I’ve been a libertarian for many years; most of that time I’ve been a moderate libertarian. But there is a case for no taxes which some extreme libertarians will make. And no, you don’t have to be “ignorant, gullible, crazy, and/or fanatic” to consider it, just moderately intelligent and open-minded enough to set aside your current point of view for a few minutes.
Here it goes. With no taxes there will be tremendous prosperity. Imagine no capital gains taxes. Money from all over the world flows into the country. Venture capitalists have trouble finding enough good ideas to fund to disperse all that cash. There is 100% employment, even more if you count people moonlighting. Workers don’t have to pay income taxes so they work lots of hours, resulting in even more prosperity.
Charitable contributions, currently at least $300 billion a year, will soar. With full employment, the need for social services decreases. Wealthy workers who are no longer paying thousands in taxes are glad to pay for private schools and garbage collection, etc.
For the big ticket items, like the armed forces, corporations, who are now rolling in dough, gently pressure each other to pay their share.
And so on.
For myself, the question is just too abstract or Utopian to answer seriously. Now if you ask me if I’d support a plan to cut taxes by about 10% a year for the next five or ten years, with evaluation of results as we go, yeah I’d vote for that in a second.
No, there wouldn’t; society would collapse into a failed state.
Not any more. Foreign investment drops to essentially zero, as everyone will know we’ve just committed national suicide. The companies already here will leave, as rapidly as possible. And there’s no point in investing money that’ll just be stolen by people who no longer have a government to stop them.
Not much prosperity from that, since the majority of the population will be slaves. There won’t be any government to stop anyone from a gun or the money to hire people with guns to stop that.
In America ? Nonsense. America is for our assets one of the least charitable countries on Earth. We hand out lots of money because we are rich ( so a small portion of our wealth is a large amount of money ), and so we can use it as a lever to extort things from people, not because we are a generous people. And most people will be too poor anyway. And if they somehow get together any money, the local warlord will just steal it, and probably any pretty looking women while he’s there.
Plenty of people would vote for no taxes ON THEM. This was essentially the way the federal government was funded in its early years – via customs duties and other taxes upon imports.
First off, I’d like an extreme libertarian to provide a cite showing that countries with the lowest tax rates have the highest private investments in their armed forces, private schools, garbage disposal, etc. This should be easy enough to provide, assuming it’s ever happened anywhere.
Second, classical economists will argue that it is not the role of the corporation to fund charity (or national defense for that matter.) The only role of the cor[poration should be to make money for its stockholders, who can then choose to use that money anyway they want. I’m sure this is something most extreme libertarians would agree with, so I have trouble reconciling that viewpoint with the belief that corporations will pressure each other to pay for big ticket items.
To get back to the main topic, how many extreme libertarians would vote for no taxes?
What the fuck?! You think people work less because they get taxed? I don’t think anyone who doesn’t desperately need more money (or really likes their job) wants to work more hours. People generally want to use their time for leisure, not work.
I think we could go back to that, if we really wanted to. The dollar amount of non-income taxes collected last year (the type of things you’re talking about) was approximately equal to the total Federal budget in about 1992. Those of you who remember 1992, did you feel there was a stunning lack of federal services back then? I didn’t. It’s not quite linear, of course, we’re an older population now with the attendant increases in entitlement costs for things like Medicare, plus that doesn’t factor in paying down the deficit, but there is no reason that it couldn’t be done except for a population that demands more and more services from the feds and a bureaucracy that wants to expand it’s power and influence. Dropping all personal taxes would cause a huge jump in the economy, we could likely grow our way out of the deficit problem. Cutting income tax does not necessarily mean a cut in government services to the point that the poor are starving in the street. Like I said, we did just fine in 1992.
The flaw in that argument is the implicit assumption that the government services those taxes fund doesn’t benefit people & the economy. What makes you think that the people whose taxes were cut wouldn’t just have to spend that money to replace what the government is doing, but more expensively due to lacking an economy of scale and other government advantages ? Government is not the useless parasite the Right likes to claim ( at least, on anything that doesn’t involve oppressing and killing people; they like that part of the government ).
Once again, a 100% fact free post. I don’t know how you maintain your consistency, really I don’t. Tell me, what exactly is it that government does so efficiently? Or that it does that is so vital that it couldn’t do it with a budget of $1.4 trillion?
I think that a large part of the problem with paying taxes is that perhaps people feel the govenrment is not spending money wisely, i.e. Bridges to Nowhere, stimulus checks, “Corporate welfare”.
Infrastructure is suffering and the leaders are arguing over a $700 billion bailout. I suppose they may need some help but not THAT MUCH.
WaMu was bought out but the branch office in my town is open, so i’m having a hard time understanding how they’ve failed ëxcept for the fact that"WaMu" sounds much like the sound made when something makes one sneeze.