Mises Institute Slams FairTax Book
Writing for the free-market Ludwig von Mises Institute, Laurence Vance can’t find enough bad things to say about the FairTax Book.
As far as I can tell, his basic gripe is that the FairTax won’t roll us back to the size of federal government that existed before the industrial revolution took place.
The antidote to the fraud of the FairTax is a good dose of the wisdom of Murray Rothbard: “There can be no such thing as ‘fairness in taxation.’ Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a ‘fair tax’ is therefore every bit as absurd as that of ‘fair theft.’”
Gotta love that Rothbardian outlook. “Why accomplish some good today when you can piss and moan about the need for perfection tomorrow, instead.”
7 Responses to “Mises Institute Slams FairTax Book”
Perhaps you could offer some counter arguments to some of the points that Laurence brings up. The summary of that article cannot honestly be condensed to a “basic gripe that the FairTax won’t roll us back to the size of the federal government that existed before the industrial revolution took place”.
By the way, here is his followup to that article:
http://www.mises.org/story/1814
David Gunnells
David,
Bill Rook has already written a lengthy reply here that’s worth reading.
And, I beg to differ, Vance’s basic gripe can be fairly summarized as “the FairTax won’t roll us back to the size of the federal government that existed before the industrial revolution took place.”
FACT 1: Vance makes it clear that the only fair tax is a tax that doesn’t exist. FACT 2: To accomplish this, the government would have to be rolled back to a size that hasn’t existed since the industrial revolution.
Some of us think that’s an unrealistic expectation and a very unproductive standard to hold forth in the modern age.
Joshua
It’s not the purpose of the FairTax to shrink the size of government. That’s the main problem as to why the detractors of the FairTax, such as Dick Armey and Steve Forbes, are so much against it. They want to shrink government with the Income Tax Code [or get rid of it entirely]and it can’t be done that way. Truth is that the FairTax will most assuredly give Government the biggest shot in the arm of revenue that it has ever known. But the good news is that the tax payer will benefit by being in control of when, where, and how much he pays. With the FairTax, everybody wins.
For those government shrinkers out there I suggest working on reducing the tax rate [as well as the appetite for spending] once the FairTax becomes law. That will be all that’s necessary to achieve what they are so beefed about. Yet if it never happens we are all still better of with the FairTax than with the Income Tax.
“Discussing the FairTax is dodging the real debate about government spending and central banking. I am with Ron Paul (R-TX), ‘The real issue is total spending by government, not tax reform.”
I would be interested to see if the citizenry, once armed with the FairTax ability to have financial impact on government revenue (organize everyone to put off buying expensive things for a month, etc) would be able to dissuade government from over-spending.
Probably not. They’d just borrow and figure the pent up demand would eventually get to them. Or to put it differently, they’d figure they could borrow longer than you could hold your breath on spending.
[...] Vance has criticized the FairTax before on behalf of the Mises Institute. [...]