Panel Discussion

0:00Any questions? I'm going to check online if there are questions too, but if you have questions, that would be great. Anybody? So with all the ways that taxes don't work and what not, is there an ideal way, regardless of whether or not it can ever happen, is there an ideal way where we can have services that that everybody participates in, but without the wastefulness of the government? Well, I mean, I think the simple answer is that yes, there is. I mean, if this is what you're asking, I mean, there is an alternative.

0:47And the thing is, basically all the services that the government provides can be better provided in the market. And in fact, most of them already have long historical precedents of being provided to the market. If that's what you meant, then yes, it's entirely possible and they would be much less wasteful and more efficient ways of providing the same things. It's not just the market. There's a market society, but it's also civil society, family society that just because there are public goods

1:59I would like to say a credit union versus a bank to make an analogy there, where the credit union is actually owned by the members, so it's the collectives when they provide the same services, but it's not like a government in the sense of taking them. Yeah, I think you can use exactly those kind of analogies because kind of building on what Danny was saying, I mean we talk a lot about the market and the market is of course very important, profit and loss are very important, but these arrangements for getting around these problems of providing public goods, they're much wider than just the profit motive and so yes, you have all kinds of arrangements like this, like things like credit unions or cooperatives, collectives and all kinds of alternatives to strict profit and loss that come up to solve these problems.

2:59And the reason that they're sort of unobjectionable is because they're just the result of people getting together and deciding that that's the way they'd like to organize the production of whatever this good is. and then so like the big point is that it's despite the fact of course that we do talk about the market a lot it's really the big distinction is between government and private individuals and the use of force and social cooperation those are the big things and it just happens to be that the market is one very important mechanism for social cooperation but yeah you have all these other arrangements too that people come up with to try and solve these problems What level of government would be acceptable? We have to have some form of government. If you just get away with everything, what's to keep complete anarchy from raining, complete total chaos?

4:11Park means rulers, so just because you don't have rulers doesn't mean you don't have rules. Oh, no, no, no, sorry. Go ahead. I think what you were trying to say is that we don't necessarily need government in the sense that it's conventionally understood. We need rules, we need law, we need a society, but it's not necessarily the case. I think we would argue that you need government in the sense of somebody who forces you to abide by laws that you did not in fact have a real role in setting up and that you never agreed to. So we do think that a lot of these fundamental services that government is supposed to provide in terms of just ensuring the very stability of society, Society, those can be provided by private individuals who don't need to force each other at gunpoint to follow each other's will. That's something that I think that we would agree on.

5:13And there's also a distinction between government and governance. So we do need governance. We need security, enforcement of laws, judicial services, protection from foreign invasion. These are things that are important, but they're all things that have, at some point, been provided by private individuals. Every single one of these services has been provided by private services. In Ireland, for a thousand years, they were provided, they were all provided, and in most other societies, at least some of them have been provided in different ways.

6:02And just as a practical matter, a solution that was proposed by Joseph Sobert, he was a great libertarian writer, he just put it like this, he said, you look as a practical Could you have a workable system that's more localized, in other words is part of our problem Today, in our United States government, the fact that so much of what we do is under the umbrella of the national, the federal level.

6:54If we were to, as a practical matter, if we were to be able to take away some of the functions of the federal government and put them more in the hands of state and local governments, Would that be more a move toward that kind of cooperative society?

7:35And that can be another process along the lines of what he was talking about before, of just taking off layers of government until you find the stopping point that works, but you can also secede until you find the stopping point that works. You can have states seceding from the federal government, you can have cities seceding from from States, you can have neighborhoods seceding from cities, and ultimately, if it's possible and if it works, then you can have the individual seceding politically from that little microstate. Which is not to say that you're seceding economically.

8:24It's important to realize that we're not talking about economic atomism, that you still We still have the division of labor that just because we're not part of the same state as Canada doesn't mean that we can't buy and sell from Canada and that we're not part of the same civilization and part of the same society as Canada. And just like the Italian city-states, just because they weren't at one point part of one big Italian super-state didn't mean that they weren't a civilization that bought and sold from each other. is a great point, is that you have these two effects, because as you become more decentralized, politically speaking, at the same time, there's this great effect where you become more integrated economically.

9:11So even more decentralized type forms of government results in much more global communication and economic activity and so on. So it's an interesting effect that goes the other way, but that's an entirely good thing. So, there is a question from the online audience. Harold asks, which type of tax do you consider to be most destructive to society? Sales tax, personal income tax, or corporate tax? And what do you consider to be the most destructive aspect of that tax? Which tax do you consider to be most immoral as opposed to destructive? Thanks for the session. Thanks. Yes, as always, it depends on where you start from and exactly how you look at it.

10:01In general, you might say that corporate income taxes can be among the most destructive because if you're taxing, say, entrepreneurs who are supposed to be the driving force of the economy, if they're prevented through taxes from doing this, from playing this very important Murray Rothbard said that too much focus is given to the type of taxation and not enough to the level of taxation. That it's the level of taxation that matters the most.

10:49And so actually the most important part about the type of taxation is how it contributes to the level of taxation. So that's why Joe was talking about how a poll tax or a head tax, just people talk about flat tax as being like everyone pays the same percentage. No, a real flat tax would be everybody paying the same amount and that by its very nature would limit taxation because you can't charge, like Joe was saying, that you can't charge too much of a tax because the poor have to be able to afford it. So it forces you to have a very limited, a very low tax. And so Murray Rothbard wrote an article about Margaret Thatcher because she tried to institute a poll tax.

11:41And he said, but she missed the whole point of the poll tax because she instituted it, but then she tried to make it really high. And that's missing the whole point of the poll tax is that it's supposed to force you to make it low. Oh, and then just to add also, because you asked about the morality of taxes too, a lot of people have made fairly convincing cases that things like personal income taxes are the most onerous sort of taxes from the moral perspective as well, because they're basically In general, internal taxes in general, including income taxes, but also including excise taxes, that those are particularly hated, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, because of of the Invasion of Privacy that they Entail.

12:40So that's part of the reason why the Americans were hated so much when the British switched from tariffs to excise and direct taxation, internal taxation, because it involved troops Results coming in and snooping around on your property and trying to assess how much you owe, whereas with a tariff it's paid at the dock and it's seen as less intrusive. But again, it's really the principle that really upset the Americans, that even though the revenue level was really low and that it was the principle.

13:41And so that's what's amazing about how easy we are in terms of the taxation that we're even just a tiny, tiny taxation, just the principle of it upset people. And like Ron Paul said, that once you give 1%, you're giving 100% of the principal. Oak? So how do we get from where we are now with the fairly high taxation to that point where you said that it would be like where the fabric of civilization sometimes would break? How do you get from here to there when everyone thinks that taxation is a game?

14:49is a much more difficult thing to actually do because it's not very wise to encourage people not to pay their taxes and nobody wants to risk imprisonment. But the real key is to just communicate this idea to people that taxes are unjust and that they are destructive to the economy. And when enough people realize this, really begin to understand this and put it into practice, In American history, one tactic that was used was just civil disobedience. Murray Rothbard Woodward has a great article on the whiskey rebellion, which was a widespread rebellion against an excise tax on whiskey that was successful.

15:58Even though George Washington actually came in militarily and put a stop to one particular revolt where they were actually manhandling tax collectors, it didn't stop there. You mentioned the Rothbard article on the full tax. At the end of the article it said that the government was still trying to collect the whiskey tax. So, ultimately, it was abandoned. That was the last time that there was a peacetime excise tax in America until the Civil War. Yes? You mentioned the Rothbard article on the full tax. In the beginning of the article it said that Scotland did not have a coercive tax and that a third of the population just refused to pay it.

16:52And then we were talking earlier about a circum. And so I wonder, there seem to be two voluntary taxes, two systems of government under Maury. Well, Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes the point that in a monarchy, you know who the state is.

17:37If King Obama tried to say the state is us, it wouldn't fly, and so there's built-in resistance because of that, and so that's one way in which that's true. But then you have kings like Philip the Fair who were really rapacious at the same time. Does the Federal Reserve have anything to do with taxation, and if it does, what does it have to do with it? There are some connections, but really, we tend to think of the Federal Reserve as an alternative way of influencing the economy.

18:25Generally speaking, you make a distinction in economics between monetary policy, which is the Federal Reserve, and basically just changes in the money supply, changes in the interest rates, things of that nature, and on the other hand there's fiscal policy, which is the government's budget, taxes, spending, and so on, and those are generally viewed as alternative methods of trying to influence the economy, push it in one way or another, so in that sense, the Federal Reserve is not connected to taxation, although of course, I think you were pointing out the inflation tax, of course this is one and the informal way that the Fed very much is involved in the business of taxation is because it changes the purchasing power of money.

19:13It imposes this implicit tax on all people who hold money. And at the same time, even if there isn't price inflation, I mean there's no such thing as a free lunch. I mean there's a certain amount of goods and services that are out there. And so if you print a bunch of money out of nowhere and give it to a bunch of bankers and suddenly they have the wherewithal to command a greater portion of these goods and services that are out there at any given moment, then when you're talking about one given moment, it's a zero-sum game.

19:58So if they are suddenly richer, then in that given moment, other people are poor. So anytime you just print money out of nowhere, it is redistribution. And so even if there isn't noticeable price inflation, it's still a tax, it's still a redistribution of wealth. Which goes to this question, which was, please comment on the evils of inflation as a hidden tax. Okay, should we wrap it up? Any other questions? Okay, thank you. Thank you all.