Distribute Widely and Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I am not an economist, nor do I play one on TV, but I know a hand-job when I see one. The mindless mutants who are mangling Donald Trump’s tax plans are dragging this nation and the world into a Da-Daesque vortex we may never get out of. (Only a “progressive” Democrat would stomp a man’s legs. break them in a dozen places, and then make fun of him because he can’t walk.) While lowering almost everybody’s taxes, they want a special bracket appended to the deal to punish people with a million dollars or more to “pay for” everybody else’s tax relief. My question, in an era when government takes too much away from us already, why the bloody hell should it be allowed to steal more?

Even from people who are supposedly hated by the “masses”? (I seriously doubt it. “The Democrat Party masses, more likely. Most right-wing masses—if there is such a thing—aspire to become millionaires, themselves.)

Half a century ago, when I was a shiny new Objectivist warrior, jousting with various statist orcs and trolls on the left, a major concern of theirs seemed to be the big, luxurious houses that rich people built for themselves or bought and lived in. Somehow, there was something evil or sinful in that—“conspicuous consumption” one famous comtard called it—and it needed to be stopped. It didn’t ever seem to have occurred to these feeble-minded pickpockets (who had likely never done an honest day’s work in their worthless lives) that the construction of a big, luxurious house (today, we call them McMansions) requires the skilled services of dozens, if not hundreds, of earth-movers, concrete-workers, framers, finish carpenters, glazers, roofers, plumbers, sheet-rock guys, landscapers, etc., most of whom have families to feed, clothe, and house, themselves.

They need rich people to build big, luxurious houses for.

In general, there are few, if any, ways the most malign “malefactor of great wealth” can spend his money without benefitting someone who needs a job. Even cocaine has to be cultivated and processed by somebody. This lesson was learned the hard way back in 1990 when Idiot-in-Chief George 41 Bush broke his “read my lips” promise and allowed a punitive “luxury tax” to be levied on yachts, big, expensive cars, and assorted other keen stuff like that. Hundreds of jobs were lost. Thousands suffered. One company went from 220 workers to 50 overnight. Within two years those who had stirred up class envy the most energetically were calling for repeal of this “hate the rich” tax. In the same way, millionaires’ money would fly overseas in an instant and vanish from our struggling economy.

There is nothing good about taxation, and nothing good ever comes from it without the often-tragic loss of some higher value. As I have been at some pains to point out before, taxation, a ten-thousand year-old practice fully as evil as anything else human beings have ever thought up to do to each other, is theft; taxation is slavery; and taxation is the fuel of war. As historian Barbara Tuchman was able to conclude in her great book about the origins of World War I, The Guns of August, the only reason for fighting it (which Bob Dylan “never did get”) was that world leaders had a lot of brand-new shiny toys (artillery, tanks, Zeppelins, airplanes, poison gas) paid for with tax money, that they were anxious to try out—on each other’s subjects.

That’s just one reason (there are many more) why libertarians must strive with every cell in their bodies to abolish taxation the way chattel slavery was abolished. From beginning to its nominal end, the anti-slavery movement, started by Queen Isabella of Spain, took about 350 years to accomplish its goal. Yes, there is still slavery in the world, but it’s nearly universally regarded as evil and worth fighting to eliminate. A giood place to begin might be my Taxpayers’ Equity Amendment, as described in this 2010 article: “Taxation In A Whole New Bag”.

This is our niche, we libertarians, in this age of the disintegration of the left and right, and the rise of populism. This is what we can aim for, what we can do, even if it takes us 350 years. We can dry up the parasitic state’s lifeblood—our money—and starve it out of existence.