Taxes and Spending
Socialist Stock Market?
Murray Rothbard once asked Ludwig von Mises at what point on the spectrum of statism can a country be designated as "socialist." To his surprise, Mises said that there was, indeed, a clear-cut delineation: the stock market.
Can States Buy Business?
Taxes distort the price system and always alter behavior away from the free-market ideal. That is why, as J.B. Say said, the best tax is always the lowest tax. But in recent years, state and local governments have been using the tax system, along with direct subsidies of all sorts, to influence where particular firms locate, all in an effort to generate more growth and thus more tax revenue. Can states and localities really "buy growth" for themselves through this means?
Do Deficits Matter?
Creative accounting by the Clinton administration has taken the government's budgetary imbalances out of the media's spotlight. But there is no basis for believing that we are entering a new era of fiscal responsibility. Deficits are likely to dominate future decades just as they dominated the past three.