By Rob Rojas

Nobody really likes paying their taxes. But, as the old adage about “death and taxes” conveys, there is a sense that taxes are as legitimate and as inevitable as death itself. In their acceptance of taxation, many well-meaning people forget that taxation violates our most basic moral principles.

If you have ever been to a kindergarten or a playground where very young children play, you might have realized that, although the kids are too young to understand many things, they already have a surprising sense of justice.

Take a toy away from a toddler who cannot yet speak a word, and you will often be met with a very clear protest. As far as the toddler is concerned, you have stolen her toy, you have initiated violence, and therefore it’s time to cry. The toddler’s reasoning probably isn’t this sophisticated, but the understanding is there.

Slightly older children are even more amazing. They understand that there is illegitimate violence (when a toy gets stolen), but they also understand that there is such a thing as legitimate violence as well, which is when the victimized child goes to the thieving child and takes her toy back. The astonishing thing is that the usual focus is on getting the toy back rather than punishing the aggressor. Punishment is a concept that they learn later, probably from us.

The initiation of violence is the act of an aggressor against you or against your property. This can be done through actual violence or through intimidation, because the mere threat of violence is an act of violence in itself. A good example would be a thief that points a gun at you to get your wallet without actually pulling the trigger. Another less obvious example is the way the government takes our money. To say that taxes are a form of theft may seem a bit over the top, but refuse to pay your taxes and you will be thrown in jail. Refuse to pay your property taxes and you will see who really owns your house.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Marc Stevens

I’ve mentioned on the radio show a few times about sending the IRS and other tax agencies affidavits. The affidavits state we are terrified of the IRS and only file returns and report financial transactions out of terror of being attacked, put in jail and having all our property stolen. I’m encouraging everyone, if you file or report to the IRS and other tax agencies, send an affidavit of fear with the return. Let them know you are only complying out of a sense of terror, not because you think there is a legitimate obligation. You may comply, but you will not conceal the threats and coercion they used to get compliance. We will not help them make it look legitimate.

There are several reasons for this, and you’ll see it’s another tool to help bring about a voluntary society, building the free market.

It makes the bureaucrats aware of the violence.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Thomas DiLorenzo

The main reason so many state and local governments are bankrupt, or on the verge of bankruptcy, is the combination of government-run monopolies and government-employee unions. Government-employee unions have vastly more power than do private-sector unions because the entities they work for are typically monopolies.

When the employees of a grocery store, for example, go on strike and shut down the store, consumers can simply shop elsewhere, and the grocery-store management is perfectly free to hire replacement workers. In contrast, when a city teachers’ or garbage-truck drivers’ union goes on strike, there is no school and no garbage collection as long as the strike goes on. In addition, teachers’ tenure (typically after two or three years in government schools) and civil service regulations make it extremely costly if not virtually impossible to hire replacement workers.

Thus, when government bureaucrats go on strike they have the ability to completely shut down the entire “industry” they “work” in indefinitely. The taxpayers will complain bitterly about the absence of schools and garbage collection, forcing the mayor, governor, or city councilors to quickly cave in to the union’s demands to avoid risking the loss of their own jobs due to voter dissatisfaction. This process is the primary reason why, in general, the expenses of state and local governments have skyrocketed year in and year out, while the “production” of government employees declines.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Gary Gibson

I feel more grown-up than most when it comes to lacking a sense of entitlement.

Not only am I not entitled to goods and services; I also have to earn the goodwill of those whose help I’d count on in case disaster struck and I hadn’t prepared sufficiently. I had to be a good son and a good brother…a good friend and a good neighbor.

Even if I had no loving relatives or concerned friends to rely on, however, I still wouldn’t demand the tax-born kindness of strangers. Any charity I would receive would have to be voluntarily given. And there should be enough shame involved to keep me from growing to rely on it forever.

This is not a popular sentiment these days. Every effort is made by the intelligentsia and the media to convince people of the opposite…

We are all children, they tell us. We need to be taken care of. And we are all owed something by someone else. That’s what governments are really for. They guide. They prohibit. They shuffle earned income to grasping hands. And they’re proud of it…

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Expected Returns

There is a human fear of standing apart from the crowd that is at times necessary, but at other times debilitating. We are taught to conform in school and just memorize the facts our teachers give us like good students. I was always the type of student that “did my own thing”, which of course got me in a lot of trouble. Even in college, I considered my reading assignments an utter waste of time and instead spent all my free time reading books I found stimulating. I am not one to follow the crowd because I have complete faith in my ability to think critically. I would rather be wrong once in awhile thinking for myself than to be a mindless robot swayed by the wind.

You would think that in Wall Street, herd behavior would be eliminated since the incentives are huge against this irrational behavior. Yet Wall Street serves as perhaps the best confirmation of herd behavior. The industry is obsessed with diversification and the idea that risk is determined by volatility. Money managers are rewarded for diversifying and being average. Those who can be average while attaining lower levels of volatility are the stars. To me, this is a big farce. The whole idea of diversification is ludicrous; it serves as a protection against ignorance. If I bought government bonds to diversify my clients’ portfolios, I would be doing them a great disservice. If I blindly bought government bonds for Boomers, I would be doing them an even greater disservice since they need to protect their assets for retirement. All these pension funds stuffing their portfolios with “risk-free” Treasuries are making a huge mistake. Why the unjustified fear of stocks? Historically, it is the bond market that always wipes out capital, not the stock market!

Those who stand apart from the crowd are mocked, until of course, they are proven right.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Moses Kim

One of the hardest things to do as a grown, “educated” adult is to learn from others. The inability to learn from others is what guarantees you will have a very childish perspective of the world. If the only books you’ve read were forced on you by the public education system, then your perspective is skewed. It was only when I expanded my realm of knowledge that I saw the world in a whole new way. I realized that there are recurring themes in history that humans consistently ignore because fundamentally, human nature never changes. No matter how much you warn people about the disaster that’s coming, they won’t listen. Call it what you may- naivete, ignorance, or outright arrogance- but this is just my experience. By definition you must be humble to learn.

There is a psychological phenomenon that explains the human tendency towards disbelief and inaction: the normalcy bias. If people haven’t directly experienced an extreme event before, they are prone to believe that it can’t happen. The normalcy bias explains why people refused to evacuate their homes when Katrina was clearly going to leave a swath of destruction. The normalcy bias explains why most people get destroyed by hyperinflationary events. And the normalcy bias explains why people refuse to get out of their dollars and buy gold. Most people alive never experienced a gold standard or a bond default; hence most people will be caught totally off-guard by the events of the future. However, people really shouldn’t be caught off-guard because governments historically never pay off their debts! They always default in some form.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Duane Stoffel
I Don’t Feel Sorry for Californians Anymore.
I used to feel sorry for Californians, myself included. I felt sorry for them because, with the exception of a couple of years in the early eighties, our beautiful state had been hijacked by the brain-dead Democrats who had been running things in Sacramento [...]

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Porter Stansbury

Our current total debt is now close to $14 trillion. The number is so large it’s meaningless. No one can comprehend how much money $14 trillion really is. A better way to think about it is that each American taxpayer owes $125,000. That’s like a whole additional mortgage for most people.

I want to be clear about this: These debts are real. These debts are money we owe today. They must be financed (we have to pay interest on them). And they DO NOT include any future promised payments.

And the money Congress officially owes fails to include other significant debts. Regardless, Congress is likely to end up repaying these debts. Debt at the state level now totals $1.1 trillion, and local government debt is another $1.6 trillion. Investors have long assumed Congress effectively guarantees these debts (Investors trusted the federal government would step in to prevent state and local governments from defaulting).

In addition to these debts, Congress has guaranteed the assets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on an unlimited basis. Losses at these two companies, by my estimate (which was once thought ludicrously large and is now a mainstream prediction), total $800 billion. And then there’s a slew of TARP-related investment and guarantees, the costs of which are unknown. If you throw on an extra $3 trillion, that brings the total debt package up to much more than 100% of GDP.

Adding up all the numbers and applying a market-based rate of interest (6%) to these debts, you’ll find that the real (i.e. not manipulated by the Federal Reserve) cost of servicing these $17 trillion in debts would be a little more than $1 trillion. Total annual federal revenue from income taxes and corporate taxes over the last year was $1.1 trillion.

These are all real numbers. You can verify all of them. What they tell me is… absent the Federal Reserve’s intervention in the Treasury bond market… and absent the myth of “off balance sheet” obligations… our federal government would already be bankrupt.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Richard Rahn

Rarely do you see a political party in the process of what appears to be a deliberate attempt to commit suicide while shooting a hostage. In this case, the hostage is the U.S. economy, and the political party is the Democrats.

The Democrats have been in control of both houses of Congress for the past four years and for the past two have controlled the White House as well. They have been telling us there will be no tax increases on the American middle class – a pledge they quickly broke with a number of small tax increases in a variety of bills.

The Republicans, despite their vastly superior record over the Democrats when it comes to taxing and spending, still have been too much of a big-government party for my taste.

For the first time, Congress has not even passed a budget. The open question remains: Is the current Congress the worst in American history?

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Jeff Opdyke

This is what drives me crazy about the people at the top of the totem pole in America.

The International Herald Tribune has a fine story today (Friday, Sept. 10, 2010) about China skirting World Trade Organization rules by providing various and vast subsidies to makers of clean-tech energy components (think: solar panels, wind turbines and such).

Whether or not China is skirting the rules, bending the rules or blatantly pissing on the rules is almost irrelevant. China is going to do what China is going to do in order to build itself into the world’s pre-eminent Economy of Tomorrow (just as the U.S. does whenever doing so benefits America’s unilateral interests).

America and Europe can wring their collective hands and fret loudly and complain to the WTO and the IMF and the check-out clerks at the local Wal-Mart, and all the sturm und drang won’t mean bupkus to this issue.

And therein lies the shame for America. Our politicians fight the economy of yesterday, and our bureaucrats moan about China’s aggressive incentives to build the technology of tomorrow.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Porter Stansbury

I’d like to make you a business offer.

Seriously. This is a real offer. In fact, you really can’t turn me down, as you’ll come to understand in a moment…

Here’s the deal. You’re going to start a business or expand the one you’ve got now. It doesn’t really matter what you do or what you’re going to do. I’ll partner with you no matter what business you’re in – as long as it’s legal.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins

The Internet is a large-scale version of the “Committees of Correspondence” that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington’s failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, “Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?”

Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Mark Alexander

Fact: Despite all of the claims by Barack Hussein Obama and his cadre of Socialists about “creating or saving” jobs through their so-called “stimulus plan,” their taxing revenue out of the private sector (from this and future generations) does NOT “stimulate” private sector job growth — quite the contrary. (Nor is there any expressed authority in our Constitution for such redistribution of wealth — but who pays attention to that venerable old parchment?)

Late last Friday, after the White House press corpse had departed for weekend resorts, Obama released his administration’s “Mid-Session Budget Review,” which analyzed the results of his effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” with his “stimulus” plan. From almost any vantage point, the report is tantamount to an admission of failure, but Obama’s rhetorical smokescreen continues to imply otherwise.

That plan, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act but more accurately known as the American Socialization and Redistribution Act, is Obama’s ruse to confiscate from taxpayers — and borrow primarily from the Red Chinese — almost a trillion dollars, then redistribute it to his constituents through government-controlled conduits.

As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Lew Rockwell

Maybe you saw the headlines blasting the rich (again!) for failing to spend money in order to enable us to get out of this everlasting recession. It turns out that in boom times, the rich spent $145 per day. Now they are only spending $119. So, there we go: a new scapegoat! Those greedy rich people are failing to do their duty.

But still, I’m not entirely sure I can follow this. In normal times, we are told that the rich are rich only at the expense of everyone else. One man’s wealth is another man’s poverty. It’s a fixed pie, and one reason for human suffering is precisely the tendency of the rich to spend their filthy lucre on fripperies. They engage in conspicuous consumption that does nothing but feed their egos even as the world’s poor suffer.

Suddenly, the line has changed. Now it is the moral obligation of the rich to cough up in order to help the rest of us. Especially now that government stimulus has proven to be ineffective, the rich should make it their patriotic obligation to spend, spend, spend!

On the one hand, the rich are usually blamed for poverty simply because they have money while others do not. On the other hand, their failure to behave like rich people is also to blame for economic hard times. It’s like this swath of the population can’t do anything right.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Ryan Ellis

In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011.

In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Bill Bonner

Let us look back. What has been the major trend of the entire past 50 or so years? Government has played a larger and larger role in the US and most western democracies. Only in the formerly (and for many, still) communist countries has government been rolled back.

The communists learned their lessons. They proved that government spending does not make people rich. But now…what’s this…? The US and other countries are greatly increasing the percentage of GDP spent by the government.

The communists proved that central planning didn’t work. But again, the US and others are now planning their economies more than ever – managing interest rates, directing capital to one industry while denying it to others, raising taxes on this…subsidizing that…regulating everything that moves…

The communists also proved that state ownership of industry was a bad idea. But the US and others now own banks, insurance companies, almost the entire mortgage business, and one of the world’s largest automakers.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Jake Tate

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or “Stimulus Package,” is a bill that was passed by the U.S. Congress and later signed into law by President Obama on February 17, 2009. It is a bill that by most estimates will cost at least $787 billion dollars. The legislation was supposed to stimulate our struggling economy and promised to create between 3 and 4 million jobs in a one year period. Also included in this sweeping legislation is money to modernize roads, improve our public school systems, and lower health care costs.

While all these things might seem logical and maybe even needed to the average American, many details of this expensive bill are commonly not explained or understood by most. This massive spending bill is replete with wasteful spending and political pet pork-barrel projects such as the $21,000 dollars set aside to fix tennis courts in Montana and the $10,090 to build a fence in Nevada. Although drivers may not be hitting livestock and kids in Montana can play more tennis, does this spending “stimulate” our economy? Is it the government’s job to use our money like this?

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Herman Cain

The president, his administration and most members of Congress still don’t get it! So let’s try to explain job creation another way. You stimulate the creation of jobs by reducing an employer’s cost to keep people employed (less taxes), and then by reducing the cost of a business to grow their business (less regulations). If these two things happen then jobs will be created.

Job creation is not a complicated phenomenon, but the president and the Democrats have been convinced that less taxes is bad, and more regulations are good. It’s just the opposite and there is plenty of historical evidence to prove it.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Pat Buchanan

“I used to think it would take a great financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, a former adviser to the Senate Republican leadership on fiscal policy.

“These days, I wonder if this country is even governable.”

Quoted in The New York Times’ lead story, “Party Gridlock Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis,” Hoagland nailed it.

America faces a crisis of democracy.

At its heart is a fiscal crisis. After the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, we are running a 2010 deficit of $1.6 trillion. Trillion-dollar deficits are projected through the Obama years, be they four or eight.

Long before 2016, however, holders of U.S. public debt will stop buying Treasury bills or start demanding higher interest rates to cover the growing risk of a default.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Charley Reese
Adapted from an article originally published on March 7, 1985

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against [...]

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]