I don’t really know if I believe all of those claims from Warren Buffett and his followers who claim that rich people (all of them? only the most savvy? only the super-rich who make money in a lot of different, atypical ways?) actually pay a lower percentage of their incomes in taxes than poor and middle-class people. I do know that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, but on the other hand, I also know that “tax rate” does not always equal “taxes paid”.

Fortunately for me, I don’t care what anyone’s nominal tax rate is or how much anyone actually pays in taxes; they are all immoral and they should all be repealed tomorrow. The only moral or humane solution to any tax “unfairness” or “inequality” is to remove the root of the unfairness—the capacity to tax in the first place—and make everyone’s taxes equal at 0. Anyone who desires otherwise or criticizes anyone or any business for defending itself against the predations of the State is an enemy of freedom, an enemy of peace, and a champion of violent, envious, destructive social discord.

Amazon.com is resisting the state of California’s new law that intends to force online retailers to collect sales tax for California transactions. Amazon, of course, argues this would be bad for business and the economy as a whole, and it is threatening to simply stop doing business in states that impose a sales tax on it. This is Manjoo’s take on it:

There are two powerful arguments in the tax debate between Amazon.com and the state of California. On the one hand, there’s simple fairness. For years, online retailers—which weren’t required to collect sales tax on purchases from Californians—have enjoyed a huge advantage over physical stores, which must collect sales tax. … Tax proponents also argue that the law will let the state’s businesses compete against online stores, thereby creating local jobs.

Are you fucking kidding me? Raising taxes is a good strategy to create local jobs? What is this, 1700? Is this any different from the mercantilism that the field of modern economics was basically created to refute? One group of companies must impose sales taxes on its customers, and another group doesn’t, and this puts the former group at a competitive disadvantage. The only solution you propose to remedy this asymmetry is to impose equal taxes on the latter group. That doesn’t seem a little odd to you? There doesn’t seem to be any proposal missing from this debate? No other solution strikes you as even worth mentioning? No, guess not.

And then there’s the other side of the argument: ARE YOU KIDDING, YOU WANT TO RAISE MY PRICES, WTF???
[...]
In other words, this isn’t an argument between two equally reasonable positions. It’s an argument between reason and emotion, between your brain and your gut. Amazon has no intellectually sound arguments against collecting taxes from residents—by all ethical and civic standards, its position is unsound. Instead, Amazon is counting on our emotions prevailing…. [emphasis added]

Are you motherfucking kidding me? Amazon has no reasonable arguments against collecting taxes, and its anti-tax position is unsound by all ethical and civic standards? Since I can pretty well guess the type of intellect that would arrive at this interpretation of the Amazon/California sales tax debate, I am going to guess that Farhad Manjoo deems all arguments against online sales taxes unethical and unsound, not just the particular ones Amazon is making and not just in the state of California.

To make it clear which other arguments against online sales taxes I am referring to (and all taxes that have ever been or ever will be imagined, proposed, debated, or implemented in the history of the universe), let me state the only argument that is needed: All taxation is theft, and all taxes are therefore unjust. All tax collectors, tax bill writers, tax imposers, tax renewers, tax failing-to-opposers, and tax supporters are either thieves or accessories to theft and would be dealt with, in a just society, in proportion to the severity of their crimes. Taxation is nothing more than legalized theft by a professional criminal class, a gang of thieves writ large. It is a metaphysical impossibility for any tax to be the slightest bit just by any consistent, logical, moral, or ethical standard, in any situation or for any purpose whatsoever.

Now that that’s clear, and since Manjoo claims to be all for reason and logic and against emotion and inconsistency, let’s muse at what else he must consider unethical, unreasonable, and unsound for ethics’ and consistency’s sake. I’ve already mentioned that Manjoo’s version of logic would deem American abolitionists’ anti-slavery position unethical and unsound because abolishing slavery would prevent northern whites from enslaving people like their southern counterparts did and prevent blacks from enslaving whites as equally as they were enslaved. Also, the Jews in Nazi Germany were using only emotion and not reason when they opposed the Nuremberg Laws instead of supporting equally oppressive laws for all. (Godwin demerits: -5.) According to Manjoo’s logic, the solution to our seemingly never-ending War on Terror and the terrorism it inspires that forced us to wage it is for some Middle Eastern countries to invade the Unites States, kill thousands of civilians, take out a few of our war leaders, and overthrow our government, because obviously two (million) wrongs make a right. Instead of eliminating the regulations that restrain some individuals and businesses but provide loopholes for large, powerful, well-connected corporations, Manjoo must favor ever-increasing restraints to trade until no one is allowed to conduct any economic activity (except the government, of course). Instead of simply legalizing prostitution and marijuana, Manjoo must favor outlawing sex after a date in which the man pays for dinner and must long for a return to alcohol prohibition, because under current law, prostitutes and marijuana growers and sellers suffer from “unethical” and “unfair” disadvantages. Manjoo’s twisted version of logic and consistency also dictates that violence against women, gays, and children be combatted by fostering a more violent, aggressive culture on all sides rather than striving to eliminate as much violence as possible in the first place.

I think Farhad Manjoo’s ideal society must be that of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, in which everybody is hindered equally by a wise and all-knowing State.

If people like Farhad Manjoo had any influence in society, we would live in a world in which a parasitic political class tried to take as much wealth from its citizens as it could, demagogues spewed rhetoric of fairness and equality while swindling everybody, the masses blindly followed them and ignorantly parroted their slogans while failing to scrutinize their policies with any intelligence or skepticism, and a fascist police state imprisoned world-record numbers of innocent citizens for victimless crimes while fostering an ever more violent, discordant, divided, intolerant, uncooperative culture.

Manjoo has the gall to continue typing after assaulting his readers with such an affront to logic and decency. He delves into some legalistic arguments about Amazon’s “presence” in the state of California and the California laws that should make its sales taxable, so, you know, of course, if some politicians in the past voted for and judges in the past approved of various tax laws—politicians and judges whom possibly a very small minority of current California voters have actually voted for and tax laws that possibly no one in the state of California or elsewhere was actually allowed to vote on—then those taxes are “fair” for all of eternity or until our wise and gracious overlords take it upon themselves to repeal them for us. He dismisses Amazon’s position as either disingenuous or childish or both, because some politicians and judges have said Amazon’s sales should be taxable. That honestly seems to be the extent of his argument. What an apologist, Statolatrist boob.

Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Paul Misener (aptronym alert!), put out a statement that borrows from the rhetoric of the Tea Party. The ballot initiative is “a referendum on jobs and investment in California,” he said, and “with unemployment at well over 11 percent, Californians deserve a voice and a choice about jobs, investment, and the state’s economic future.” If Amazon spends substantial sums to push such a ballot measure next fall, it’s hard to see how it could lose. The ads write themselves: Don’t let greedy lawmakers tax your Internet purchases!

Though I doubt most voters would care to pick apart such a populist message, such a sound bite falls apart under scrutiny. For example, the idea that Amazon is an “out-of-state” retailer in California is a complete fiction.

You see, opposition to sales taxes is all emotion and demagoguery. There is no economic, rational, or moral argument behind it.

He concludes,

The reasons for Amazon’s tax battle are obvious. It’s not that it can’t institute a sensible tax collection regime, but that it won’t, because it has no incentive to do so. Amazon’s position may be indefensible, but it has a trump card. Raise your hand if you want higher prices. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Gee, an absence of taxes promotes economic activity because prices can remain lower. Companies that don’t have to impose sales taxes have an economic advantage over those that do. Our entire country and especially the state of California seem to be suffering from a deficiency in economic activity (and also personal savings), so I wonder what we could do to spur some more economic activity and help people sustain or augment their bank accounts. Maybe ELIMINATE TAXES INSTEAD OF IMPOSING NEW ONES?

I know it isn’t fair to berate this poor liberal columnist because he suffers from a lack of imagination that would allow him to envision any activity, personal or economic, private or public, that could be conducted between two consenting parties that didn’t require the benevolent hand of the State enabling and supporting it, so he could never imagine supporting any measure that would decrease government revenue or decrease government spending, but I honestly thought that it would have occurred to someone with a job that affords him a personal computer and an internet connection that one solution to the sales tax inconsistency that exists between internet and brick-and-mortar stores is to ELIMINATE EVERYONE’S TAXES! Is that too abominable to even mention? Is that idea so abhorrent that it never even occurred to him? I wouldn’t be surprised. It would never occur to him that government (particularly, California’s state government) is a huge part of our economic problems and that any measure to decrease its revenue should at least be considered.

The bottom line is that Amazon’s transactions with its customers are mutually consensual exchanges that harm no one, and the absence of sales taxes on them also harms no one. If others are harmed by other taxes, then the solution is to eliminate those harmful taxes rather than attempting to harm everyone equally.

Robert Heinlein famously said, “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” Manjoo wants politicians that you didn’t vote for to control your behavior, control your money, and control every company’s behavior and money as well. He has no good intentions on this issue, and his ignorance or bias is not an excuse. People like him are dangerous and uncivil, and we are surrounded by them.

Travesties like this should provide libertarians with insight into why Democrats and Republicans are so angry at the realm of politics and economics in general and why they direct so much vitriol and derision at libertarians: they must know that their beloved system of taxing nearly every single activity by nearly every single person within an arbitrary geographic area, in order to “help”, “protect”, and “provide for” their captives, is a complete farce that destroys far more wealth than it even pretends to create.

The ridiculous tax bill that could befall an individual for such an innocuous trade, borne of sheer luck, is just an extreme example of the harm that every single tax in the history of the world has done not just to the taxed but also to the untaxed who might have traded with them. The State declares itself sole arbiter of justice and sole protector of a group of people, and in order to fund its maniacal obsession with controlling ever more aspects of its subjects’ lives, it says, basically, “Oh, it looks like there’s monetary value in that—we’ll take some of that money and leave some of it for you. You know, to protect your rights and your property.” It is not possible to support such a ridiculous, hypocritical, violent, larcenous racket without crippling ignorance at best or disingenuousness or malice at worst.

The existence of such a racket also makes it obvious why libertarians get so angry at Statist idiots who think income taxes are a good idea.

Reading that CNN article reveals something of the lengths that Statolatrists will go to to justify their beloved income tax system:

However, if it were construed as a gift, it would not be taxable, Columbia University law professor Michael J. Graetz told the Times.

“The legal question of whether it is a gift or prize is whether the transferor is giving the property out of detached and disinterested generosity,” Graetz said. “It’s hard for me, not being a Yankee fan, to think of the Yankees as being in the business of exercising generosity to others, but there’s a reasonable case to be made that these were given out of generosity.”

How generous of the wise and glorious IRS to leave the exchange of gifts outside of the realm of its predations. Will Christian Lopez have to hire a tax lawyer to support his non-payment of $14,000 to the IRS for his gifts? More money and labor wasted. It shouldn’t matter whether his rewards were a gift or not. It is also immaterial whether Lopez himself or the Yankees pay whatever taxes are necessary (which they will, in all likelihood); the IRS is still wasting resources, violating the rights of its subjects, and destroying wealth by even existing or taxing anything.

For his part, Lopez is being just as magnanimous with the IRS as he was with Jeter.

“Worse comes to worse, I’ll have to pay the taxes,” he told the Daily News. “… The IRS has a job to do, so I’m not going to hold it against them, but it would be cool if they helped me out a little on this.”

Oh, how surprising, he’s part of the problem. Fuck him, then.

Speaking of large internet-related companies, Canadian ISPs admitted that their pricing structure (which they call “usage-based billing”) is designed to discourage/reduce internet use by its customers. Cory Doctorow writes, “In other words, they’ve set out to limit the growth of networked based business and new kinds of services, and to prevent Canadians experimentation that enables them to use the Internet to its fullest.” Michael Geist, whom he quotes, says that this pricing model, therefore, is more accurately called behavior-based billing. As a rule, private companies in a free market always strive to attract more customers in order to do more business and make more money, in contrast to government-created “companies” and government agencies, which always seem to be seeking to limit the amount of products or services they have to provide to customers (water, electricity, every office you have to go and wait in line). This indicates that Canadian ISPs are not truly private companies in anything resembling a free market.

Another company that is not close to being entirely “private” and operates in a market that isn’t close to being free is Time Warner. Time Warner supported a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would prevent city governments from introducing fiber-optic broadband infrastructure in their cities. Simple pro-business right-wing conflationists reflexively support a bill that would prevent city governments from doing anything (especially providing a product or service that can and/or should be provided by private companies) and reflexively support the interests of private businesses. They are not entirely wrong, because the ultimate solution is not to get city governments into the fiber-optic broadband business or any other utility. However, the solution that would help the residents of cities where broadband is scarce, expensive, or nonexistent is to remove the regulations that are keeping it that way rather than passing new laws that seem to be mainly aimed at propping up telecom giants. No, I don’t know what laws North Carolina or any other state might have passed restricting competition and expansion in the broadband industry, but, well, look at this bill. It’s a bill that the state legislature will pass that will have profound effects on the telecom industry. It is undoubtedly one bill out of thousands across the country that have set regulations and restrictions on telecommunications, always to the detriment of the average (or, especially, poor) citizen.

Higher education might be the next asset bubble. Well, it’s certainly overpriced, a situation that is entirely the result of government interventions (mainly guaranteed loans to everybody) whose purpose is to make college affordable to more people. All government action has unintended consequences.

This is a great TED talk by Indian scientist Sugata Mitra about how children can teach themselves (and motivate themselves) when given the opportunity (and the necessity) to do so.

Speaking of the problems with traditional, regimented, government education, Boston University Psychology professor Peter Gray writes about the seven sins of our forced-education system. He expands upon a previous post in which he called forced education “prison”. In this post, he also outlines seven reasons compulsory education is harmful to society and not just the children who are currently forced to go to school. Numbers 3 and 4 are “Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance” and “Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.” It’s a really good, brief read.

Sixty-three percent of people killed in the Iraq War have been civilians.

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

Glenn Greenwald is dismayed at the speed with which the Obama regime’s official reason for sending military aid to Libya changed.

Glenn Greenwald writes another masterful post on America’s two-tiered justice system: one standard of justice for legislators, high-level bureaucrats, and their big-business cronies, and another standard for everyone else. It is not possible to read Glenn Greenwald consistently and objectively and remain an Obama supporter, or possibly even a Democratic Party supporter.

Instead, it seems like everything I read from liberals about taxes, the economy, or the federal budget is “The rich aren’t paying enough taxes!” and “The rich used to pay more, so it follows that they should still pay more!” and “The middle class is being destroyed by low taxes for the rich!” and “The rich don’t pay their fair share!” For instance, when I first saw the title of this article, “How the rich soaked the rest of us”, I optimistically expected to read about inflation, Wall Street bailouts, crony capitalism, restrictions on job creation, barriers to entry, government waste, and/or the complete failure of Obama’s stimulus program. Instead, the entire article is about how the rich used to pay more taxes than they do, and the things they do with their money don’t help others in an economic or social sense, so their tax rates should be increased to redistribute wealth to others and help balance the budget. Not a single time does the author mention the exorbitant spending exhibited by every American Congress since the Great Depression, nor does it mention the inflation that impoverishes everyone else more than the rich, which inflation is necessitated by ever higher spending.

Another opinion column says that the middle class is being assaulted by income taxes. Yeah, just like everybody else. It says,

No one class of citizen has an overly high burden of paying income taxes in 2011. But overall, Americans making $1 million or more are shouldering less of a tax burden than before. When the government has been deficit spending at record levels, it’s time to increase taxes.

First of all, every class of citizen has an overly high burden of income taxes, because every tax is too high. But most importantly, the fact that millionaires are shouldering less of a tax burden than before does not mean they should go back to paying more; it means, as every fact related to income taxes means, that we should continue decreasing taxes on everyone, from rich to poor. And government deficits should be solved by cutting spending, not increasing taxes. As Helmut Shoeck said in his masterpiece Envy, “The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.” Some people having more money doesn’t make others worse off. Spending their money in ways you think will stimulate the economic recovery for the rest of us is a completely debunked, groundsless, immoral 1930′s solution. The only taking of money from the rich that can be justified is taking their money that they gained from inappropriate cooperation with or actions of the government, which surely amounts to billions of dollars, but it would take a libertarian analysis to make that case, which is beyond the comprehension of today’s liberal Democrats, who are limited to class envy and Keynesian spending debauchery.

Allowing people to do what they want with their own money, in addition to being the only morally just solution to any fiscal or tax issue, will result in a greater production of wealth because less economic waste will occur because extra-market decisions by the government will be eliminated and replaced with decisions made entirely based on prices specified by the free market. If any liberal actually had an interest in what is just, then he would advocate reducing (and eventually eliminating) everyone’s taxes, not just some people’s, and if he had any interest in nationwide or worldwide economic growth, for society as a whole, from top to bottom, then he would advocate the economic system that results in the least possible economic waste. This system is the free market, where economic calculation for every single decision and every single transaction is possible and is accurate, based only on the market forces of supply, demand, free exchange, and people’s preferences freely demonstrated.

All that liberal Democrats seem to be able to give us is the same, tired, lame drivel about increasing taxes for the rich and spending ever more taxpayer money on things the taxpayers obviously don’t want (otherwise they would buy them themselves). It is the same class envy and the same Keynesian “tax and spend” rhetoric that has necessitated our high tax rates in the first place, wasted untold trillions of dollars, limited economic growth to a paltry 2 or 3% per year, prevented labor from finding its optimal usage and created 8 to 10% unemployment, and caused more and more inflation to pay for our government’s debts. Why can’t we hear something interesting or inspiring from the American left once in a while, like the virtues of individual decision making and a universal opposition to any more tax increases?

I thought this passage from my economics textbook validated our position (the passage is about the “informal sector” (black market) vs. the “formal sector” in developing countries):

Many economists believe taxes in developing countries are so high because these countries are attempting to pay for government sectors that are as large relative to their economies as the government sector of industrial economies. Government spending in Brazil, for example, is 39 percent of measured GDP, compared to 31 percent in the United States. In the early twentieth century, when the United States was much poorer than it is today, government spending was only about 8 percent of GDP, so the tax burden on U.S. firms was much lower. In countries like Brazil, bringing firms into the formal sector from the informal sector may require reductions in government spending and taxes. In many developing countries, however, voters are reluctant to see government services reduced.

Several insights about political economy can be seen in just that paragraph. First, libertarians claim that the relative freedom from government intervention is what allowed the United States to become wealthy in the first place, while Statists will claim that “correlation” and “causation” have identical meanings and therefore that the lack of a socialistic government was a major cause of the U.S.’s relative poverty 100 years ago. Second, the consumers and businesses that operate in the black market in Brazil obviously do so because they don’t think they benefit from their government’s interventions, at least not nearly proportionally to the costs (taxes), echoing Robert Heinlein’s famous quip, “First, what is it you want us to pay taxes for? Tell me what I get and perhaps I’ll buy it.” Third, the fact that voters continue to delude themselves into voting for poverty over wealth is as sad and puzzling in the developing world as it is here.

If Brazil had lived for 50 or 100 years under the relative economic freedom that characterized the United States and western Europe after the industrial revolution, then it could afford a large government without such crushing taxes because its businesses would be more productive, its workers would be more individualist, educated, and productive, and its entire economy would most likely benefit from a culture of (relatively) honest business practices, contract enforcement, voluntary worker-rights agreements instead of centrally mandated ones, profit-seeking entrepreneurship, and healthy competition.

(I thought I successfully avoided exhibiting vulgar libertarianism or Right-conflationism by using the word “relative” when appropriate.)

Confessions of a Price Controller by Joseph Antos. He explains how Medicare’s price-control system keeps prices up, which is no different from any price controls.

The Resource-Based Relative Value System (RBRVS) is founded on the simple, but incorrect, view that higher payments are justified for services that require greater inputs—ignoring the consumer side of the market.
[...]
Prices must respond to both the supply and demand sides of the market to allocate resources to their best use. Medicare ignores the market, setting prices for physician services based on an academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union and implemented by the American Medical Association. Those prices do not reflect the value patients receive from their care, and they do not reflect shifts in the demand for particular kinds of services (such as primary care) as the population ages or as more people have health insurance.
[...]
The problem for a government price controller is that he can never know when the price structure is “right.” He can know when physicians are unhappy with their prices because they will complain, but that does not necessarily mean that those prices should be raised. He cannot know when prices are too high, because physicians benefiting from that mistaken generosity will not complain. The bias is always to raise prices, not lower them.

As good, simple, short as that column is, the last sentence struck me as some platitude that was insisted upon by an editor, which might be a good example of why the glorious world of blagging and self-publishing produces more unfiltered honesty and relevant commentary than writing for some corporate publication. Or maybe it’s just because it was published by the American Enterprise Institute. Either way, it was kind of funny and dumb: “Let’s hope a Republican Congress will have the guts to start pulling the needle out of our arms.”

UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First, originally published at cnbc.com. You can’t make this stuff up.

Federal Student Aid To For-Profit Schools Has Tripled In Recent Years, The Consumerist. This is because when the State subsidizes something by taking money from people who earned it and giving it to others, there is no incentive for the prices to go down. In fact, there is incentive for the prices to go up, so they have. In other words, the demand for college in general and the demand for expensive colleges in particular have increased because price is much less of an issue now that the Imperial Federal Government will give you loans to pay for everything. Because the demand is artificially inflated, so are the prices. It is simple.

Obama argues his assassination program is a “state secret” by Glenn Greenwald. I don’t know why everyone who calls himself a “liberal” doesn’t read Glenn Greenwald regularly. I haven’t ever seen a Glenn Greenwald blag post shared by my friends on Facebook. I doubt the implementation of a state assassination program was cited in that one article, shared by at least two of my friends on Facebook, listing all the things Obama has accomplished in his first two years in office with a Democratic Congress. I wonder why they aren’t too proud of that one. I wonder how many have even heard about it.

The Cost of the TARP: One More Time from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Money quote:

Thanks to their access to below market credit in their time of need, courtesy of the taxpayer bailouts, the Wall Street executives are still pocketing tens of millions a year and the banks are again making record profits. Had the market been allowed to work its magic, this wealth and income would have been available for the rest of society. The financial sector will continue to be a drain on the rest of the economy because the government saved it from the consequences of its own recklessness.

My current concern is the misguided vitriol directed by liberals at Tea Partiers and the former group’s lack of any position to be criticizing anybody’s politics.

Perhaps the rare liberal who visits our little blag will take issue with the loaded language I used in the title: “haters”. My word choice was deliberate and accurate. Most liberals hate the Tea Parties and every single little, last thing that they stand for. Most liberals seem to have nothing but ridicule and scorn for the embarrassing Tea Partiers and their benighted selfishness and racism. Most liberals would not listen to half of what any Tea Partier had to say except to use it as ammunition for their rants about how horrible Tea Partiers have to be to object to all the plans that the liberals have for everyone. I do not say liberals hate Tea Party participants themselves, because I would not put words that personal into other people’s mouths, and most people at least recite the empty, semi-Christian defense “I don’t hate the person, I hate the act.” On the internet, on Facebook, on TV and radio, the sentiment is clear and almost universal: liberals hate the Tea Parties’ ideas and demonstrations the way any group with power hates protestations against and threats to that power.

Consider the most recent Tea Party gatherings, the anti-tax protests on April 15th. Obviously I strongly sympathize with their message on that day and agree wholeheartedly with their goal of reducing taxes. What sentiment therein do liberals find so objectionable? “Leave us alone,” “Stop taking our money,” “Stop spending our money on things we don’t want,” “Stop threatening and imprisoning people for keeping their own money”? These messages, at least, are completely defensive. “Stop doing this, stop doing that, let us govern our own lives.” There is no inherent malice, violence, or any type of aggression behind a defensive message like that, yet liberal Democrats find it worthy of scorn and hatred. Contrast that with the messages almost every Republocrat politician campaigns on: “These are my plans for everyone,” “This is what I will do with your money,” “This is what I will force everyone to do,” “This is what’s good for the whole nation.” Please don’t pretend the plans and promises of politicians require no coercion and carry no threats of punishment for non-compliance, and please don’t try to twist anti-tax protests into something the slightest bit coercive. Leave such bald dishonesty for the politicians.

While it’s true that I’m probably inserting my own ideas of what I would be protesting at an anti-tax (or other anti-government) rally and not considering the full scope of what various neocons and other dupes have said at other rallies over the past year (for example, here is an issue I agree with liberals on and that does, in fact, make Tea Partiers an embarrassment), I’d wager that the whole of the Tea Parties’ message is no more violent than the ideas of their detractors.

I came across a column about the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party in my very own town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was written by a liberal named Rick Keith who made some good points and several bad ones. He attended the April 15th Tea Party on the University of Michigan’s campus and reported on the hypocrisy he saw in the Tea Partiers. The worst part, which could have been turned into quite a humorous column, was that Rick Keith pretended to give half a flying fuck about the United States Constitution. Being much more of an adherent to Lysander Spooner’s position on the Constitution than to the strict Constitutionalism of someone like Ron Paul (whom I still openly supported in 2008 and would support again in 2012), I would not be too interested in defending the Constitution too vigorously. Keith’s purpose in arguing Constitutional points with the Tea Partiers was not, I imagine, to convince them that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are defending the Constitution much better than the Tea Partiers’ ideal politician, nor to convince them that he loves the Constitution more than they; rather, he was trying to expose their hypocrisy by showing them that many of the things they want and the things they benefit from are unconstitutional. I don’t imagine he was successful, especially at that anti-tax rally, as there was no income tax in the original Constitution and the central government functioned just fine for 125 years without one (excepting Lincoln’s war taxes).

He is well informed but misinterprets many things with typical liberal-Democrat bias, so I’ll give a brief summary of the lukewarm attacks he managed to make on the hypocrisy of the Tea Partiers and assume he speaks for most liberals:

They recited the Pledge of Allegiance, for some reason, and Keith probed the speaker to tell the socialist, Statolatrist history of the Pledge. He got no response. That’s a good point, and I commend him for knowing his history and speaking up about it.

A doctoral student spoke out against government spending and praised private enterprise, even though though the student engages in federally funded cancer research in federally funded buildings at a federally funded university.

Some local conservative talk-radio host confused the TARP bank-bailout program with Obama’s stimulus spending package. This conservative “didn’t mention the Stimulus’s $140 billion tax cuts to the ‘We’re Taxed to Death’ audience, nor the hundreds of billions to create jobs in rebuilding a crumbling infrastructure, increase efficiency and advance new technologies.”

Needless to say, Keith disagrees with the Tea Partiers’ preferences about what they would like to do with their own money, and he points out that Exxon paid no income taxes to the Imperial Federal Government last year by funneling taxes through offshore subsidiaries. See, Exxon’s taxes are relevant because in the liberal Democrat’s mind, if one company weasels out of its taxes, that means all companies are rolling in profit and no one is being overtaxed, so the Tea Partiers’ complaints about being “taxed to death” are hypocritical and based entirely in fiction!

The Tea Partiers’ idol, Ronald Reagan, cut taxes and simultaneously over-spent, and Reagan and G.H.W. Bush bailed out banks and created soaring debt, all of which these Tea Partiers supported or would have supported.

The Tea Partiers are also apparently hypocritical because the federal government subsidizes all kinds of industries but the Tea Partiers don’t want this to extend (further) into health care. According to Keith, federal government subsidies = subsidies that the Tea Partiers support, so suddenly opposing Obamacare makes them hypocritical?…

Either way, I’m sure there are inconsistencies in there, and I’m equally as sure that Keith’s exposure of them involved a little bit of reaching and no small amount of hypocrisy of his own. Luckily for me, I am not hampered by any association with conservatism, support of any political party, attendance at any Tea Party rallies, or misunderstanding of history, economics, or political philosophy, so I can tear into Rick Keith’s pathetic delusion of American politics at will:

Rick Keith, by your assistance in putting both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in power, you are an accomplice to murder like every other Democratic- and Republican-voting American in the last century. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Africans, Arabs, Serbs, Croats, Kosovars, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Americans is on your hands. All of you. Every president you have supported is a war criminal who belongs in prison next to the ones you’ve hated, and you are an accomplice to their crimes.

The Clinton-led NATO bombings of Yugoslavia/Serbia were unconstitutional and murderous, as are Barack Obama’s continuing airstrikes on Pakistan. The Drug War and the very existence of the Federal Reserve are unconstitutional as well. While it is legitimate to bring up the Tea Partiers’ inconsistencies in their support of strict Constitutionalism solely to point out their errors, even if you don’t support strict Constitutionalism yourself, the politicians you so idolize do swear to uphold the Constitution and are bound by the laws of their office, so by their own rules, they are criminals. Very few of the trillions of dollars your president and your Congress have spent have any remote justification in the Constitution, anywhere.

The boring, lame argument that people who receive or benefit from government money are hypocritical to oppose government spending is simply lazy. It is not possible to avoid government-provided products or services, but we can still point out the injustice of funding them coercively and promote their more efficient provision by companies and communities, privately and voluntarily. It might surprise you to learn that that cancer research student is not solely responsible for the state of public and private education and does not control the sources of funding that pay for biomedical research in this country today. On the contrary, it is your fault that no one can do privately funded research or get a privately funded education in the sciences.

Obama’s stimulus plan will have proven to create mostly government jobs and government debt, exactly as Herbert Hoover and FDR did. If you really wanted to improve the economy and unemployment in the long run, you would have supported tax cuts and spending cuts, so that people can spend their money as they see fit and not as politicians see fit.

You fail to mention that Barack Obama voted for the TARP bailouts, making him a contributor to that inflationary, impoverishing debacle. Conservatives are hypocritical (or at least dumb) for supporting Reagan’s cut-and-spend policies, debts, and bailouts, so all of the present-day liberals are, too, for calling out the Tea Partiers on it while simultaneously supporting the exact same things when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Ben Bernanke do them.

Rick Keith’s and every other liberal’s idolization of Bill Clinton, saying he brought us “prosperity (with tax increases), based on emerging technologies, a new infrastructure and the Information Age,” belies a strong bias, something that will probably, unfortunately, survive through Obama’s deficits and unemployment. Your misunderstanding of economics is not surprising, so let me tell you a little something about the business cycle and the federal reserve. The “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, because much of that growth you liberals love to extol was fueled by debt enabled by the federal reserve, which came back to hurt the economy when the tech and dot-com bubbles burst. Inflation enriches people in the finance industry temporarily and impoverishes everyone in the long run, and that’s what we’ve been seeing throughout the existence of the federal reserve, including during the Clinton administration. Government spending can only be wasteful in the long run because those expenditures are not subject to the price system or the profit and loss of the free market, so that spending and investment that made us so rich in the 1990′s is one of the hundreds of things that made us poorer now. I repeat: the “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, just like the “good times” of the housing bubble weren’t so good.

Lastly, we come to Obamacare, liberals’ standard for all that is great about the Savior of America and Congress’s wise spending under the guidance of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is disgusting power grabbing and vote buying at its worst. “Debacle” will not begin to describe this when my children are grown up. “Debt” will scarcely mean anything anymore when the printing presses inflate the money supply constantly to give stuff away for free when all the Baby Boomers and unemployed stiffs don’t have to pay for anything and health care providers don’t have to make any economic decisions. Medical charity, which used to provide for the indigent, has already all but disappeared and will, in fact, be outlawed. The price competition that improves quality, increases number, and decreases price will also be outlawed. In his column, Rick Keith accuses conservative Tea Partiers of working to “tear down excellence” by “elevating mediocrity.” The more government controls medical care, the more this becomes true: equality is increased by bringing everybody down to a common level. Outlawing economic calculation on the free market absolutely cannot and will not make anything better or cheaper for the masses. (Not that the market hasn’t already been screwed up by decades of government interference.)

The Tea Parties have been infiltrated by neocons, anti-immigration flag waivers, bland supporters of a little less government but only domestically, and straight anti-Democrat simpletons because those are the types of people who predominate in the non-Democrat American populace. Similarly, the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party rallies were so strongly ridiculed because the type of people who predominate in the Democratic ranks are blind Statolatrists who oppose any and all governmental cuts (non-military, of course) and despise the idea of people keeping more of their own money that should be the government’s. If this were inaccurate, then liberal Democrats would have something nice to say about the anti-tax protests and would have opposed some of Barack Obama’s and Congress’s spending/stimulus/bailout actions. But they haven’t, and they won’t, because they are blind followers of just about anyone with a (D) after their name, especially when those Democrats propose to take more money from people who earned it and give it to others.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly skipped town for two days, so SF had no mayor. This is a problem? Let people run their own lives for a while without getting in their way, and see how well it works!

I think it is incredibly unfair to fire teachers or other public employees because of some supposedly scandalous but completely legal pictures of them on Facebook or mySpace or somewhere else on the internet. Sometimes, the victims were fired for things that weren’t even pornographic or illicit in any way. Ashley Payne, a 24-year-old teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, was fired because of non-pornographic pictures and supposedly profane comments posted to her Facebook page. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, I wasn’t doing anything provocative,” she says. She had set everything in her profile to “private” and was not friends with any students or parents. She has no idea how the parent who brought the complaint gained access to her photos. Oh, and also, the parent complained of Payne’s holding an alcoholic drink in one of the pictures. The completely infuriating, despicable, wretched, reviled, pathetic, sanctimonious destructiveness of idiotic teetotaling motherfuckers aside, by what right does a school board fire a teacher for doing nothing illegal, pornographic, harmful, or even unadvisable by any standards? I wish I had the link to a story about another teacher who was fired over some photographs of her in provocative poses, taken either by her boyfriend or husband before she ever became a teacher. So if you have ever done anything that someone in the school system or related to someone in the school system wouldn’t have done herself, that is grounds for firing. This is so typical of the the overly intrusive nanny state and the fascist busybodies that run our stupid society.

It strikes me as a sign of technological impairment or old-fogey-cluelessness when people refer to blog posts as “blogs.” To me, the LRC contributors are the most prominent perpetrators of this transgression. They’ll write, “In reference to your blog from yesterday…” or “…which I wrote about in a previous blog.” Hey, guys, “blog” is short for “web log,” as in, a journal. You wouldn’t refer to an entry in a child’s diary or a starship catpain’s log as a “log.” You would call it an entry. The proper term is blog post or blog entry. You can shorten it to “post” without using any more keystrokes than you now use. Calling a blog post a “blog” is like Senator Ted Stevens calling an email “an internet.” (In case you were wondering, yes, this is the only type of situation in which I would use the conventional “blog” instead of the uber-|337 and irreverent “blag.”)

Ha! Some person at “Progressive Nation” writes of the “growing rift between Libertarians and Republicans. No, this is not a repeat from the 1970’s, the 1980’s, the 1990’s, or every year of the Bush regime.

The first-class moran who occupies Michigan’s lieutenant governor post wants to tax bottled water companies to rescue the flagging revenues of a college scholarship program. In the state with the worst economy in the nation. The one that’s been in a depression for a year longer than the rest of the nation. The one losing businesses in hordes. It is simply depressing that after all these years, liberals refuse to understand that taxes hurt businesses and employment, and that taking more and more money from the taxpayers to put into government programs only destroys wealth. If you want education to be more affordable, or you want to save the environment (as the rest of this idiotic tax would fund), get the government out of both, and let people, companies, and communities solve their problems for themselves.

Juice is as unhealthy as soda and contributes just as much to obesity and diabetes, say some scientists. Yeah, you know who else blamed juice for the world’s problems? HITLER.

Speaking of insatiable parasites, the government of Hawaii will now tax its residents on gross gambling income rather than net gambling income.

A Hawai’i resident who wins $10,000 in a year, for example, and loses $9,000 in the same year used to be taxed only on the $1,000 in net winnings. Under the new law, that resident would be taxed on the full $10,000 in winnings.

I imagine several other states already have similar laws, but it’s no coincidence that at least one state is enacting such a tax during the Second Great Depression. Many companies offer better deals to customers in an attempt to maintain revenues (…and, unfortunately, they also fire a lot of people to cut costs) to stay afloat. The first resort of governments is to take whatever they can from their captives. It is sad to read comments about this and other stories from people who probably claim to love freedom and justice and all those other things that, they’d say, made America great, but then when it gets down to specifics they bend over backwards to support anything and everything that helps the State at the obvious expense of its subjects.

It doesn’t matter that this is unenforceable. The intent and the attitude of these parasites in government is what should really boil your blood.

Y’see, gals, if you follow sports and know a little bit about them, then you can sail right through the interrogation about your cocaine-filled golf clubs without arousing any suspicion. Such efforts to traffic drugs would obviously be unnecessary if the drugs were legal, which would be better for everyone in society because their sale, distribution, and use would be safer and our civil liberties wouldn’t be the collateral damage of the War on Drugs.

A Maryland high-school softball coach was fired after parents drank beers that they brought to an end-of-the-year team party. Because underage high-schoolers were present, observing their parents imbibing alcohol. At the coach’s private residence. A firing over this probably wouldn’t happen in a free society. Hysterical teetotaling anti-alcohol crusaders are about as wretched as they come. Without a doubt, they are more to blame for society’s alcohol-related problems, such as underage binge-drinking and drunken driving, than any other factor. There is no way they could exert as much influence without the State enforcing their delusions upon society. All of this influence is harmful. A dead giveaway of a brain-dead Statolatrist zombie is that they suggest government school board members could rise to any position of importance in an educational system in a free society (or probably any other organization or business).

In a free society, family and community would be intimately involved in the education of children because it would be necessary and because there would be neither the inclination nor the opportunity to relinquish such responsibilities to State bureaucrats. Conversely, bureaucrats and other strangers would have no opportunity to claim authority over parents or their children. Idiotic teetotalers and other brands of moral busybodies would never be in a position to make decisions about other people’s children or, in this case, a coach who supposedly…let parents do something that was in some way bad to their own children.

Frank Hatley of Cook County, Georgia, was imprisoned for one year for failing to make child support payments for a child who, as the court was aware, was not his.

In June of last year, a judge ordered Hatley to jail for failing to reimburse the state for public assistance that was paid to support his “son,” who, as the court was aware, is not actually his son.
[...]
For 13 years, Hatley made payments to the state until learning, in 2000, that the boy might not be his biological son. A DNA test that year confirmed that there was no chance he was the father, according to court documents.

Hatley…was relieved of any future child support reimbursement but was ordered to pay more than $16,000 that he had owed the state before the ruling.

Anyone who wants to claim such absurdities as this could happen and carry on for a full year in a non-monopolistic, non-coercive legal system, and that the agency responsible could continue operating as usual after this came to light, simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Only coercive monopolies can get away with things like this; private, peaceful bodies cannot and would not.

The British socialized medicine system will ban private organ donations from dead donors. Basically the problem is that foreigners were paying top dollar (pound, euro, whatever) for the organs of dead Britons, and it horrified the busybodies in the UK government that scarce resources were being voluntarily allocated via the price system, and that such exchanges were taking place outside of the gentle governance of the NHS.

An independent report said the public needed to be confident that scarce donor organs were allocated fairly within the NHS.

Transplant surgeons said the ban would reassure the public that organs will go to those in greatest need.

Everything is scarce and the only sensible, practical, or remotely principled way to allocate those scarce things—yes, including body parts that their owners want to donate—is by the price system of the free market that matches supply to demand. No governing body or other self-anointed group of experts could ever allocate resources or direct people more efficiently or “fairly” than the free market’s price system does. It is simply not possible in the real world, even if the governing body had the best of intentions, and especially not when decisions will inevitably be made for political rather than economic reasons. Here is a much more logical and refreshing take on the U.S.’s screwed-up, government-run organ donor system.

Those Philadelphia cops who pulled three shooting suspects out of a car and beat them back in May 2008 have been cleared of any crimes by a grand jury. (Wow, that was almost a year and a half ago?!) The most surprising part of this case is that their chief, Charles Ramsey, fired four of the officers and suspended or demoted another four, and he’s not backing down from that decision. “I have 40 years of law enforcement experience. I kinda know what I’m looking at. In my opinion, all the actions were not justified.” Good for him.

A program that allows citizens to file anonymous complaints on the Illinois secretary of state’s website about people misusing handicapped parking spots received 114 tips in its first month and a half. People snitching on each other to punish them for disobeying laws that have no basis in natural law, no relation to right vs. wrong, and that attempt to force common courtesy on everyone? Sounds par for the course for governments. Wake me when you hear of an example of government promoting a sense of respect, community, and courtesy among its captives.

A Fort Myers Beach councilman was fired after other council members learned he was married to a former porn star. Terrible and unjust. They fire him in July 2009 “without cause” after he had been married since October 2008. The dolt who led the vilification said, “It’s a matter of how effective he becomes after this situation. How much disruption there is.” You stupid moron, there was no decrease in his effectiveness and there was no disruption until you got it into YOUR pathetic little brain to make an issue out of it. You can’t work with him and approve of his effectiveness for nine months and then decide his marriage might be disruptive to his job only after you learn of it! And soon, after his wrongful termination suit against the city, the idiots on the town council won’t have to pay for his settlement out of their pockets, oh, no; it will come from the town’s treasury, in other words, other people will pay for their stupidity directly or indirectly. Prudes are bad enough, but idiotic prudes are just depressing.

An Illinois millionaire didn’t like the $80,000 property tax bill on his mansion, so he had himself ordained by some online “church,” put a wooden cross on his house, and called it a church to get a property tax exemption. Good for him, I say! Not good for him or the rest of the taxpaying suckers, say idiotic Statolatrists everywhere. A man defends himself from a crime in a nonviolent and somewhat clever way, and the sanctimonious public responds with violence and derision. Everyone is pleased that this sham was found out and the guy will now have to pay back taxes, because nonviolent nonparticipation is a violation of their moral code. (I’ll conveniently gloss over the fact that this millionaire banker made his fortune off of the ultimate State racket, the monopoly on currency, because the principle of nonviolent nonparticipation remains the same.)

How the “buy American” attitude backfires: it spurs resentment and nationalism, whereas free, borderless trade engenders the respect, goodwill, mutual prosperity, and reciprocal interdependence that characterize true civilization. Libertarians at least as early as Frederic Bastiat have known this as a truism. Welcome to the 19th century.