In President Obama’s much-discussed speech in Roanoke, Virginia, among his remarks on the source of success was his assertion that

The response of several businessmen to the upcoming implementation of Obamacare has made quite a splash. Both John Schnatter of Papa John’s Pizza and Denny’s franchisee John Metz announced that the law would impel them to cut employee hours and raise customer prices, which is fair enough.

The hunt for deductions, exemptions, and loopholes to eliminate, undertaken by The Economist (as seen in my last post) and other “free-market” advocates, is part of the never-ending quest to “broaden the tax base”, which has been a fixture of Republican economic policy for decades.

Congress is desperately searching for the brake as the Federal government rapidly approaches the year-end “fiscal cliff.”  The chief element of President Obama’s plan to keep from going over the edge is to raise taxes on the “rich.” Predictably, he claimed on November 14 that his re-election gave him a clear mandate on the issue:

Most contemporary political philosophers, unfortunately, are not libertarians. Nicholas Wolterstorff, best known as a founder of “reformed epistemology” but a philosopher of extraordinary range, is no libertarian either — far from it. In the present collection of essays, though, he assails a vastly influential school of thought in a way that libertarians will find useful.

Danny Sanchez, in a Circle Bastiat post ,”Yes, Rothbard Covered That: Wealth Tax Edition, used Rothbard to criticize yet another proposal to fight the imaginary evil of the left, income or wealth inequality (See Daniel Altman New York Times column, “To Reduce Inequality, Tax Wealth, Not Income).

Rothbard’s conclusion re a wealth tax:

Economist and Council on Foreign Relations member Daniel Altman has a column in yesterday’s New York Times which says, “To Reduce Inequality, Tax Wealth, Not Income.”

Rothbard explained in Power and Market why a “wealth tax” would be particularly pernicious (see his conclusion in bold below):

Peter Lewin posted some very interesting commentary of Richard Epstein’s distinguished scholar lecture at on-going Southern Economics Association (SEA) meeting. I had the opportunity to hear Epstein several years ago at the Association of Private Enterprise Education meeting and hardily agree with Peter’s assessment that “To hear Epstein talk is awe-inspiring. Hard to describe.