:22:45.260 --> 00:22:51.260 Now there's this guy, I think it's Arthur Seldin, but it might be Arthur Shenfield, who wrote a book called Tax Avoision. 295 00:22:51.260 --> 00:22:54.260 Not tax evasion, but tax avoision. 296 00:22:54.260 --> 00:23:00.260 What he means by that is, is it legitimate to take every deduction you can to hire an accountant 297 00:23:00.260 --> 00:23:06.260 So you hire an accountant so you can reduce your tax burden legitimately, and he goes out on a limb and says yes. 298 00:23:06.260 --> 00:23:14.260 I mean, isn't that radical? I'm kidding, it's not very radical, and this is what passes for, you know, radical free enterprise in some quarters. 299 00:23:14.260 --> 00:23:22.260 Murray is taking a very much more radical view, not that it's legitimate to reduce your taxes by ways that the government allows, 300 00:23:22.260 --> 00:23:26.260 but that it's legitimate to reduce your taxes by any ways because it's a theft. 301 00:23:26.260 --> 00:23:29.540 And just as you don't have to tell the burglar where your jewels are, 302 00:23:29.540 --> 00:23:33.540 you don't have to tell the taxman what he wants to hear. 303 00:23:33.540 --> 00:23:38.020 Okay, the next one is the distribution of the tax burden. 304 00:23:38.020 --> 00:23:41.940 And the so-called canon of just taxation 305 00:23:41.940 --> 00:23:47.460 is uniformity of treatment. And uniformity of treatment has a certain cachet because, 306 00:23:47.460 --> 00:23:50.980 you know, equality before the law is a legitimate 307 00:23:50.980 --> 00:23:54.220 way of looking at things. Well, if you have equality before the law, 308 00:23:54.220 --> 00:23:57.020 Shouldn't You Have Equality Before the Taxman? 309 00:23:57.020 --> 00:24:01.820 The taxman is, in other words, there's an analogy there. 310 00:24:01.820 --> 00:24:07.420 And Murray says equal treatment, that means equal slavery. 311 00:24:07.420 --> 00:24:13.220 It means that if somehow in 1862 we could come down to Alabama 312 00:24:13.220 --> 00:24:18.020 and have a helicopter and free 3% of the slaves, 313 00:24:18.020 --> 00:24:21.420 that this would be illegitimate because we're not treating all the slaves equally. 314 00:24:21.420 --> 00:24:26.420 Equally, we're only freeing some of them, 3%, and 97% we're not freeing. 315 00:24:26.420 --> 00:24:30.420 And obviously it's better to free 3% of the slaves than no percent of the slaves, 316 00:24:30.420 --> 00:24:35.420 but that is a violation of equal treatment because now you're not treating the slaves equally. 317 00:24:35.420 --> 00:24:42.420 So equal treatment is not the be-all and end-all of ethical analysis. 318 00:24:42.420 --> 00:24:46.420 The next one is tax exemptions are evil. 319 00:24:46.420 --> 00:24:50.420 Everyone should pay the tax, we shouldn't have loopholes, we shouldn't have tax exemptions, 320 00:24:50.420 --> 00:24:55.580 because they're really a subsidy. Now I worked for this guy Mike Walker at the 321 00:24:55.580 --> 00:24:59.420 Fraser Institute and he had this view and he and I got into a little spat over 322 00:24:59.420 --> 00:25:06.820 and I was saying, you know, tax exemptions are just not a subsidy. They're 323 00:25:06.820 --> 00:25:09.460 only a subsidy if you think the government legitimately owns all the 324 00:25:09.460 --> 00:25:14.740 GDP and they're generously allowing you to keep some of their money. But if you 325 00:25:14.740 --> 00:25:18.140 don't think that they own the money then when they don't take it from you it's not 326 00:25:18.140 --> 00:25:21.140 The fact that they're giving you a subsidy is just that they're not taking your money. 327 00:25:21.140 --> 00:25:23.140 No, he couldn't believe this. 328 00:25:23.140 --> 00:25:26.140 We went down to Alvin Rybushka at the Hoover Institution. 329 00:25:26.140 --> 00:25:29.140 I'm not sure why Mike picked Alvin. 330 00:25:29.140 --> 00:25:31.140 Alvin would be the guru of this. 331 00:25:31.140 --> 00:25:37.140 And of course, Alvin was sensible and, you know, agreed with me, which is a tautology. 332 00:25:37.140 --> 00:25:39.140 Kidding, kidding. 333 00:25:39.140 --> 00:25:41.140 But a lot of people feel this. 334 00:25:41.140 --> 00:25:45.140 They feel that if the government is not taxing you, they're giving you a subsidy. 335 00:25:45.140 --> 00:25:50.940 But this implies that they own the whole GDP and where did they get the right to the whole GDP? 336 00:25:50.940 --> 00:25:53.700 The whole thing is sort of hard to understand. 337 00:25:53.700 --> 00:26:00.980 Murray says this is like blaming the slave for fleeing his master, 338 00:26:00.980 --> 00:26:04.940 if you think that, you know, they're giving you something. 339 00:26:04.940 --> 00:26:11.820 Okay, what's, and his answer is to extend the exemption to everyone. 340 00:26:11.820 --> 00:26:15.820 Don't blame the churches for getting a tax exemption. 341 00:26:15.820 --> 00:26:18.820 Don't say, well, the churches should pay taxes since we're paying taxes, 342 00:26:18.820 --> 00:26:22.820 rather saying, since they're not paying taxes, we're not going to pay taxes. 343 00:26:22.820 --> 00:26:25.820 Let's extend the exemption instead of reduce the exemption. 344 00:26:25.820 --> 00:26:33.820 So if I've got a new hero for my next Defending the Undefendable, the loophole-er as hero, 345 00:26:33.820 --> 00:26:37.820 the guy who creates more loopholes in taxes is a good guy. 346 00:26:37.820 --> 00:26:47.700 Okay, the next one is that he talks about the uniformity and the necessary 347 00:26:47.700 --> 00:26:52.700 distortion of all taxes. There's no such thing as a neutral tax. We move from 348 00:26:52.700 --> 00:26:57.420 automobiles to armaments. And the next point he makes, a very interesting point, 349 00:26:57.420 --> 00:27:05.220 bureaucrats cannot pay taxes. Now a bureaucrat gets a job, he's 350 00:27:05.220 --> 00:27:11.260 He's working in the Fed, he makes $100,000 a year, and he's got to pay $30,000 tax. 351 00:27:11.260 --> 00:27:13.500 And Murray says, no, no, no, he's not really paying tax. 352 00:27:13.500 --> 00:27:21.500 It's rather he's getting $70,000 salary because it's just a bookkeeping ledger domain. 353 00:27:21.500 --> 00:27:28.580 He really can't pay taxes because he's part of the criminal gang that's taking taxes. 354 00:27:28.580 --> 00:27:34.420 He says it's impossible to unambiguously define income, for example, if you're having an income 355 00:27:34.420 --> 00:27:43.420 What about imputed rent? What about imputed labor? Farm goods? Housewife? It's all arbitrary, there is no non-arbitrary way of doing these things. 356 00:27:43.420 --> 00:27:50.420 It's similar to the socialist calculation debate. If you don't have markets in these things, you can just guess about them. 357 00:27:50.420 --> 00:27:56.420 And they make arbitrary rules about what you can expense and what you can't. 358 00:27:56.420 --> 00:28:03.420 Then there's the problem of averaging of income. Some people's income is flat, other people's income goes up and down like this. 359 00:28:03.420 --> 00:28:07.860 and if you have a progressive tax the people that have this kind of a great 360 00:28:07.860 --> 00:28:10.740 variance in their income are in the worst position so you're allowed to 361 00:28:10.740 --> 00:28:14.780 average but how long should you average two years five years ten years there's 362 00:28:14.780 --> 00:28:20.620 no no right answer again okay then we have other criteria of taxes what about 363 00:28:20.620 --> 00:28:27.580 ability to pay for example and you know can you deduct your medical bills can 364 00:28:27.580 --> 00:28:33.020 you deduct food you have arbitrariness there and then he says that ability to 365 00:28:33.020 --> 00:28:39.020 The ability to pay is the Highwayman's criteria of collection. 366 00:28:39.020 --> 00:28:41.020 That's exactly what the Highwayman says. 367 00:28:41.020 --> 00:28:44.020 You know, how much money do you have? Okay, give it to me. 368 00:28:44.020 --> 00:28:47.020 That's what the ability to pay thing is. 369 00:28:47.020 --> 00:28:48.020 You don't have that in the market. 370 00:28:48.020 --> 00:28:52.020 Bill Gates pays the same amount for a loaf of bread as you or I do. 371 00:28:52.020 --> 00:28:57.020 And if we had ability to pay, or if we had proportional prices, 372 00:28:57.020 --> 00:29:02.020 if prices were like proportional taxes, we'd have the absolute income equality. 373 00:29:02.020 --> 00:29:05.920 Bill Gates would have to pay a hundred thousand for every slice of bread. 374 00:29:05.920 --> 00:29:08.060 You and I would pay two or three bucks for a slice of bread. 375 00:29:08.060 --> 00:29:10.700 A poor person would pay a penny for a slice of bread. 376 00:29:10.700 --> 00:29:13.900 So at the end of the day, no matter what your income was, you'd have the same amount of 377 00:29:13.900 --> 00:29:16.940 bread or autos or whatever. 378 00:29:16.940 --> 00:29:21.620 So if we, so bad is proportional taxes that if we applied it and made it proportional 379 00:29:21.620 --> 00:29:26.640 prices, we'd have absolute income equality and if you have absolute income equality, 380 00:29:26.640 --> 00:29:31.860 you reduce the economy back to barbarism because you take away all incentives of anyone 381 00:29:31.860 --> 00:29:44.860 Now with this, I have to mention a Chicago scheme. This is worthy of the University of Chicago. 382 00:29:44.860 --> 00:29:50.860 What they said is, okay, look, we've got a deal for you people. And what's the Chicago idea? 383 00:29:50.860 --> 00:29:58.860 The Chicago idea is, look, you all people declare whatever it is you own, let's say we're having a tax on property. 384 00:29:58.860 --> 00:30:06.860 You have property, you have a house, you have a dog, you have a car, you just declare what it's worth and you pay taxes on it. 385 00:30:06.860 --> 00:30:11.860 However, anyone can then buy what you declared at the price you declared. 386 00:30:11.860 --> 00:30:19.860 So if you're going to be snarky with us and you're going to say, well, I've got this house which is really worth, say, 200,000 and I'll declare it's worth five bucks, 387 00:30:19.860 --> 00:30:24.860 sure, pay taxes on five bucks, but then anyone can buy your house for five bucks. 388 00:30:24.860 --> 00:30:54.860 Or if you have a, my favorite example, the one that Murray uses, is a dog, you have a pet dog that's worth a thousand bucks and you declare it's worth three cents, and now anyone can buy your dog for three cents, or anyone can buy your dog for a thousand, namely you take away all consumer surplus, because if your dog is really worth a million dollars to you, you have to declare your dog as worth a million dollars and no one but Bill Gates can buy your dog, but then you're paying a lot of taxes on your dog, do you see the the evil 389 00:30:54.860 --> 00:31:09.860 I love this. I mean, there's a certain low cunning, because this would get you to declare the true value to you of things, or at least, not a market value, but a more accurate value, but it's diabolical, worthy of Chicago. 390 00:31:09.860 --> 00:31:24.860 Okay, let me move along. Oh yeah, then there's this guy Seligman, the faculty approach, who says that we are justified in having progressive taxes because money earns money. 391 00:31:24.860 --> 00:31:34.860 The richer you are, the more money you can earn. It's like money is fertile or something like that. Two dollar bills get together and get it on and, you know, they come up with a dime or something. 392 00:31:34.860 --> 00:31:39.000 something you get that idea little sick and revolting but what the heck all 393 00:31:39.000 --> 00:31:45.900 sparing in tax analysis and Murray says this is ridiculous rich people lose you 394 00:31:45.900 --> 00:31:50.700 have this aphorism from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves and three generations you 395 00:31:50.700 --> 00:31:54.060 know the bigger they are the harder they fall there are many fortune 500 396 00:31:54.060 --> 00:31:58.380 corporations that used to be on the fortune 500 corporation list 10 20 30 397 00:31:58.380 --> 00:32:02.620 years ago that are not there now just because you have money doesn't is no 398 00:32:02.620 --> 00:32:11.620 There's no guarantee of continued money. The only guarantee of continued money or wealth is continued ability to satisfy consumers. 399 00:32:11.620 --> 00:32:23.620 So Murray rejects this idea. Then he goes into an analysis of the, what do you call it, the relationship of taxes and charity. 400 00:32:23.620 --> 00:32:31.620 He rejects that. There's an awful lot of stuff here that I'm not going to have time to do because I'm trying to keep it to about a half hour. 401 00:32:31.620 --> 00:32:40.620 I do want to say one or two other things. He talks about ability to pay, sacrifice theory. 402 00:32:40.620 --> 00:32:47.620 Oh, one high point for me, so I'll just sort of mention high points because I've given you a sort of an inkling of what he's about. 403 00:32:47.620 --> 00:32:57.620 One of the high points for me was the head tax. He says if there's any tax that's justified, it's a head tax because, you know, everybody pays the same. 404 00:32:57.620 --> 00:33:27.620 and then he starts in attacking the head tax and I'm saying, no Murray, don't, don't attack the head tax, that's all we've got, but then I came back to my rational faculty, I said okay, you know, you can attack the head tax too, but one idea is if the taxes are limited to what the poorest person in society can pay, then the rest of us don't have to really pay too much and there's a certain coherence to that. 405 00:33:27.620 --> 00:33:30.620 What else do we have here? 406 00:33:30.620 --> 00:33:36.620 The benefit principle is the closest to the market, but he rejects the benefit principle as well, 407 00:33:36.620 --> 00:33:39.620 because the government doesn't create the benefit. 408 00:33:39.620 --> 00:33:42.620 This idea of who gains more from the state, the rich or the poor. 409 00:33:42.620 --> 00:33:45.620 He says the poor gain more from the state, not the rich. 410 00:33:45.620 --> 00:33:50.620 This is an attack on progressive taxation, because the rich can have their own armed guards. 411 00:33:50.620 --> 00:33:53.620 The poor can have armed guards. 412 00:33:53.620 --> 00:33:56.580 and it's their economies of scale and guarding wealth. 413 00:33:56.580 --> 00:33:59.220 You can guard a whole vault full of money 414 00:33:59.220 --> 00:34:03.380 just easily as a vault with less money in it. 415 00:34:03.380 --> 00:34:06.060 So he says that if anyone is getting a ride, 416 00:34:06.060 --> 00:34:10.420 it's not the rich, it's the poor, but nobody really is. 417 00:34:12.340 --> 00:34:14.740 This is in sharp contrast to the distinction to the market. 418 00:34:14.740 --> 00:34:17.380 The market benefits the poor more than the rich. 419 00:34:17.380 --> 00:34:22.380 If you compare, say, the average person in the year 1505 420 00:34:22.380 --> 00:34:30.260 With regard to lighting, well, he was in the dark and the rich guy had candles. 421 00:34:30.260 --> 00:34:35.260 Now the poor guy has a light bulb and the rich guy has a big chandelier but just a light bulb. 422 00:34:35.260 --> 00:34:40.420 In other words, what progress did is it brought the rich closer to the poor, right? 423 00:34:40.420 --> 00:34:46.380 Before the poor had just darkness or they had a walk, whereas the rich had horses. 424 00:34:46.380 --> 00:34:50.660 Now the poor have a small crappy car and the rich have a beautiful limousine, 425 00:34:50.660 --> 00:34:57.060 But still, the difference between walking and a coach and four, and a small car and a big car is much less. 426 00:34:57.060 --> 00:35:03.060 Now, this is not praxeology, and don't accuse me of, you know, interpersonal comparison of utility fallacies, 427 00:35:03.060 --> 00:35:10.560 but you can see the point that economic progress moves the poor up more than the rich in this sense, 428 00:35:10.560 --> 00:35:15.860 whereas with taxes, it's the other way around. 429 00:35:15.860 --> 00:35:22.860 Okay, what else do we have? 430 00:35:22.860 --> 00:35:26.860 Here, I think I found a mistake, let me put it up on the board, 431 00:35:26.860 --> 00:35:32.860 you people tell me if you think that this is correct or not, or... 432 00:35:32.860 --> 00:35:40.860 Whoops, this is on page 1240, 1240, reading here. 433 00:35:40.860 --> 00:35:44.860 The principle of equality would rule out, as would the benefit principle, 434 00:35:44.860 --> 00:35:51.860 Will All Government Actions Accept Defense for All Other Expenditures We Set Up Special Privilege or Subsidying? 435 00:35:51.860 --> 00:35:53.860 And what I did is I said, what about the pacifist? 436 00:35:53.860 --> 00:36:00.860 Namely, I don't think that it justifies even defense, and Murray is saying accept defense. 437 00:36:00.860 --> 00:36:05.860 But the pacifist is one who objects to even defense. 438 00:36:05.860 --> 00:36:11.860 Now, I don't know if I'm correct if the job of the editor is to change things like that. 439 00:36:11.860 --> 00:36:21.860 It's really substantive, it's not just a typo, and I'm not really sure, I mean, he who criticizes Murray Rothbard has to be very modest in his criticism, 440 00:36:21.860 --> 00:36:31.860 so I'm not saying that he's wrong and I'm right, I'm saying let's consider this 30 mines are better than one mine and maybe we can make sense of that. 441 00:36:31.860 --> 00:36:38.860 Okay, what else have I got here? 442 00:36:38.860 --> 00:36:43.860 Murray criticizes taxes that are for revenue only. He says that all taxes are for revenue. 443 00:36:45.860 --> 00:36:53.860 He talks about the voluntary tax. 444 00:36:53.860 --> 00:36:58.860 Let me end on voluntary tax since I'm just a little bit over my half hour. 445 00:36:58.860 --> 00:37:05.860 Ayn Rand favors the voluntary tax. She says, well, yes, yes, taxes are coercive. 446 00:37:05.860 --> 00:37:12.420 We don't favor coercion. We're non-aggression types also, in addition to you libertarians. 447 00:37:12.420 --> 00:37:15.020 By the way, you know what she calls libertarians? 448 00:37:15.020 --> 00:37:17.180 Ipis of the right. 449 00:37:17.180 --> 00:37:21.820 Hippies of the right, only she pronounced it Ipis. Ipis of the right. 450 00:37:21.820 --> 00:37:27.220 So us Ipis, we're against coercive taxes. 451 00:37:27.220 --> 00:37:31.100 And which is okay, we're against coercive tax too. We'll have voluntary taxes. 452 00:37:31.100 --> 00:37:35.420 And her idea of voluntary taxes is that every time you have a contract, 453 00:37:35.420 --> 00:37:39.320 you put a little sticker on it and to get that sticker you have to pay the 454 00:37:39.320 --> 00:37:43.420 government a certain fee but the obvious question is well suppose you want to have 455 00:37:43.420 --> 00:37:49.900 a contract and put a sticker not of the US government club but of the I don't 456 00:37:49.900 --> 00:37:55.840 know the Bob Murphy Defense Agency what then blank out to use some words that 457 00:37:55.840 --> 00:38:02.840 she uses against us in other words what Murray is saying is there really two 458 00:38:02.840 --> 00:38:10.840 There are two things that the government does, one it has compulsory taxes and the other it has a monopoly over whatever its functions are. 459 00:38:10.840 --> 00:38:17.840 So even if you could have a voluntary tax, that would be necessary but not sufficient to achieve full free enterprise. 460 00:38:17.840 --> 00:38:23.840 You would also need to get rid of this monopoly element and it's hard to see how she can accomplish that. 461 00:38:23.840 --> 00:38:29.840 On the other hand, you know, I don't want to totally bash Ayn Rand or even Milton Friedman, they've done good. 462 00:38:29.840 --> 00:38:39.840 The reason I pick on them as opposed to Galbraith or Marx is, you know, it's sort of like shooting fish in a barrel when you do that, and it's more fun to have a little bit of product differentiation. 463 00:38:39.840 --> 00:38:49.840 But I would hardly pick on these people if they didn't do any good. You know, sometimes I've been accused when I criticize Rand or Friedman and say, well, you know, they've done more for liberty than you have. 464 00:38:49.840 --> 00:38:58.840 And well, that's true, certainly. Ayn Rand with her book, her magnificent book, Atlas Shrug, have brought many people to our camp, as has Milton Friedman.