I think you misunderestimate the problem: the digging is the relatively cheap part, particularly the digging from the curb to your premises. The expensive proposition for the utility is the cable, repeaters, concentration equipment, support crews to keep it fixed and the back-end gear to connect it all to the cloud, or the satellite, or whatever. Even if there were a conduit running straight into your basement, I have my doubts that there would be a huge mob of companies vying to run a few miles of glass to your house; shovels or no, it's certainly not like running 100base-T upstairs into the bedroom. Also, keep in mind that each of these companies, under such a regime, would have to have their own network, thus, if they were offering, lets say, POTS, they'd each have their own redundant COs, repeaters and trunks, and suddenly one expensive network infrastructure becomes five. Your theory only works if costs to a telco provider are a function of subscribers count, when in fact the costs are more often a function of coverage area (let alone bandwidth and latency, for which conduits buy you nothing).
OTOH, Common utility ducts do exist, but they're very expensive to install and are generally used in places where there's already a big network of underground holes (like the NY subway/steam system) or places where earthquakes make conduits a good idea to keep all the wires stable (like Japan). In these cases, though, the curb to the house is not a part of the municipal network.
Strictly speaking, using a monopoly to abuse stifle competition or innovation is bad, monopolies themselves are acceptable and common.
The US Mail service doesn't have a monopoly, just ask Fedex Ground, and nether would a publicly-owned infrastructure either. It just sets a minimum standard of service. You're free to start Theaveng's Letter Service tomorrow, but it has to be either as reliable and cheap as the USPS, or charge more and compete on features.
I didn't say they were "nuts," just cranks. Maybe I should have been more specific-- I didn't mean to imply that the gold standard is a bad idea (though I think it is), but that the people who advocate it are belly-aching autodidact complainer types that think they know more about economics than professionals. Believing in the gold standard is no longer an economic theory, it's become a cargo cult social identity movement, that they drop the moment someone asks them to vote.
A good example of a crank would be a UFO conspiracy theorist, or a timecube-style physics crackpot. Maybe they're right, but it doesn't help that he's a reclusive weirdo that thinks posting his question on the POTUS's website will be productive.
Essentially you are relying on trusting that KHQA changed their story on facts and not because it has become inconvenient for the President-elect. The timing is more than suspect.
You're implying a conspiracy between the PEOTUS, almost certainly members of his staff, an independent TV station's reporter and editor. Just sayin.
Both the Senate and House Democratic and Republican caucuses have.gov domains, and they are frankly partisan. There's nothing strange about it in the general case.
"As President, will you appoint a special prosecutor with impeccable credentials to reopen a comprehensive investigation of 9/11, in order to discover the truth about the events of that terrible day, and find out who was responsible?"
"Will you consider reforming the debt based economy and reinstate a standard of value to the US dollar (such as the Gold, Silver or Infrastructure standards) in order to preserve the value of the dollar and protect it from uncontrolled inflation?"
Now the cranks can see for themselves just how irrelevant they are.
I don't think any responsible people are suggesting propping up housing prices (or any other prices) above $x.. Nobody is saying "cause a bubble or suffer deflation." I think it requires more than a bald assertion to say that government deficit spending, in the current climate, will automatically cause an asset-price bubble. And then further, even if it did, that the outcome of this scenario would be significantly worse than allowing the deflation to run its course.
Then how do you define value? In order to have value, doesn't something have to be valued by someone?
Yeah, but I guess I only perceive value in things like goods and services. The money itself is strictly the means. Money is useless without a market for it to move in, so I think its silly to expect it to have value that endures a particular political regime. Cuz it won't.
The use of force prevents you from making rational decisions that further your life - you instead are forced to further someone else's contrived goals.
The natural state of man is to be dominated by powerful men and institutions, and then by his needs, I think (I could be wrong but I think I speak for a certain tradition of thought on the matter). This isn't a desirable thing, but that's no reason to try to deny it. Rights are a statement that domination must have limits, if we are all to realize our full potential. Without the force of government eliminating criminals who would harm you or steal your property, the "coercions" and the influence of "contrived goals" would encounter on a daily basis would only increase.
leverage is a good thing [for the government] to have available
Why?
If a bridge provides $10 million dollars in value, would cost a million dollars to build, and you can borrow the money to build it for a total loan cost of 2 million, what the hell are you waiting for? Leverage to expand assets, assets that will help business on either side of the road, without having to wait 10 years to save the money, or 20 years for the businesses on either side of the road to negotiate a consortium to build the bridge, which they'll charge you $0.85 to cross if you aren't a steady customer. 20 years people lived without a bridge, they got by, but how much better could their lives have been?
A choice forced upon you is not a rational choice.
You consent to it, you obey, you do not rebel. Hannah Arendt: "Politics is not the nursery. Your obedience is your support." I profoundly believe that. If you go along with it you go along with it. "Voicing your objection" while following along is worthless.
More practically, you could sidestep most of the whole inflation business by keeping your long term assets in gold and not keeping a lot of cash. You have that right. It might be more "rational," but that's sortof a red herring, as, clearly, rationality is no criteria for determining if someone has a right to behave in such a way.
It says man has inalienable rights
I don't think the Constitution says this, the Declaration does, and though they indulged in this rhetoric, and many of them truly believed it, I think they were mistaken. Tell a man in jail he has inalienable rights, or a man in the Army, or a Somali. This is how man truly regards his own condition, outside of this remarkably bourgeois conception of man you have outlined. Remove the police from your town and you would see. Men yearn to breathe free only when they have a good income, aren't terrorized by hooligans, and their children are fed; they are generally blind to the blessings and entails of their "rights" up until that point.
And, generally, even when they are aware of their rights in full, as Europeans and Americans clearly are, they consent to have a more statist or directed economy than the one you aspire to. Their folly, perhaps, but also, individually, their "right" to consent to such things. Truly laissez-faire economies are the province of the 19th century and right-wing banana republics.
Anyways, my guy won so you're getting a bridge and free broadband, and later maybe we can pay down this damn bill! Try to enjoy it.
There is no requirement that "property" can only be something that you ultimately want, or want "in the end". Property is regularly the means to other more ultimate ends.
That's why I don't think property and value are the same thing... In my opinion "value" is something you ultimately want, and property is the means. Money is property, as is a house, but only the house has value. I should come up with a different word, since I'm overloading value.
I agree. That is why a fiat currency is a horrible idea. It is a means to cause things of value to vanish in an instant (thus violating the rights of every victim in the process).
I dunno, it gives the monetary authority a lot of levers to control the money supply, and in particular to incentivize borrowing in situations where borrowing makes complete sense but people are herding away from it in fear, like at the current moment. Inflation is a only a tax on saving in the sense that it's a rebate on borrowing, too, and leverage is a good thing to have available, and its much more difficult for a government to gain leverage if it has to exchange gold for its notes.
if you keep your wealth in dollars, you essentially are extending a welcome mat to the government into your wallet, for storing "value" in their paper and subjecting yourself to their decisions w/r/t its value....
Even if that were the case, it does not grant them the right to take in taxes however much they want from whoever they want, based on income, gender, race, or whatever other discrimination the government chooses.
It certainly is the case: you're not entitled to complain about government intrusion into the economy while you keep a your assets in paper with the government's name printed all over it. It's hypocritical in the extreme.
As to the justification of taxes, I live in a country that only discriminates on income, and it's my personal opinion that the only reason a person has wealth at all is because of the order, safety and security a government provides, so aside from certain marginal arguments, I think progressive taxation is perfectly justified. We don't have rights because Sky Father breathed them into us. Men wrote them down, and gave police the power to protect them (and the people themselves the 2nd amendment just in case). Without government, there are no rights, and no money to be made, and no property to exchange for it.
Also regarding currency - if money has no value, then why do people exchange objects of value for it?
People perceive currency has value because, in my opinion:
There's a controlled amount of it
The men in Blue Shirts with Badges will shoot you if you try to take it from someone else
The government has a bunch of laws that makes it easy for people to settle transactions with it
What other value could it possibly have? I concede it's fungible with physical property, I don't think I got that right, but I don't think a fiat currency, like the US$, can be properly regarded as a "repository of value" in the sense that a possession can, since it's value with regard to goods and services can fluctuate. I don't regard inflation as a "hidden tax," simply because I don't think you have property rights to the "value" of a dollar, I just think you have property rights to the dollar, full stop, whatever it's exchange rate might be. If you don't like that, don't store wealth in dollars; if you keep your wealth in dollars, you essentially are extending a welcome mat to the government into your wallet, for storing "value" in their paper and subjecting yourself to their decisions w/r/t its value.
That is the whole definition of "value" - how much people want something, and what they're willing to exchange for it.
Exactly, but no one ultimately wants dollars, they want things dollars can buy.
Thus, if I ask you to give me all that "fictional" money in your bank account, and you seem unwilling to do it, I should not be surprised - your money has value to you and to people who will trade with you for it.
I guess that all depends on how much a dollar is worth when you ask:) You can't have the money in my account, not because it's valueless, which on my terms it is, but because it's my property. Property != valuable. I guess I'm using the word "value" in a strange way to argue my anti-monetarist viewpoint.
Absent manipulation of the money supply, price appreciation is caused by... wait for it... an increase in value!
High demand? Low supply?
When you manipulate the market with inflationary actions, you cause people to invest in things they would not otherwise invest in. [..,] Even your quoted article admits it was only a solution to immediate problems.
Well yeah, that's what we're talking about, right? Our immediate problems. The goal isn't to get people to buy houses in a bubble, the goal is to to prevent a deflationary spiral. Bubbles are bad, but better than decades-long deflation.
This does happen, but is the action taken by your wife consequence of your famiy's rate of taxation, or the fact that two married people are taxed as one entity? It's really about the iniquity of a marriage penalty. And also, in order to really answer this question, we'd have to figure out what her productivity at home is, and if that isn't actually more than on the job -- considering a homemaker's work can be valued in the 6 figures, this isn't so ridiculous, and she might be more productive in the home than at a bad job.
Your assumptions are that the bubble could have been sustained without further government intervention.
My point is that a deflationary economy was hobbled in both cases by contracting government spending, and you haven't demonstrated that the outcome would have been any different.
There is no theory in science? Enough with the drama please.
There is theory, but nobody took Einstein very seriously until Special relativity was proved with experimental evidence. You can say that reducing government spending produces better economic outcomes for a country, and offer a lot of really good reasons why, but you have to show it happen, too, before you can expect policy makers (at least the incoming batch) to take you seriously.
I agree that they should be evidence-based, but in economics it's difficult to be sure that the evidence is in support of theory X or opposing theory Y.
This statement is a solipsism. You should be able to define a proposition in such a way that it's provable true or false, otherwise there is no science here. Does expansion in government spending stop deflation, "yes." Does it create employment, "yes." Does it do these things as well as spending contraction? No. Would the outcome be different 10 years down the line? Gotta do cost-benefit analysis, byt the question is answerable. I guess the rub is, What is the proposition that we're trying to prove? I say that expanding government spending increases employment and liquidity in the near term and ultimately shortens the length of a recessionary cycle.
Don't call me a fanboy, we have an honest disagreement.
For me, the underlying concern is individual rights. So long as the government intervenes in the economy, rights are violated.
Yeah, I just don't believe in that. I primarily don't believe that a holding in government-issued currency constitutes "property" in the same sense as a house, or capital. "Dollars" are just a service provided by the government by fiat in order to facilitate transactions. If you keep them as cash, or use their numerical value to determine your "wealth," you're ultimately abusing their purpose. Thus...
Krugman and like-minded economists have not shown the cause for concern that justifies rights violations.
I suspect, my good fellow, that there is no evidence of any kind, than any person could produce, that would justify the taking of a right by your lights. And that's probably as it should be; rights should not be bought. I believe in a iron right to property, but "Dollars" are not property in the sense that this computer is, or my house is. They're a mechanism by which the government provides people with the service of buying and selling; they have zero intrinsic value, and thus the government isn't really taking anything tangible when they relieve you of them. Clearly, if they take too many you won't bother working for them, and if the government doesn't give you enough when you build a bridge for dollars, you won't want to use dollars, so its important to keep a balanced monetary policy and currency market, where people can come to an agreement on what a dollar is worth openly. But, since the US left the gold standard, money qua money is worthless. If you want to know what you have, ask your self "What of mine can I lay my hands on?," don't look at your balance sheet-- it's a fiction.
The existence of currency is a profound intrusion of the government into the private sector-- they'll shoot you for stealing little pieces of green cloth. But without it, chaos, unless you want to go back to a gold standard, but even then, all you have is a note that can be exchanged for gold, a metal that is merely rare, and not very useful in general, except in barter for goods and services.
So, yeah, I think taxation is justified because I live in a free, first-world nation state where my house or food cannot be stolen by armed thugs, and where I can go on a computer and interact with people thousands of miles away without having to worry about conveying specie to my phone company every month. They may tax me, but as long as we all bear the burden and we all enjoy the fruits, and as long as I'm free to call the system garbage and demand it changed if I see fit to complain, and as long as I receive a just wage for hard work, what's the big deal? If you think the principle is profoundly unfair, you may leave it, but I think you're better off with us, and we with you. I would personally concern myself more with those among us who benefit from what we as a people have created, but don't put in their fair share.
Now, if they took away my life savings in order to build an Obama monument, I'd be pissed and would demand action. But, of course, they propose no such thing. If they use this stimulus to build the LACTMA Expo Line to pass by my house, it will save me more in gasoline than the total tax probably ever would, ten times over.
Of course no such chart could ever be produced. It would be like asking me to draw you a picture of "consciousness" using nothing but neurons.
The chart has Tax rate on the X-Axis and Productivity on the Y-Axis. These are both empirically determinable. Sample a bunch of people paying different tax rates and determine their productivity. The Congressional Budget Office has done studies like this one where the effect of a tax cut is assumed, and then all the economic feedbacks are accounted for based on current productivity and trends. You can't read the future, but if you can't even make forecasts, there is no such thing as economics.
This is part of the appeal of your heroes' arguments. They assume that things will work themselves out in the end so long as something is done immediately. What is not seen, what cannot be charted, is the economic growth that *did not happen* because of increased taxation.
The problem with your hero's argument is that he has no evidence to back up his claims. Show me that people work less when taxed at a certain rate. The fact is, there isn't very much evidence that this happens; it seems like common sense that it would, but it also is common sense that the sun travels around the Earth. History is full of examples where a country turned to austerity and all of the metric we measure an economy by went down. I give you history, Hazllitt gives you homilies.
It's telling that at no time does Hazlitt even claim that New Deal programs have hurt the economy. He says that they should, and that they can in ways that are, essentially, impossible to know. This is not science, this is gnosticism. This is religion.
They would have us continually struggling to survive a recession, and pay it back during prosperity, with the implicit assumption that the end result is a better economy. But they have nothing to compare to.
Aside from the US economy during the 1950s and 1960s, when America used its vast investments in assets like bridges, highways, dams and a secure Europe to exploit new markets and drive economic growth.
Meanwhile, Hazlitt's argument makes sense in theory.
That isn't enough.
I guess my point is that economic decisions have to be evidence-based and if you think action A will cost money, you have to be able to say how much and why. You do it when you get a mortgage, and governments do it when they raise revenue. That's what economists do. Economics in One Lesson only works if you accept that economics is mainly moral or philosophical, and that decisions regarding taxation, borrowing and spending must be informed by the way a certain small-L liberal value system regards property rights, and the ordering of a man's estate.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you misunderestimate the problem: the digging is the relatively cheap part, particularly the digging from the curb to your premises. The expensive proposition for the utility is the cable, repeaters, concentration equipment, support crews to keep it fixed and the back-end gear to connect it all to the cloud, or the satellite, or whatever. Even if there were a conduit running straight into your basement, I have my doubts that there would be a huge mob of companies vying to run a few miles of glass to your house; shovels or no, it's certainly not like running 100base-T upstairs into the bedroom. Also, keep in mind that each of these companies, under such a regime, would have to have their own network, thus, if they were offering, lets say, POTS, they'd each have their own redundant COs, repeaters and trunks, and suddenly one expensive network infrastructure becomes five. Your theory only works if costs to a telco provider are a function of subscribers count, when in fact the costs are more often a function of coverage area (let alone bandwidth and latency, for which conduits buy you nothing).
OTOH, Common utility ducts do exist, but they're very expensive to install and are generally used in places where there's already a big network of underground holes (like the NY subway/steam system) or places where earthquakes make conduits a good idea to keep all the wires stable (like Japan). In these cases, though, the curb to the house is not a part of the municipal network.
Strictly speaking, using a monopoly to abuse stifle competition or innovation is bad, monopolies themselves are acceptable and common.
The US Mail service doesn't have a monopoly, just ask Fedex Ground, and nether would a publicly-owned infrastructure either. It just sets a minimum standard of service. You're free to start Theaveng's Letter Service tomorrow, but it has to be either as reliable and cheap as the USPS, or charge more and compete on features.
A tip of the hat to you sir.
I won't be asking you for sugar for my coffee, this is certain.
I didn't say they were "nuts," just cranks. Maybe I should have been more specific-- I didn't mean to imply that the gold standard is a bad idea (though I think it is), but that the people who advocate it are belly-aching autodidact complainer types that think they know more about economics than professionals. Believing in the gold standard is no longer an economic theory, it's become a cargo cult social identity movement, that they drop the moment someone asks them to vote.
A good example of a crank would be a UFO conspiracy theorist, or a timecube-style physics crackpot. Maybe they're right, but it doesn't help that he's a reclusive weirdo that thinks posting his question on the POTUS's website will be productive.
You're implying a conspiracy between the PEOTUS, almost certainly members of his staff, an independent TV station's reporter and editor. Just sayin.
I might be wrong, so go vote for the question!
Both the Senate and House Democratic and Republican caucuses have .gov domains, and they are frankly partisan. There's nothing strange about it in the general case.
You need an account in order to vote, many people might just be lurking.
That story you linked to says that people logging in to the site flagged the questions as inappropriate. The questions are still visible on the site.
I'd like to know how this got modded +5 when you could verify it as false with three clicks and a search field...
Of course they don't:
Here. Also:
Now the cranks can see for themselves just how irrelevant they are.
I use 1Password for a password keychain, the Mac sync is pretty slick. I don't think the camera on the iPhone could manage a receipt.
By that logic, a Blackberry will run you $2000-3000; a Motorola POS with no money down will push $1500.
I'm pretty sure you can remove the word "impure" from the GP and the statement will still hold. You can see a discussion here.
Yeah, Doxide. It's what you get when you use inline markup in your IronPython source code to generate HTML documentation ;)
I don't think any responsible people are suggesting propping up housing prices (or any other prices) above $x.. Nobody is saying "cause a bubble or suffer deflation." I think it requires more than a bald assertion to say that government deficit spending, in the current climate, will automatically cause an asset-price bubble. And then further, even if it did, that the outcome of this scenario would be significantly worse than allowing the deflation to run its course.
Yeah, but I guess I only perceive value in things like goods and services. The money itself is strictly the means. Money is useless without a market for it to move in, so I think its silly to expect it to have value that endures a particular political regime. Cuz it won't.
The natural state of man is to be dominated by powerful men and institutions, and then by his needs, I think (I could be wrong but I think I speak for a certain tradition of thought on the matter). This isn't a desirable thing, but that's no reason to try to deny it. Rights are a statement that domination must have limits, if we are all to realize our full potential. Without the force of government eliminating criminals who would harm you or steal your property, the "coercions" and the influence of "contrived goals" would encounter on a daily basis would only increase.
If a bridge provides $10 million dollars in value, would cost a million dollars to build, and you can borrow the money to build it for a total loan cost of 2 million, what the hell are you waiting for? Leverage to expand assets, assets that will help business on either side of the road, without having to wait 10 years to save the money, or 20 years for the businesses on either side of the road to negotiate a consortium to build the bridge, which they'll charge you $0.85 to cross if you aren't a steady customer. 20 years people lived without a bridge, they got by, but how much better could their lives have been?
You consent to it, you obey, you do not rebel. Hannah Arendt: "Politics is not the nursery. Your obedience is your support." I profoundly believe that. If you go along with it you go along with it. "Voicing your objection" while following along is worthless.
More practically, you could sidestep most of the whole inflation business by keeping your long term assets in gold and not keeping a lot of cash. You have that right. It might be more "rational," but that's sortof a red herring, as, clearly, rationality is no criteria for determining if someone has a right to behave in such a way.
I don't think the Constitution says this, the Declaration does, and though they indulged in this rhetoric, and many of them truly believed it, I think they were mistaken. Tell a man in jail he has inalienable rights, or a man in the Army, or a Somali. This is how man truly regards his own condition, outside of this remarkably bourgeois conception of man you have outlined. Remove the police from your town and you would see. Men yearn to breathe free only when they have a good income, aren't terrorized by hooligans, and their children are fed; they are generally blind to the blessings and entails of their "rights" up until that point.
And, generally, even when they are aware of their rights in full, as Europeans and Americans clearly are, they consent to have a more statist or directed economy than the one you aspire to. Their folly, perhaps, but also, individually, their "right" to consent to such things. Truly laissez-faire economies are the province of the 19th century and right-wing banana republics.
Anyways, my guy won so you're getting a bridge and free broadband, and later maybe we can pay down this damn bill! Try to enjoy it.
Not by my definition, but I see your point.
That's why I don't think property and value are the same thing... In my opinion "value" is something you ultimately want, and property is the means. Money is property, as is a house, but only the house has value. I should come up with a different word, since I'm overloading value.
I dunno, it gives the monetary authority a lot of levers to control the money supply, and in particular to incentivize borrowing in situations where borrowing makes complete sense but people are herding away from it in fear, like at the current moment. Inflation is a only a tax on saving in the sense that it's a rebate on borrowing, too, and leverage is a good thing to have available, and its much more difficult for a government to gain leverage if it has to exchange gold for its notes.
It certainly is the case: you're not entitled to complain about government intrusion into the economy while you keep a your assets in paper with the government's name printed all over it. It's hypocritical in the extreme.
As to the justification of taxes, I live in a country that only discriminates on income, and it's my personal opinion that the only reason a person has wealth at all is because of the order, safety and security a government provides, so aside from certain marginal arguments, I think progressive taxation is perfectly justified. We don't have rights because Sky Father breathed them into us. Men wrote them down, and gave police the power to protect them (and the people themselves the 2nd amendment just in case). Without government, there are no rights, and no money to be made, and no property to exchange for it.
People perceive currency has value because, in my opinion:
What other value could it possibly have? I concede it's fungible with physical property, I don't think I got that right, but I don't think a fiat currency, like the US$, can be properly regarded as a "repository of value" in the sense that a possession can, since it's value with regard to goods and services can fluctuate. I don't regard inflation as a "hidden tax," simply because I don't think you have property rights to the "value" of a dollar, I just think you have property rights to the dollar, full stop, whatever it's exchange rate might be. If you don't like that, don't store wealth in dollars; if you keep your wealth in dollars, you essentially are extending a welcome mat to the government into your wallet, for storing "value" in their paper and subjecting yourself to their decisions w/r/t its value.
Exactly, but no one ultimately wants dollars, they want things dollars can buy.
I guess that all depends on how much a dollar is worth when you ask :) You can't have the money in my account, not because it's valueless, which on my terms it is, but because it's my property. Property != valuable. I guess I'm using the word "value" in a strange way to argue my anti-monetarist viewpoint.
High demand? Low supply?
Well yeah, that's what we're talking about, right? Our immediate problems. The goal isn't to get people to buy houses in a bubble, the goal is to to prevent a deflationary spiral. Bubbles are bad, but better than decades-long deflation.
This does happen, but is the action taken by your wife consequence of your famiy's rate of taxation, or the fact that two married people are taxed as one entity? It's really about the iniquity of a marriage penalty. And also, in order to really answer this question, we'd have to figure out what her productivity at home is, and if that isn't actually more than on the job -- considering a homemaker's work can be valued in the 6 figures, this isn't so ridiculous, and she might be more productive in the home than at a bad job.
More to the point...
My point is that a deflationary economy was hobbled in both cases by contracting government spending, and you haven't demonstrated that the outcome would have been any different.
There is theory, but nobody took Einstein very seriously until Special relativity was proved with experimental evidence. You can say that reducing government spending produces better economic outcomes for a country, and offer a lot of really good reasons why, but you have to show it happen, too, before you can expect policy makers (at least the incoming batch) to take you seriously.
This statement is a solipsism. You should be able to define a proposition in such a way that it's provable true or false, otherwise there is no science here. Does expansion in government spending stop deflation, "yes." Does it create employment, "yes." Does it do these things as well as spending contraction? No. Would the outcome be different 10 years down the line? Gotta do cost-benefit analysis, byt the question is answerable. I guess the rub is, What is the proposition that we're trying to prove? I say that expanding government spending increases employment and liquidity in the near term and ultimately shortens the length of a recessionary cycle.
Don't call me a fanboy, we have an honest disagreement.
That's sorta risible on its face isn't it? Since real property and money are fungible. Hmm... must think more.
Yeah, I just don't believe in that. I primarily don't believe that a holding in government-issued currency constitutes "property" in the same sense as a house, or capital. "Dollars" are just a service provided by the government by fiat in order to facilitate transactions. If you keep them as cash, or use their numerical value to determine your "wealth," you're ultimately abusing their purpose. Thus...
I suspect, my good fellow, that there is no evidence of any kind, than any person could produce, that would justify the taking of a right by your lights. And that's probably as it should be; rights should not be bought. I believe in a iron right to property, but "Dollars" are not property in the sense that this computer is, or my house is. They're a mechanism by which the government provides people with the service of buying and selling; they have zero intrinsic value, and thus the government isn't really taking anything tangible when they relieve you of them. Clearly, if they take too many you won't bother working for them, and if the government doesn't give you enough when you build a bridge for dollars, you won't want to use dollars, so its important to keep a balanced monetary policy and currency market, where people can come to an agreement on what a dollar is worth openly. But, since the US left the gold standard, money qua money is worthless. If you want to know what you have, ask your self "What of mine can I lay my hands on?," don't look at your balance sheet-- it's a fiction.
The existence of currency is a profound intrusion of the government into the private sector-- they'll shoot you for stealing little pieces of green cloth. But without it, chaos, unless you want to go back to a gold standard, but even then, all you have is a note that can be exchanged for gold, a metal that is merely rare, and not very useful in general, except in barter for goods and services.
So, yeah, I think taxation is justified because I live in a free, first-world nation state where my house or food cannot be stolen by armed thugs, and where I can go on a computer and interact with people thousands of miles away without having to worry about conveying specie to my phone company every month. They may tax me, but as long as we all bear the burden and we all enjoy the fruits, and as long as I'm free to call the system garbage and demand it changed if I see fit to complain, and as long as I receive a just wage for hard work, what's the big deal? If you think the principle is profoundly unfair, you may leave it, but I think you're better off with us, and we with you. I would personally concern myself more with those among us who benefit from what we as a people have created, but don't put in their fair share.
Now, if they took away my life savings in order to build an Obama monument, I'd be pissed and would demand action. But, of course, they propose no such thing. If they use this stimulus to build the LACTMA Expo Line to pass by my house, it will save me more in gasoline than the total tax probably ever would, ten times over.
The chart has Tax rate on the X-Axis and Productivity on the Y-Axis. These are both empirically determinable. Sample a bunch of people paying different tax rates and determine their productivity. The Congressional Budget Office has done studies like this one where the effect of a tax cut is assumed, and then all the economic feedbacks are accounted for based on current productivity and trends. You can't read the future, but if you can't even make forecasts, there is no such thing as economics.
The problem with your hero's argument is that he has no evidence to back up his claims. Show me that people work less when taxed at a certain rate. The fact is, there isn't very much evidence that this happens; it seems like common sense that it would, but it also is common sense that the sun travels around the Earth. History is full of examples where a country turned to austerity and all of the metric we measure an economy by went down. I give you history, Hazllitt gives you homilies.
It's telling that at no time does Hazlitt even claim that New Deal programs have hurt the economy. He says that they should, and that they can in ways that are, essentially, impossible to know. This is not science, this is gnosticism. This is religion.
Aside from the US economy during the 1950s and 1960s, when America used its vast investments in assets like bridges, highways, dams and a secure Europe to exploit new markets and drive economic growth.
That isn't enough.
I guess my point is that economic decisions have to be evidence-based and if you think action A will cost money, you have to be able to say how much and why. You do it when you get a mortgage, and governments do it when they raise revenue. That's what economists do. Economics in One Lesson only works if you accept that economics is mainly moral or philosophical, and that decisions regarding taxation, borrowing and spending must be informed by the way a certain small-L liberal value system regards property rights, and the ordering of a man's estate.