The flat tax draws virtually unanimous support from the “right-thinking” intellectuals in our society, including academics, writers, and media pundits—all people who have managed successfully to identify their own views, whatever they may be, with the general welfare. Any policy that draws unanimous support from these people can’t be all good.
Modern liberalism works in a simple but effective manner: liberals Find Problems. This is not a difficult task, considering that the world abounds with problems waiting to be discovered. At the heart of these problems is the fact that we do not live in the Garden of Eden: that there is a scarcity of resources available for us to achieve all of our
The Free Market 7, no. 1 (January 1989) One of the ironic but unfortunately enduring legacies of eight years of Reaganism has been the resurrection of Keynesianism. From the late 1930s until the early 1970s, Keynesianism rode high in the economics profession and in the corridors of power in Washington, promising that, so long as Keynesian
Economists have long believed that government’s tax and expenditure policy either is, or can readily be made to be, neutral to the market. Free-market economists have advocated such neutrality of government, and even economists favoring redistributive actions by government have believed that the service activities and the redistributive activities
The Just Tax and the Just Price Costs of Collection, Convenience, and Certainty Distribution of the Tax Burden Uniformity of Treatment Equality Before the Law: Tax Exemption The Impossibility of Uniformity The “Ability-To-Pay” Principle The Ambiguity of the Concept The Justice of the Standard “Distribution of the Tax Burden,” continued Sacrifice
This unsigned editorial, written by Murray N. Rothbard, appeared in the April 15, 1969 issue of The Libertarian (soon to become The Libertarian Forum ). April 15, that dread Income Tax day, is around again, and gives us a chance to ruminate on the nature of taxes and of the government itself. The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that
I come to bury Reaganomics, not to praise it. How well has Reaganomics achieved its own goals? Perhaps the best way of discovering those goals is to recall the heady days of Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency, especially before his triumph at the Republican National Convention in 1980. In general terms, Reagan pledged to return, or
The Alleged Superiority of the Income Tax Orthodox neoclassical economics has long maintained that, from the point of view of the taxed themselves, an income tax is “better than” an excise tax on a particular form of consumption, since, in addition to the total revenue extracted, which is assumed to be the same in both cases, the excise tax
[This article first ran in the June 1992 issue of Chronicle s (pp. 49–52)] In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being
In recent years, Americans have been subjected to a concerted assault upon their national symbols, holidays, and anniversaries. Washington’s Birthday has been forgotten, and Christopher Columbus has been denigrated as an evil Euro-White male, while new and obscure anniversary celebrations have been foisted upon us. New heroes have been
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.