Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake
up
In the morning when the day is new?
... Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray ...
There wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do.
-- The Beach Boys
Music by Brian Wilson
Lyrics by Tony Asher
Depending on who you happen to listen to, some two-thirds, or
three-fourths, or nine-tenths of the United States government
is
illegal -- meaning that what it is and what it does it falls outside
the limits prescribed by Article I, Section VIII of the Constitution,
listing the powers of Congress and, therefore, of the government
as a
whole.
(Understand that when the Constitution was written, the Executive
branch existed only to humbly and abjectly carry out the orders
of the
duly-elected representatives of the people. That's us. How times
have
changed.)
Today, almost any agency or activity you can point to at the
federal level -- ATF, BLM, CIA, DEA, EPA, FBI, GAO (to start with
just the first seven letters of the alphabet) out of thousands
of such entities -- is completely unauthorized by the highest
law of the land, and therefore a violation of that law. The politicians
and bureaucrats who created all those illegal agencies to begin
with, as well as the personnel who pursue those illegal activities
are, each and every one, criminals.
Although regaining control of the government and eliminating
these
illegal agencies and activities is absolutely essential to becoming
free individuals in a free country once again, and whole volumes
could
be written about how to do it, this essay will concentrate on
some of
the practical consequences if we were to succeed. What if we managed
to eliminate the two-thirds or three-fourths or nine-tenths of
the
federal government that are illegal, and along with it, the taxes
that
support them and the regulatory interference that they inflict
on our
lives?
I want to keep the arithmetic as simple as possible, so I'm
going to begin by assuming that we've somehow eliminated all
taxes, and all economic regulation, and that a similar
peaceful revolution has occurred at the state, county, and municipal
levels, as well. If, for some perverse reason, you personally
desire more government, you may feel perfectly free to adjust
your percentages accordingly. As the great libertarian teacher
Robert LeFevre put it, "Aim at zero -- if you discover that
you've accidentally abolished the entire government, well, you
can always have it back by next week with a couple of phone calls."
The first thing Americans should know is that between the federal,
state, and local governments, about half of what they earn every
year
is taken away from them in the form of taxation. (As usual, you
will
find that different sources offer have different opinions about
this
-- the Tax Foundation tells me it's "only" 32.7 percent
-- I got my
original information personallly, from LeFevre, and have since
been
able to confirm it on other websites.) What this all means is
that if
you paid no taxes at all, you'd have twice as much money to save
or
spend.
Similarly, every individual or company from whom you buy goods
or
services pays about the same percentage of their income out in
taxes,
one way or another. However here it's just considered a cost of
doing
business, a cost that gets built into the prices you and I pay
for
everything, doubling what everything would actually cost in a
tax-free
society.
Without all these taxes, competition would soon drive prices
down to half their current level, which means that your money
(which, if you'll recall, you have twice as much of) would buy
twice what it does now -- that's an effective quadrupling
of what's called your "real wealth".
And now for a little surprise. Back in the early 70s, when I
first
began exploring this idea, I needed an estimate of how badly economic
regulation drives prices up. At that time, 3M corporation had
built
and photographed an entire meandering garden wall constructed
from the
boxes of paperwork they had to fill out every year. They said
that
complying with that sort of regulation comprised one third of
their
overhead.
At the same time, interstate truckers were the victims of all
kinds of scams. One, in Iowa, I believe, had them paying taxes
on the gasoline they should have bought crossing the
state. If they filled up in Illinois or Nebraska and made it across
Iowa without needing more fuel, that was just too bad -- they
had to pay the Iowa gas tax anyway.
The federal government was even worse. Truckers were forced
to "deadhead" -- that is, if they took a truckload of
candy bars from Pennsylvania to Oregon, they were forbidden to
find another load to carry back, and were compelled instead to
return to Pennsylvania empty, effectively doubling the
price of transporting the candy bars.
In 1972, when I attended his seminar in Wichita, LeFevre estimated
that there were fifteen million federal laws, and who knows how
many regulations generated to support them, plus laws and regulations
at the state and local level. (Ignorance of the law, he always
reminded us, is no excuse.) So, I estimated that regulation doubles
the price of everything we buy. Much later on, I was gratified
to see -- I forget whether it was in Trashing the Planet
or Environmental Overkill -- that Dixy Lee Ray and Lou
Guzzo used the same ballpark figure.
Which means that each of your already-doubled dollars would
go
four times as far in a tax-free, regulation-free environment.
You and
I (and everybody else) would be effectively eight times as rich
as we
are now. To give people an idea of what that means, when I ran
for the
Colorado State House of Representatives in 1978, my campaign speeches
consisted mostly of going through the Wednesday grocery shopping
sections of the local newspaper, and dividing the prices there
by
eight.
I'll leave that exercise for you, now, but I'll point out that
a
car that costs $40,000 would cost $5000 in a tax-free, regulation-free
environment -- and maybe less than that, when the government isn't
allowed to meddle in automotive design or fuel formulation. Take
the
price of anything -- a home, appliances, a college education --
and
divide it by eight. What more would you buy if you had eight times
the
wealth? Only you can answer that, and that's the whole point:
making
life-changing economic decisions for yourself, instead of somebody
stealing seven-eights of what you ought to have and making them
for
you.
Make mine the FN-FAL rifle I have always wanted, for $132.63.*
But, as they say in Ron Popeil's infomercials, that's not all!
As
you (and 300 million other Americans) decide what to do with your
long-lost, newly-recovered wealth, somebody will have to work
-- and
be paid -- to fulfill your wishes. If you decide, for example,
you
want high-definition plasma televisions in every room of the house,
somebody will have to make them, ship them, sell them, and deliver
them.
Contrary to what the government and corporations may believe,
there is not an unlimited supply of "somebodies". The
majority of
individuals manufacturing the new HDTV for your bathroom will
be
individuals who are unemployed now, or underemployed, with crummy
jobs. But the new tax-free, regulation-free environment will be
hungry
for workers and eager to train them to meet new levels of demand.
And
all those new workers will want to buy things with their new-found
wealth.
It is the nature of an unregulated economy -- where companies
with
political pull can't use the government to drive their competitors
out
of the market -- that prices steadily fall as quality steadily
improves. That's why pocket calculators -- a relatively unregulated
part of the market -- went from $400 in the 1970s to as little
as $4
now.
If everyone is eight times as wealthy, and there are more and
more
individuals added to increase demand even further, there will
be a
revolution, not only is what's affordable to the average individual,
but in new technology. Everything we've seen happen in electronics
over the past generation (because it all happened faster than
the
politicians could interfere with it) will happen all over again
in
areas as diverse as air conditioning, automotive design, and household
plumbing.
The other day, I was on the website of a famous British newspaper
-- a socialist one -- where a friend of mine had just had an article
published. Among the enormous volume of reader comments that followed,
many writers -- apparently completely unaware that the past twenty
years have happened -- scolded my friend for failing to understand
that Adam Smith (to them, the personification of capitalism) had
failed.
Most people don't know that Smith's famous Wealth of Nations
was not a tract for capitalism, but a bitter attack on something
that they called "mercantilism" back then, and that
is now correctly defined as "fascism", a system under
which certain companies climb into bed with the government --
Halliburton and Blackwater come to mind, along with every defense
corporation on the continent -- and never seem to climb out again.
They get special favors and sweetheart deals, politicians get
campaign contributions, lavish vacations, and eventually comfy
places on the boards of directors, and the Productive Class gets
the bill.
And the Purple Shaft.
Capitalism -- private capitalism -- is something else altogether.
It's a system under which individuals and corporations compete
with
one another by trying to turn out the highest quality goods and
services at the lowest prices. It's a system that has enabled
humanity
to leap from the Middle Ages to the Space Age in an astonishingly
short number of centuries, and which has lengthened human life
expectancy at birth from 20 years to 75. It's they system that
easily
houses, feeds, and clothes more human beings, more equitably,
than any
other system in history, and could house, feed, and clothe every
one
of them if slimy politicians and tinpot generals would get out
of the
way.
That's all very easy to miss, when a country like the United
States is held back and artificially impoverished by taxation
and
regulation. Getting rid of those parasitic elements would restore
the
proper contrast between a free economy and an unfree economy,
so that
letters like the ones I read would never show up in any newspaper
ever
again.
Along the way it would establish a New Renaissance.
In early 19th century Britain, there was almost no taxation.
The
same taxes that sparked a revolution here in America had generated
a
rebellion there, as well. One of the results -- the Reform Acts
--
had, among other things, eliminated about a third of all government
regulation.
This gave rise to the phenomenon of "living off the interest",
meaning that if a proper sum of money were put away, it could
earn its
owner enough to live on forever afterward, without touching the
principal. People saved their money to accumulate such a sum,
others
inherited it. None of it was taxed, and one of the results --
just one
of them -- was a great leap forward in science. Most of the asteroids,
for example, were discovered by amateurs with their own telescopes,
"living off the interest", and devoting their time to
studying the
heavens.
Almost all science was carried out privately in the same way.
Who
knows what leaps could be made once the sciences and other disciplines
were freed from the tax-supported, politically correct straitjacket
they're confined in today, and put back into private hands where
they
belong?
It might even be possible that someday we'll discover that it's
better (and more fun) to buy from and sell to other people than
kill
them, eliminating government's biggest excuse -- war -- for looting
us.
Most people have no idea what goverment really costs. The words
"billion" and "trillion", repeated over and
over, become gibberish.
They come to mean roughly the same thing when they are heard or
read,
and it all sounds like somebody else's play money. But what's
actually
being spent here -- what's being shredded and cast into the wind
-- is
your future and mine, and any future that we wish our children
to
enjoy.
We can estimate the dollar amount that unconstitutional government
costs us, but -- just as we can't know which of the millions of
men
and women whose lives were expended in World War II, Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, or Iraq, might have found a cure for Alzheimer's
or
cancer -- we can't estimate the lost opportunities in our ravaged
future.
If we ever hope to stop the growth of parasitic government,
if we
ever hope to reduce its size and appetite, in short, if we ever
hope
for good to triumph over evil, we must show individuals -- in
terms
that actually mean something to them -- not only what government
costs
them, but what they stand to gain if they manage to "alter
or abolish
it".
"Government makes stuff cost eight times as much as it
should,"
seems like a good place to start.
=====
* See more of this thinking at http://lneilsmith.net/utopian.html
=============================================================
Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been
writing about guns and gun ownership for more than 30 years.
He is the author of 27 books, the most widely-published and
prolific libertarian novelist in the world, and is considered
an expert on the ethics of self-defense. His writings may be
seen on the following sites:
The Webley Page: http://www.lneilsmith.net
The Libertarian Enterprise: http://www.ncc-1776.net
The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel, Roswell,
Texas, and TimePeeper (August 2007): http://www.bigheadpress.com
LNS at Random (blog): http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/
LNS at JPFO: http://www.jpfo.net/filegen-a-m/lneilsmith.htm
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