What If…
November 20, 2008 – 2:26 pm by KelDavid Z over at No Third Solution has a series of posts in which he talks in great detail about taxes that show he is way more knowledgeable about economic issues than I am. They are quite long, and I will admit to not have read all of them completely yet – I get distracted easily. But his premise is simple: taxes are bad. They destroy productivity. It seems all like pretty common sense to me. Yet, people seem to disagree with him (and me). Taxes are good, they say. They help. They do good. We need them. It all causes me to take a step back, and think something that I think is even more important than economic theory.
Assume the free market does fail, as many today would claim. Assume that people, left to their own volition, have lower productivity than if they were coerced by all knowing wizards in ivory towers in Washington DC. Assume that somehow, under threat of violence, it were possible to take money from an individual and be more productive with that money than that individual would have been without your force. Even if the free market led to low productivity, hunger, and misery, and forceful coercion lead to limitless prosperity, I would still prefer – in all of it’s unholy inefficency – the free market.
Liberty is more important than prosperity.
3 Responses to “What If…”
It should be noted, before my smarter colleagues (or even those who would call me a fool for choosing misery over prosperity) that the hypothetical I propose cannot exist. If people willfully choosing for themselves causes misery, yet someone else choosing for them caused prosperity, it would not take long for the people willfully choosing for themselves to willfully defer their decisions to the better planner.
By Kel on Nov 20, 2008
Spot on. And to quote a private discussion I was having recently, liberty is also more important than security.
By Mike Gogulski on Nov 20, 2008
Why do you guys even answer to these morons. How can anyone support taxation? It’s ridiculous.
By Francois Tremblay on Nov 22, 2008