Price controls, product controls, compulsory cartels, licenses, standards, tariffs, child labor laws, conscription, minimum wage laws, subsidies, penalties, anti-trust, conservation laws, patents, public utilities, eminent domain, and bribery are among the many triangular interventions by government that distort markets and reduce benefits to con
Progressive, proportional and regressive taxes. Rothbard is relentlessly not in favor of taxes. The state robs both rich and poor.
The uniqueness of the Austrian approach to taxation is to first cover Public Policy, then Antimarket Ethics and finally Taxation. It is a praxeological development approach. Robbery and counterfeiting are the revenues to the state. You can't look at taxation alone, you must look at expenditures, too.
Power & Market - this second section of Rothbard's book - shows the state was to be protector of the people and property, but the government is contradictory to that task. Government both taxes and demands a monopoly of defensive services within a geographical area.
Main objection to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is rational expectations - they can't prevent entrepreneurs from making use of loose credit because they would be left behind if they didn't.
"The essential flaw of so-called supply-side economics — the policy both of the Reagan administration and of the present Bush administration — was the failure to face up to the need to reduce government spending."
Nor should we allow ourselves to be browbeaten by the IPCC carbophobes when they use dubious science and worse economics to make us believe that the entire planet is in imminent danger of a cataclysmic collapse unless we ordinary folk (though, naturally, not the cosseted members of the Green Sanhedrin itself) give up all hope of a better standard of living.
As Murray Rothbard explained in The Case Against the Fed, business firms cannot be insured, and especially not fractional-reserve banks.
Our only hope is to (1) accept up front a twenty-percent fall in American living standards for a people living beyond their means for the past twenty-five years on the delusions made possible by fiat money, and (2) simultaneously discipline the creature from Jekyll Island, a.k.a. the Federal Reserve System, not to create new money just to prop up asset-price bubbles.
Whatever your feeling on the need to improve state roads, do not let the myth of "job creation" and a "boost to the economy" be the rationale.
