Take a look here it is enough to get your blood boiling.
Weak article written by a ten year old democrat. His ‘bashing’ on Rothbard was two sentences that imply disagreement on whether or not taxes are theft.
Partisan politics are like deciding what color playdoh is better to get the girls attention on the kickball court.
"Or you can digest this more manageable piece, in which he avers that the United States would be a “utopia” if only a “Great Default” came along to wipe out all that debt brought on by old people, sick people, public employees, and foreigners."
He wants to say that that is North’s Final Solution.
You know it’s time to clench your buttcheeks when the Republicans start borrowing a random selection of your talking points. I find it hilarious how the author talks about Gary North - an obvious Reconstructionist quack (I have no idea why Lew Rockwell insists on featuring him so regularly) - in the same breath as Rothbard. The LvMI is not mentioned but, if it were, it would surely be castigated as an “extremist ultra-far right think tank.” Rather than just talking about default, why not talk about how Rothbard, Hoppe and others have described that a government default should be handled (cancel all US “debt” being held by sovereigns outright (including the Fed), then liquidate the government’s assets to satisfy the claims of the remaining bondholders pro rata. The National Forests and other assets held by the US government are actually quite considerable.
Clayton -
That is a good point. I think people are idiots and they will not understand. They will think it means to not pay the bondholders and to sell the governments assets to Goldman Sachs (which it actually kind of does)
Are you familiar with the NRDC? It is part of the orignial Rockefeller trust fronts and i think that it owns a significant amount of ‘the governments’ land. It is still run by the family and they will never allow it…unless they are privatized to their banks and such. sigh.
Wh… Bu… I’m speechless.
Well, no I’m not. But I can’t believe the dishonesty of this piece. It’s just so incredibly wrong, I can’t believe a person is capable of using the English language and yet be so stupid.
OK, well… I imagine that Buchanan and Rothbard have made economic arguments as to why a default would not be disastrous, and not only a non-economic, moral value judgment. And if they didn’t, I’m sure both would say, “Whoa there, I’m just saying there is nothing immoral about a government default. I didn’t say anything about the economic consequences of a default, and surely such an economic analysis would change given various historical circumstances, such as the actual amount of debt in question. Defaulting in 1986 is not the same thing as defaulting in 2011.”
Though even if we were talking morality, his retort that “acting on them in a world that does not agree with you is a different matter” is also completely irrelevant and out of nowhere. “I can believe that driving on the left side of the road is a superior method of locomotion, but if I try it on the way in to work in the United States, I’ll be a public menace, endangering myself and my fellow citizens.” What side to drive on the road is a matter of coordination; the number of people who ‘agree’ with the coordinating rules is incredibly relevant. When it comes to the validity of a moral or economic argument, the number of people in agreement is irrelevant.
A man as clueless as this is in no place to make the following remark:
“Then there’s Murray Rothbard, a von Mises acolyte whose intense libertarianism led him toward the posture that taxation is theft.”
Extremist!!!
9/11
fnord fnord
Anybody who thinks taxation isn’t stealing is an extremist moron that can’t be trusted. I know I haven’t supported the implicit proposition that taxation isn’t theft, and if you pressed me on it I’m sure I couldn’t satisfactorily respond to the objection. But it’s insane and radical, okay?
Peter Gibbons: [Explaining the plan] Alright so when the sub routine compounds the interest is uses all these extra decimal places that just get rounded off. So we simplified the whole thing, we rounded them all down, drop the remainder into an account we opened.
Joanna: [Confused] So you’re stealing?
Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don’t understand. It’s very complicated. It’s uh it’s aggregate, so I’m talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
Joanna: Oh okay. So you’re gonna be making a lot of money, right?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Joanna: Right. It’s not yours?
Peter Gibbons: Well it becomes ours.
Joanna: How is that not stealing?
Peter Gibbons: [pauses] I don’t think I’m explaining this very well.
Joanna: Okay.
Peter Gibbons: Um… the 7-11. You take a penny from the tray, right?
Joanna: From the cripple children?
Peter Gibbons: No that’s the jar. I’m talking about the tray. You know the pennies that are for everybody?
Joanna: Oh for everybody. Okay.
Peter Gibbons: Well those are whole pennies, right? I’m just talking about fractions of a penny here. But we do it from a much bigger tray and we do it a couple a million times.