Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Remember me? I’m the guy who wrote Alongside Night, a novel about the United States’ economy collapsing due to the Federal Reserve inflating the dollar to pay for the government spending far more than taxes collected.

What is the national debt today? Somewhere around 23 trillion bucks? And if you figure in future obligations — Social Security, Medicare, promises made to veterans for wounds sustained in endless undeclared wars — I hear the debt comes to somewhere around 160 trillion bucks.

President Donald Trump is calling for significant tax cuts to attract foreign investment, give corporations reason to build new factories in America, bring jobs back to America.

Of course I noted in Alongside Night— published in 1979—that if the government keeps spending more money than it collects in taxes and tariffs the only way to pay for that spending is for the Federal Reserve to make each dollar worth less, a hidden tax.

So anyone who claims that tax cuts “have to be paid for” — while making the obnoxious claim that anything the people say they own has a lien from the goddam guvmint —they are in fact pointing to a basic principle of reality: you can’t get something out of nothing.

What’s a libertarian to do?

How about this? Tell the truth.

Cutting taxes leaves people and financial institutions with more money to spend. That’s money that can be paid to executives to live a more lavish lifestyle, and the Democratic critics do have that right. Just because a corporation has more money on its balance sheet doesn’t mean they’ll use it to make anything or create new jobs. That’s mostly what happened when in 2008 banks were forced to take taxpayer money that was supposed to be used to make consumer loans.

But let’s say that individuals in the “middle class”—the Marxists used to call that the bourgeoisie—take that money and instead of buying new cars, phones, and toys—they use that money in ways the crats don ’t like. They start-up unlicensed and unregistered home schools. They use spare rooms and vacation cabins to compete with hotel chains, use their mommy vans to compete with medallion taxis. They sell jams, pies, home-brew beverages to local stores.

And conceal all this entrepreneurial activity financed with the money not being turned over to Uncle Sam from Uncle Sam.

Same for “small businesses” doing home repairs, or plumbing, or rebuilding car transmissions, or rigging your automobile’s computer to lie to the State about the CO2 emissions because CO2 emissions being the cause of climate change is anti-science globaloney.

The Agorist Trading Floor in  Alongside Night the Movie

Yes, President Trump. Bring on the tax cuts. The economy that the tax cuts will save is the one that exists in spite of Jekyll Island and Wall Street.

The economy run by Washington crats? The swamp you talk about? That official economy is doomed and I think you’ ve already figured that out.

 

Reprinted from J. Neil Schulman @ Agorist.com.