Joseph J. Thorndike (Director of Tax History Project and Contributing Editor, Tax Analysts) has published What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You, 107 Tax Notes 429 (Apr. 25, 2005), which addresses tax withholding and the benefits of tax consciousness. In the article, he quotes Laurence M. Vance in his recent article on Mises.org. He also points out that Milton Friedman regrets his effort to enact an income tax withholding system:
It does seem to be a challenge to put together a course on libertarianism and economics without drawing students’ attention to the work of Rothbard, Hazlitt, Mises, Hayek, Jefferson, Spooner, Sumner, Boetie, and on and on, to say nothing of modern work by Hoppe, Raico, Armentano, Block, Long, or anything else that has ever appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies—but it seems that this is what “Economics 1017: A Libertarian Perspective on Economic and Social Policy” accomplished last Fall at Harvard.
Todd Zywicki of The Volokh Conspiracy fingers tax liabilities as the #1 cause of bankruptcies: An interesting thing briefly suggested here is the extent to which tax problems force people into bankruptcy (usually, however, not because they just “forgot” to pay their taxes).
The Great Anti-Trust build-up against Wal-Mart is likely in the works. Unless, of course, the Feds can come up with a something else that can prove to be more devastating. So now, the Feds want to nab Wal-Mart for spending its money the way it wishes to spend it? If, indeed, monies were misspent, then it’s a private matter between employee and employer (what a concept!) But the anti-union twist has the monstrous State licking its chops over this one.
A reader of my recent article, “The Curse of the Withholding Tax,” received, directly from Milton Friedman, this quote from his memoirs, Two Lucky People (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 123), about his role in the withholding tax:
In about every presidential administration for the last three decades the vile underbelly of an Executive-Branch organization spills out into the open. Right now an implosion is in progress at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that could fully expose not only its phony pretense as a protector of the public’s health but the agency as a dangerous and dictatorial handmaiden of a federally protected drug industry.
Last year, the world economy grew by 5%1 , its fastest rate for many years, led by the extraordinary boom in China and very high growth in most other third world countries too. America and Japan also had fairly strong growth, although Western Europe had a more dismal performance. Can the good times last? Or is the world economy heading for a crisis?
Apparently, in Bali, one can get the death penalty for importing drugs. Bali prosecutors, however, have been “merciful”, and only asked for life in prison for Schapelle Corby, an Australlian beauty therapist accused of smuggling 9lbs of marijuana into Bali.
Lord Keynes’s main contribution did not lie in the development of new ideas but “in escaping from the old ones,” as he himself declared at the end of the Preface to his “General Theory.” The Keynesians tell us that his immortal achievement consists in the entire refutation of what has come to be known as Say’s Law of Markets.
