The Virginia legislature has been toying with the idea of curbing or even abolishing sales taxes. The idea comes in response to merchants who fear that they are losing because of the availability of untaxed goods purchased over the web. Whether big changes in the tax code happen this year or five years from now, clearly the battle over net taxation has just begun.
The Republican Congress, fearful of taking on a Democratic president who plays the class-warfare card, again has failed tens of millions of small American businesses and families: The death tax lives. And tens of thousands of small businesses are at risk as long as it survives.
The US government is now awash in revenue, owing to the economic boom that has dramatically enlarged the pie on which the state can gorge itself. And yet the Clinton administration not only refuses to curb the rates, even a smidgeon, but it wants to trade some higher taxes for a few more targeted loopholes. Meanwhile, the GOP is promising-yet again-to cut taxes. But like Lucy with the football, no one believes it any more.
America' s first wage and price controls were enacted in Massachusetts, a little more than a hundred years after the first pilgrims arrived. The opportunities available in the New World combined with a strong work ethic were raising the wages of working men, to the consternation of their employers. In 1630, the colony' s Court of Assistants capped wages for several categories of skilled workers and for common laborers at 16 pence and 12 pence per day.
Legal scholar Gene Healy has made a powerful argument in favor of abolishing the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. When a fair vote was taken on it in 1865, in the aftermath of the War for Southern Independence, it was rejected by the Southern states and all the border states. Failing to secure the necessary three-fourths of the states, the Republican party, which controlled Congress, passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 which placed the entire South under military rule.
Statism has so permeated our culture that even the games we play reflect the popular belief in omnipotent government. For example, one of the most successful computer games of all time is the SimCity series, which requires the player to plan a city in exhaustive detail from uninhabited terrain. Over five million copies of the game have been sold, and each version to date has reflected a government-centered view of the world.
In at least one area, the US economic expansion has left a trail of destruction in its wake: on it are members of the profession that pretends to forecast future economic conditions. Gene Epstein of Barron's, speaking at a Mises Institute conference, cited as an example the famous Wall Street Journal survey of economists, published on a regular basis. It represents ten years of solid failure.
It was 1934, and government-caused mass unemployment supposedly was being solved by a near mass takeover of the economy by that same government. However, "Do you have a job?" was not the only important question that Uncle Sam had for his subjects. He also wanted to know, "Are You Training Your Child To Be Happy?"
The left, most recently New York politico Lenora Fulani, likes to render the Boston Tea Party as a protest against corporate capitalism, and thereby analogous to the property-destroying protests at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. A more traditional interpretation regards the Boston Tea Party as simply a revolt against taxed tea, so perhaps the WTO, which purports to support tariff reductions, fulfills the promise of the Tea Party.
In The Foundations of Leninism, Stalin declared "For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries." What he secured instead was the slavish devotion of Western intellectuals who claimed to represent the proletariat: left intellectuals. With some exceptions, these apologists either ignored or adamantly denied the atrocities of Stalinism. In doing so, they became accomplices to the bloodbath that was Soviet communism; that is, Marxism as popularized by Lenin.
