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September 15, 2005

Comments

EU Serf

The Left is largely uninterested in economic arguments. They prefer emotion as it works better for most of their favoured causes.

They also probably expect that taking the tax argument down this path, rather than just making wishy washy noises about equity, will take the battle onto the right's natural territory.

Tim Hicks

Paul Graham argues that high taxes discourage the truly innovative and productive sections of society from taking the risks that end up benefitting us all.

Perhaps you would disagree with the efficacy of assuming that entrepreneurs make some kind of expected payoff calculation that is meaningfully affected by tax rates? It seems plausible to argue in this case that the not-so-hidden hand of the state is felt most strongly in these cases through regulation and red-tape, rather than tax rates.

http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

Rob Read

High tax can only work if they is nowhere for talent to flee to.

In effect making the whole world a neo-slavist prison.

Robert Schwartz

I think we should drop all further talk about income tax rates, until such time, if ever, as somebody demonstrates that there is a reliable ex ante method of determining the real world economic incidence of taxation. More than a century of trying to achieve distributional justice through taxation has utterly failed. I should think that the proponents of distributional justice through taxation would have a heavy burden to bear in proving that their proposals will produce the effects that they claim.

Kevin Carson

If you start with the assumption that resources are jointly owned, isn't that a case for the Geoist program shifting taxation from labor and capital to rent? And if the taxes are rent to all of us, doesn't that also imply putting it directly back into a citizens' dividend and then letting citizens use their own money to pay for services that are currently government-provided? The idea that resources are jointly owned is at least as consistent with a freer market than with the opposite.

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