Tag: taxation
“The land monopoly… consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation… the individual should no longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal occupation and cultivation of land.” -Benjamin R. Tucker, “State Socialism and Anarchism” Ironically, the non-aggression principle as understood by much…
Sanders’ book centers on two tasks facing the American people. He states them at the outset. First: These Americans [the predominantly younger voters who supported Sanders’ candidacy] understand that proposals that tinker around the edges are an insufficient response to the enormous crises we face. For them, there is a rapidly growing recognition that this…
The Need For It Is. At Reason, J.D. Tuccille (“Worried About the Debt Fight? Make the Hard Spending Decisions That Politicians Won’t!”) restates a familiar refrain of the libertarian right: “it’s easy to forget that a statutory limit to federal borrowing isn’t the real issue; the real problem is that the federal government habitually spends…
De Charles Boyd. Artigo original: The Myth of the Libertarian Constitution, 30 de dezembro 2020. Traduzido para o português por Gabriel Serpa. A Constituição americana, como fora elaborada por seus criadores na Filadélfia, há muito é descrita como sendo uma garantia às liberdades individuais ante a repressão governamental. Muitos dos críticos de Donald Trump o…
The original Constitution, as designed by the framers in Philadelphia, has often been seen as guaranteeing individual freedom from government repression. Many of Donald Trump’s critics see him as undermining our nation’s foundational constitutional principles, and people and groups from Joe Biden to Black Lives Matter are often seen as trying to restore them. But…
Most Effective Altruists don’t look like anarchists. The latter have a (charmingly) grungy flavor, the aura of half-dazed rebels perennially stumbling their way out of Woodstock reunions. By contrast, Effective Altruists have the trappings of recent MIT and Tufts graduates, lanky tech nerds and philosophy majors with an incomprehensible infatuation with “Pi Day” and something…
For a few years now, Modern Money Theory, or MMT, has been the hottest buzzword in economics. The insights of MMT regarding our nation’s spending debate have been simultaneously misunderstood, disregarded, and celebrated. In this essay I will explain the central argument of MMT. I will explore why its conclusions are dangerous in the wrong…
The state depends on its cops to enforce private property. Without them present, the owners would have to hire private security to protect their property from seizure, and that is (due to economies of scale of which the state takes advantage) massively more expensive on the whole. So, one of the most effective ways to…
Di William Gillis. Originale pubblicato il 6 settembre 2018 con il titolo A Simple Reform. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Se il problema delle tasse è che sono una violenza, allora ogni riformismo fiscale coerentemente e consistentemente libertario come prima cosa dovrebbe diminuire il numero di persone derubate. Questo, ovviamente, significa eliminare completamente le tasse sui…
If the problem with taxation is the coercion, then surely the priority of any coherent and consistent libertarian reformism on taxes should be to minimize the number of people who are robbed at all. Of course this would mean entirely abolishing taxes on the poorest. By the non-aggression principle, a mugger drawing a gun on…
I am mystified that so many libertarians still see the U.S. Constitution as a landmark achievement in the struggle for liberty. On principle alone, they should have become wary in time. A document that is adored at virtually every position in the political firmament should arouse suspicion among libertarians. Moreover a smattering of historical knowledge…
I. The Nonexistent Ethical Dilemma The showdown between Greece and the EU is one of those events that brings out in stark contrast the dividing line between libertarians whose main concern is genuine economic freedom, and the sort of libertarian whose priority is the interests of big business and the propertied classes. In an exchange…
C4SS Feed 44 presents James C. Wilson‘s “Don’t Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol — Keep Government Out!” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford. “Supporters of marijuana prohibition are not getting any younger. More than 213 million Americans live in jurisdictions with some form of legal marijuana use. Growing numbers recognize marijuana as a means of…
The Center for a Stateless Society is delighted to announce that our parent institution, the Molinari Institute, has been declared by the IRS to be a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization; hence donations to the Molinari Institute – and thus to the Center for a Stateless Society as well – are tax-deductible. To quote from the…
Il venti febbraio, i parlamentari americani Jared Polis (democratico, Colorado) e Earl Blumenauer (democratico, Oregon) hanno presentato due nuove proposte di legge che mirano alla legalizzazione della marijuana a livello federale. La pratica di arrestare, multare, opprimere e stigmatizzare chi usa la marijuana è un fatto tragico che ha danneggiato l’esistenza di tanti. La fine…
On February 20, US Representatives Jared Polis (D-CO) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) introduced two new bills for federal marijuana legalization. The US government’s practice of imprisoning, fining, harassing and stigmatizing marijuana users is tragic and has damaged many lives. Ending prohibition is a welcome change, but these bills have severe problems. If passed, they would turn marijuana…
Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Akai Gurley. These are just the latest in a line of minorities who have been killed by the police in excessive force cases where no scrutiny was even applied to the cops. While protests arise in the memory of these fallen human beings, I find myself asking a question in their…
Sento spesso persone che, senza riflettere, dicono: “Lo stato ha il diritto di tassare”, “lo stato ha il diritto di punire i criminali”, o “lo stato ha il diritto di controllare i confini nazionali”. Dentro di me, provo orrore per la facilità con cui si fanno queste affermazioni, per il fatto che molti considerino queste…
I often hear people make casual remarks like, “Well, the State has a right to collect taxes,” “the State has a right to punish criminals,” or “the State has a right to controls its borders.” Inside, I am always somewhat horrified at how very easily these kinds of assumptions are made, at how obvious the…
About 2,748,978 Americans are employees of the federal government. The population of the US is somewhere around 317,940,000. The federal government takes 17.3% of Gross Domestic Product in taxes. So the average federal employee controls a little more than 20 times as much of each year’s produced wealth as the average American. And it’s not…