Having a vision of a free society doesn’t mean libertarians are incapable of common-sense political calculations.
For example, the long-run goal is to dramatically shrink the size and scope of the federal government, both because that’s how the Founding Fathers wanted our system to operate and because our economy will grow much faster if labor and capital are allocated by economic forces rather than political calculations. But in the short run, I’m advocating for incremental progress in the form of modest spending restraint.
Why? Because that’s the best that we can hope for at the moment.
Another example of common-sense libertarianism is my approach to tax reform. One of the reasons I prefer the flat tax over the national sales tax is that I don’t trust that politicians will get rid of the income tax if they decide to adopt the Fair Tax. And if the politicians suddenly have two big sources of tax revenue, you better believe they’ll want to increase the burden of government spending.
Which is what happened (and is still happening) in Europe when value-added taxes were adopted.
And that’s a good segue to today’s topic, which deals with a common-sense analysis of the value-added tax.
Here’s the issue: I’m getting increasingly antsy because some very sound people are expressing support for the VAT.
I don’t object to their theoretical analysis. They say they don’t want the VAT in order to finance bigger government. Instead, they argue the VAT should be used only to replace the corporate income tax, which is a far more destructive way of generating revenue.
And if that was the final–and permanent–outcome of the legislative process, I would accept that deal in a heartbeat. But notice I added the requirement about a “permanent” outcome. That’s because I have two requirements for such a deal:
1. The corporate income tax could never be reinstated.
2. The VAT could never be increased.
And this shows why theoretical analysis can be dangerous without real-world considerations. Simply stated, there is no way to guarantee those two requirements without amending the Constitution, and that obviously isn’t part of the discussion.
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