The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the Editor:
Charlotte Ward asks us to imagine a world without taxes. (“Don’t like taxes? Imagine a world without these services,” Tuesday.)
Okay, let’s try. What would it be like?
True, the government wouldn’t be able to provide its services any more. But it also would no longer be able to forbid competitors from offering such services non-coercively. With formerly governmental services no longer insulated from market competition, their quality would rise and their prices would fall.
Government would also no longer be able to rig markets in favor of the corporate elite and against the poor and middle class. Most governmental redistribution is from the less to the more affluent, not vice versa. Getting rid of taxation and the plutocratic policies it supports would eliminate the chief cause of poverty.
Gone too would be the ability to enforce laws against “lodge practice” – laws that deprive the poor of low-cost health care in order to enrich the medical establishment. That one change would do far more for health care than either the liberals’ state-run solution or the conservatives’ corporate-run system.
Oppressive policies like harassing immigrants [deleted by the newspaper: and downloaders] and pot smokers, or bombing Pakistani children, would be unsustainable in a freed market. And police brutality would be a lot harder to maintain if security services were competitive.
Liberals claim to be advocates for the disadvantaged, but all too often support regulations that entrench established interests and make it impossible for the poor to compete.
Conservatives claim to oppose big government, but in practice support corporate welfare, anti-union laws, intrusions into personal liberties, a bloated military-industrial complex, and grants of monopoly privilege and cronyism cloaked in the language of “deregulation” and “privatization.”
And taxation makes all this possible.
To learn more, check out the websites of the Center for a Stateless Society and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left.
Roderick T. Long