Fiscal Theory

Laurence Vance offers a critique of John Merrifield's school voucher proposal. If the public school system were abolished, or even rendered irrelevant, what would be the point in collecting tax money from all citizens and redistributing it to those who have school-age children? How is this any different from a Great Society redistribution scheme? In short, Merrifield's "competition" and "choice" could, in practice, amount to vast wealth redistribution and another layer of educational central planning: not choice but market-based socialism.

Why do governments get into bad situations so often? The real problem is not usually out and out corruption, writes Tibor Machan. The problem is systemic. Essentially, governments lack the needed basis for assessing the relationship between their resources and their expenses. They are unavoidably ill informed because the means by which that relationship is best understood is plainly unavailable for governments.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Did anyone who voted for Bush think that he would far surpass Clinton in expanding the Leviathan state? Actually, writes Christopher Westley, the Republican Party has never been the party of fiscal restraint. It was defined by a neo-mercantile philosophy from its inception as the new Whig party in the 1850s up through the Progressive Era. 

Politicians believe that the size of the economy is fixed and they only have to decide how to divide it up, writes Richard Teather. Austrian economists, with their focus on the real world and human nature, know better; wealth does not just exist, it has to be created, and the disincentive effects of government actions do not just distribute wealth—they actively destroy it.

The fundamental issue in banking and monetary policy, writes Guido Hülsmann, is whether government can improve the monetary institutions of the unhampered market. All government intervention in this field boils down to schemes that increase the quantity of money beyond what it otherwise would be. Such schemes confer no social benefit but rather only serve redistributive purposes.

Overall economic efficiency does not concern GDP growth per se, writes DW MacKenzie. It concerns the satisfaction of consumer demand. Increased military spending does not directly satisfy consumer demand. Nor do increased deficits and monetary stimulation substitute for market forces. They only set in motion another round of cyclical economic trends.

In a lumber market where shortages were already appearing, writes Timothy Terrell, the Defense Logistics Agency suddenly ordered more than 20 million square-feet of plywood sheeting for construction in Iraq. Markets for plywood and its substitutes reacted strongly. Prices of oriented strand board (OSB), commonly used in new homes, apartment buildings, and commercial structures, jumped to record highs.

H. Scott Trask sums it up: on the one hand, they believed in fractional-reserve banking, generally following Adam Smith's currency and banking theories. On the other hand, they were resolutely opposed to government-issued paper money, fiat money, legal tender laws, inconvertible paper currency, and land banks. On the question of a national bank, they were divided.

The issue of government debt and deficits lay dormant throughout the high-revenue 1990s. But with recession and exploding government spending, the issue has become enormously important again. Sadly, just about everyone is missing the central point, which not that we need budget reform so much as drastic monetary reform.

Every good libertarian should favor tax cuts. The money belongs to us in the first place, and it should be an occasion to celebrate when Washington wises up and gives some back. We've been promised a tax cut as long as memory serves, but it never seems to arrive. At last, here it is, thanks to Bush having pushed so hard for this as an economic stimulus measure.