Monday, October 3, 2011

Tyler Cowen: Refusal to Contemplate a Tax Increase is Extreme

Tyler Cowen, in a typical convoluted column, writes in NYT:

...this refusal to contemplate a tax increase...I’d characterize as an extreme Republican stance...

He also tells us that:

Curiously, though, if this [antitax] approach actually were to become government policy, it would have a surprising effect: it would surely lead to higher rather than lower taxes.

This last comment indicates that Cowen is nothing but a government technocrat, with no small-government libertarian principles at all. The only way you can expect higher taxes in the future is if you expect the size of government to increase.

The entire idea behind the lower tax movement is to shrink government, so that it never grows again. That's libertarianism, not some crazed model that says a tax cut today will me higher higher taxes tomorrow.

4 comments:

  1. I wonder if Cowen even knows about or cares about the Ratchet effect...

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect

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  2. Bob, you wrote,"The entire idea behind the lower tax movement is to shrink government, so that it never grows again."

    However, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrote, limited government is impossible:

    http://mises.org/daily/2874

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  3. There is no question that “Cowen is nothing but a government technocrat, with no small-government libertarian principles at all”. This entitles him to be described by the MSM as a “thoughtful, mainstream libertarian” and permits him to propagandize for the NYT. If he somehow discovered “small-government libertarian principles”, he would no longer be so entitled.

    Does that mean he’s corrupt?

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  4. why does it even matter if it is 'extreme'?

    ReplyDelete