From the Introduction to the Fourth Edition (1982) of America’s Great Depression

While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient. In the first place, politically higher taxes will simply give the government more money to spend, so that expenditures and therefore deficits are likely to rise still further. Cutting taxes, on the other hand, puts great political pressure on Congress and the administration to follow suit by cutting spending.

  And:

This is according to Austrian economist G.P. Manish, paraphrasing the great economist W.H. Hutt, as he explains Keynesianism and Austrian Business Cycle Theory in an excellent interview with Tom Woods.

[Excerpted from Theory of Money and Fiduciary Media edited by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, which celebrates the centennial of the great work by Ludwig von Mises, known in English-speaking countries as The Theory of Money and Credit.]

In response to my Mises Daily last week on The International War on Cash, a reader recounted the following incident in an email:

“Robert Morris’s nationalist vision was not confined to a strong central government, the power of the federal government to tax, and a massive pubic debt fastened permanently upon the taxpayers. Shortly after he assumed total economic power in Congress in the spring of 1781, Morris introduced a bill to create . . . the first central bank . . . the Bank of North America . .. modeled after the Bank of England.”

–Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States

Paul Krugman is touting a new IMF study which claims that “austerity” increases the National Debt/GDP ratio. The study’s finding is that budget cuts in high debt countries leads to more borrowing because of shortfalls in GDP and tax revenues. This result hinges on the impact of fiscal multipliers.

Dear Friends,

April 15th is a horrible day, because it sums up all the wealth destruction called taxation that we are subjected to all year long.

As Murray Rothbard pointed out, taxation is the worst method of looting us. Inflation is destructive, of course, and it might make a loaf of bread cost $10. But at least you get a loaf of bread. With taxation, you get nothing—except theft and other violations of our civil liberties.

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