THE ISSUES
- Wasteful Spending
Governments always want more money. They will go to any length to get it, milking the productive economy for its every last penny. Eventually, there is a level of tolerability reached, and so direct taxes (the one’s seen withheld from your income) are insufficient to fund the government at the rate it would like to expand. They begin selling bonds to take in more money than they do in taxes, to spend more money than they are otherwise capable of at one time. To the extent that these deficits are funded through borrowing from the public, from the existing money stock, this is not inflationary. If, however, as they do it, it is financed through monetary policy (creating new money), i.e., selling bonds to the central bank, this is inflationary in the sense of causing rising prices, as well as causing the business cycle and redistributing property from the latest recipients (the poor) to the early recipients (the banks, government, contractors, recipients of subsidies, etc).
He uses this section to include the issue of the national debt, so it's necessary now to state that the whole debt of the government, regardless of how it has been incurred, is an invalid contract. We should default on the “national debt." How’s that for radical libertarianism? The false collectivist abstraction of "we", does not owe anyone anything. In libertarianism, the philosophy of all-things-voluntary, the only legitimate contracts, valid from a legal perspective, are those which have been expressly agreed to by both parties; the “social contract” not fitting the bill. (For those who think “taxes are voluntary” because “we” agreed to them, then perhaps they might be sold on the fact that indebting the unborn is “taxation without representation.”) Surely “I” do not owe property to the Chinese government, the Federal Reserve System, or any other institution that lent money to “The U.S. Government.” To conclude here, the budget on its fundamental basis is not libertarian. None of us have an obligation to fund a “budget.”
If he wishes to end deficit spending, he makes no mention of the Federal Reserve System that I see which "monetizes" the Treasury's debt, making it all possible. Ending central banking is the only means stop government from being inflationary and thus expansionary. Unlike Ron Paul, ending the Fed is no central theme of the Johnson campaign. There is no free, capitalist banking in sight; more, or less, socialist central-banking will prevail.
Gary tows the safe line here again and accepts the budget, but believes it just needs to be cleaned up a little bit. I believe he has used this section to make himself sound good; maybe even being so in ways if judging him only for what he says. For example, he
"pledges to veto any legislation that will result in deficit spending, forcing
Congress to override his veto in order to spend money we don’t have."
And he has
“pledged that his first major act as President will be to submit to
Congress a truly balanced budget.”
I’m not sure the U.S. Government has had a balanced budget in nearly 200 hundred years, if truly ever. Nor am I sure determination alone can do it, if that’s even desirable. Maybe Gary has what it takes, but I doubt it. There is no talk here of rolling the government as far back as possible. The libertarian position is of course to abolish "the budget" all-together. Since all government rests on aggression against innocent people, thus violating the central principle of libertarianism, the Non Aggression Principle, which "goes over my head", as Johnson says, all government spending should be abolished. To me, to think otherwise is to be the "conservative" who sees, economically and ethically, that taxes are a bad thing, just stopping short of a full application of this belief. He continues to give us a disappointing, mildly-libertarian message that may look good to newcomers.
The minarchist versus anarchist debate can be settled, anyway, if and once we could ever hope to achieve “limited government.” Then they can tell me why I should be forced to fund a defense monopoly, although they usually vaguely maintain that their minarchism is voluntaryism, not specifying where we differ then. At least, though, what is needed is to institute immediately the minarchist-state, ended all the Departments, throwing out the bureaucrats and administrators, politicians and lobbyists, closing everything down possible, returning property to the people, and abolishing anything and everything. The size and scope of government should at least be attempted to be reduced to what it was originally pretended to be needed for: the protection of property rights and the enforcement of contracts, to which it is now, if it was every anything else, the very violator of those rights, i.e., the implementation of socialism. In fact, i’d say, if governments were capable of this (history and theory shows us it’s not) – of protecting property rights, as some still think it’s needed for or does (conservatives, minarchists), or the reason it’s bad (anarcho-communists) – then perhaps there would be less anarcho-libertarians. The whole reason we’re here is our insistence that these rights are best protected with no government at all, seeing that it is the original thief. We don’t need to “get back to the Constitution” however, a statist document and a Republican-like statement. As Lysander Spooner said of it, ignoring whether it was founded on libertarian grounds or not:
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much
is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have
had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
He takes the State for a given. His historical analysis, as Rothbard clarified, that it "has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation", is not used to give up entirely on this involuntary institution. Rather, again, it just needs to be "fixed" and "reformed." He's more concerned with a balanced budget than talk of drastic, immediate reductions in the overall size of government. The only platform I could accept as libertarian would be a privatize-and-abolish-everything one, seeing no need for a monopolist in any area of life should we call this liberty.
We should wish to eradicate the world from statism, freeing everyone once and for all. Johnson speaks only in the manner of "reforming" it. In this way, he differs from other socialists in the extent that he truly wishes for its scope to be limited (when was it ever?). In this section, all he’s done is to make it seem as if there's government spending that isn't wasteful; that government just isn't doing it right. Sure, it’s a good thing he wishes to “balance the budget.” (I say, scrap it), but what about keeping it unbalanced and still cutting taxes? I see no mention. Johnson implies that inflation is taxation, but not really that taxation is theft. If guess Johnson believes we can and should make government (the thugs who take away our rights) more efficient.
Overall, his illusion here (which I do think is a deliberate dodging of the real issue) is to create the category of "wasteful government spending", as if there is government spending that is not the plundering of resources! Instead of addressing the inherent insolvency of government programs, supported only by the deficit spending he says he's against, he's of the socialist position that what we need to be doing is "reforming entitlements." This is like the "democratic socialist" fantasy that there isn't nothing wrong with government policies per se, but that they should just be carried out by less-corrupt people, somehow. Here I feel all Johnson is doing is pushing this conservative-like notion that government should or could be run more like a business, and we just need experienced businessmen in there to balance budgets and make government operate smoothly and sustainably again. I call "whoopty-doo" on his promise to "cut government spending by 20%." (video on page) If we're not going to crumble the whole budget up and end it, my view I suppose then is that there should be equal tax-cuts with the spending decreases, not just what is suggested that we
“bring spending in line with revenues, without tax increases. “
Quickly, we must ask, why can’t the Treasury just write-off its accounts-payable to the Fed, ending repayment to them, since much of the debt is "public", meaning "we owe it to ourselves?" And so, taxes transferred to the Fed be ended? What would be a stupid question to ask if you’re a socialist, that “why does government borrow/tax when it could just print the money?”, since they don’t understand inflation, or the laws of supply and demand, to see that it could only depreciate the currency and cause the aforementioned things, is perhaps still a worthy question to be asked by the libertarian: why don’t they just cut our [direct] taxes to zero and finance the whole thing by printing money at this point, especially since they’re creating unprecedented amounts of bank credit anyway? I suspect to stave off inflation somewhat, as well as to maintain the illusion that only the taxes you see are the forms of taxation, and that the illusory, all the more devious inflation tax, doesn’t exist.
While government inflated anyway under the Bretton Woods system, eventually defaulting in gold redemption around the time the Libertarian Party was formed, in the early 1970's, which was in fact an initial issue of the Party, we've seen clearly that the unrestricted issuance of paper-money since that time has led to an indefinite growth in government, price-inflation, deficit spending, debts, and the like. So, sure, we absolutely should end "deficit spending", since money borrowed that isn't taken in by way of taxes (by the central bank creating money) is inflationary, and since the source of the ability to spend money they don’t have comes from the central bank, which every libertarian should oppose.
The most important take with from his tone is that he doesn't regard the State as a gang, as what I would say is the libertarian political theory of the State, but obviously sees much need for it, as well as speaking of it generally as something we just need to get "limited" and into-line. If only would just get back to upholding property rights and contracts again! Voluntaryists shouldn’t succumb to such fantasies. The State is always involuntary.
Sure, we'll take it. Is it decidedly libertarian? No; but neither are the other options. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here, to say we could actually get smaller government on Gary. My pessimism of politics, though, makes me believe we won't get more, thankfully, but we won't get less.
- Taxes
While there exists much slavery, or potential slavery, in our time – from the draft, to being unable to leave the military, to the compulsory public school system, being jailed in innocence, the subpoena, etc. – there is perhaps no greater issue in libertarianism than taxation. It is the mark of slavery that one isn't allowed to keep what they produce, and that it's confiscated by their slave-master, in this case the government. (There's no time here for the philosophical points against the Marxists, or the questionably-anarchist "socialists", who claim that since they aren't able to keep the product of their labor when using another's capital goods, instead selling their labor for wages, that capitalism is slavery. The alternative, of course, is statism.)
Surprisingly (I guess, for the “libertarian” candidate), Johnson says nothing of cutting taxes! The closest thing he says to it, is “simplify the tax code.” While repeating that the income tax should be ended, this seems to be only for it to be replaced and captured elsewhere. He only wishes to “reform the tax code"; not end taxation because it’s robbery, slavery, and expropriation. Sure, bureaucracy could be cut down on by a simplification of the tax-code, and a savings of administrative costs by doing so, but what about the non-libertarian issue of taxation itself? There's no mention though of the now-popular phrase entering the libertarian vernacular, that "taxation is theft." Johnson is a soft-core libertarian, not really wishing to eradicate the greatest enemy of liberty, the State. Taxation is not a problem to him; the style of taxation is, which he seems to be interested into the oxymoronic "fair tax."
Speaking right away of "needed revenues" (what a slap in the face to all private business owners everywhere who actually produce something in exchange for their services to refer to government's theft as "revenue."), it's clear Johnson at least believes there are "necessary functions of government", and "essential services" that it provides; how far he would go, it remains to be seen. We can say at least, Johnson favors some taxation. But there is no "mandatory spending" in the libertarian view. Since there are no "collective goods" that have to be solved with taxation to balance out these so-called "externalities", which has become a problem in economics, there are no necessary tasks a coercive monopolist must take up. Libertarianism is an individualist philosophy, not a collectivist one which believes there is a "common good", however harsh one may wish to interpret this and use it against us. We cannot shy away from our goal of absolute liberty for the individual to appease socialist sentiments, if this were even his goal.
He gets that the political means are used "as a way for special interests to penalize their competitors", and that capital goes to where it is treated most friendly, in his call to end the income tax. What may be deemed a refreshing change, even, from mainstream economics which sees the means of an economy growing as being driven by consumption, that Johnson says
“our current tax code, which penalizes the savings, productivity and investment
This is good because there is the acknowledgement of the necessary ingredient in economic growth: savings and investment. In fact, I don’t believe they [Keynesians] can even provide an answer at all as empiricists; the whole of economic theory is subject to experiment. They reverse the truth that production leads to the ability to consume, believing printing money can actually create wealth by stimulating consumption which would lead to supply, contrary to Say's law that production is the source of demand. Gary takes the other position, but still fails on taxes, again. He is pushing for this idea of a "consumption tax", which is very conservative-like too (he does seem to just be a conservative hiding behind a libertarian image), saying that what we need is "the replacement of all income and payroll taxes with a single consumption tax that determines your tax burden by how much you spend, not how much you earn."
To address this, i'll suggest Rothbard, since i'm unsure anyone offered tax critiques as detailed and devastating as himself, who says of attempting to get to a consumption tax from a tax on income that
"[we should] deny the very possibility of achieving that goal, i.e., we
maintain that a consumption tax will devolve, willy-nilly, into a tax on
income and therefore on savings as well. In short, that even if, for the
sake of argument, we should want to tax only consumption and not
income, we should not be able to do so.
For reasons that
"[our] entire savings-investment is based solely on the possibility of his
future consumption, which will be taxed equally. Since future consumption
will be taxed, we assume, at the same rate as consumption at present, we
cannot conclude that savings in the long run receives any tax exemption or
special encouragement. There will therefore be no shift by Jones in favor of
savings-and-investment due to a consumption tax. In sum, any payment of
taxes to the government, whether they be consumption or income, necessarily
reduces [one's] net income."
Therefore, he's more concerned with shifting the burdens around rather than actually cutting taxes.
He stumbles again:
"Governor Johnson advocates for the elimination of special interest tax loopholes.."
Now, while socialists may see it as being “subsidized” (by those who are still paying taxes for the so-called “public goods”), the libertarian position is clear: property should, ethically and economically, be held private. If I may, again, refer to Rothbard in a chapter of his, The Myth of Tax Reform, on this Gary Johnson idea of closing loopholes, which I assume he means make sure those who currently get out of taxes are less able to:
“It’s certainly true that our tax and budget system is riddled with
subsidies, properly defined as taxing one group of people to line the
pockets of another, or robbing Peter to pay Paul. If you or I are taxed
to subsidize tobacco growers, or highway builders, or contractors, or
welfare recipients, then these are indeed subsidies, cases where
productive people are being robbed by the government to support groups
who function, in effect, as parasites upon the producers. These are
subsidies that should be eliminated forthwith. But what about, say,
deductions for payment of interest on mortgages, tax credits for
investment, or deductions for payment of state and local taxes?
In what sense are they “subsidies”? Instead, what is really happening
here is that some people—homeowners, investors, or state and local
taxpayers—are graciously allowed by the government to keep more of
their own money than they would have otherwise. I submit that being
allowed to keep more of your hard-earned money is not a subsidy in
any true sense; it simply means that you are being fleeced less
intensely than you would have been. If a robber assaults you on the
highway, and is about to run off with all of your funds, and you persuade
him to let you keep some bus fare, is he “subsidizing” you? Surely not.
Being allowed to keep your own money can scarcely be called a subsidy.”
Therefore, the libertarian should cheer any possible loopholes there are in the law to escape taxation and theft since a tax break is not a subsidy! More loopholes, please! Make more people exempt from taxes. More deductions to the taxpayer is the libertarian position; being allowed to keep more of your money. If churches can get out of paying taxes, then contrary to the atheist-statist position (who think their religion, statism, doesn’t contradict their atheism), that's great. If some people, or groups of people, can avoid taxation, then the more productive society will be as a result. No libertarian should ever wish to include more people into the tax-code under this socialist-logic that they're being subsidized by others since they're not paying their "fair share." The libertarian wants everyone to be robbed less. Thus, we want everyone to be free escape the expropriation of government; everyone to have equality in liberty, not the socialist definition of “equality”, where one man is taxed and another receives his property.
- Term Limits
"Term limits" are just another socialist selling position taken which believes, again, that the inherent problems of the government can be solved with a few tweaks. No less hopeless than thinking the government can pass laws to "get money out of politics" is thinking it can or would check itself with terms limits. Again, Johnson thinks that government could somehow not be a magnet to "forces like lobbyists, special interests, and partisan gamesmanship", and that some more reforms are needed for "checks and balances."
While making it all more-democratic is not the solution, we must remember much of those in the state-apparatus exist outside of the democracy; they are appointed, nominated, promoted without election. The deeply bureaucratic state is scarcely going to change by instituting limitations on terms. Terms limits are just another “issue” to make us feel as if changing the figureheads of government will solve the problems deeply entrenched within it. Not that we believe more democracy is the solution, and obviously that a democracy for “the people” is impossible, evolving into a small minority that become the ruling-elite of the oligarchy, but what is to be said of all the un-elected folks heading agencies, the central bank, judges, police, the cabinet members?
He leads off here with the idea that
“We need [term limits] to bring back democratic representation.”
But we don't need "representatives" in government. My idea of "representation" is a market that works for the people; one that is not tainted by government. "We" should not wish for the ideas of the people to be carried out by the State, for those ideas are socialist. As the satirical journalist, H.L. Mencken, widely quoted in anarchist circles, once said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
I have to wonder what is even the point of government if we’re to shrug it off like we should just, like he suggests
“Run for office, spend a few years doing the job at hand, and then return to private life.”
Also, as Hans-Hoppe has repeatedly stated, in particular his analysis of it [democracy] versus monarchism, the incentive under such a short-term, "caretaker"-like relationship with the State, is to plunder it for all it's worth as quickly as possible. Whereas the king regarded all the property as his own private property, being more farsighted in his plundering, those members of the democracy are only there on a short-term basis, and want to “get in and get out”, so to speak; of course with all the dough, sort of like the Bush run on the State. It would seem to me this would apply here too, to the issue of term limitations. We could only imagine what one would do if they could occupy power in the State for a month or so: do something irrational, and pass the buck on to the next, new government.
- Jobs
I'm always hesitant when any politician (like the multi-millionaire Gary Johnson) is pushing the must-make rhetoric of "creating jobs." When done by outright socialists, it's always the call that we need "infrastructure programs", "tuition-free college", or a “jobs bill”, or “stimulus package”, etc. It's always the businessmen are corrupt, and so we need our benevolent politicians to make help create the wealth "the capitalists" won't make for us. In this thinking, it's believed they can tax, say, one-hundred million dollar's worth of jobs out of the economy to "create" much less, say twenty-million "jobs" once it's siphoned-off through the administrative bureaucracy. Funny how everything the socialists complain about (schools, roads, police, etc) is already socialism-in-failing, anyway, right?
We must remember, there's nothing in a "job" per se; this would be adopting to Marxist Labor Theory of Value too. What's important is production, and that a real good or service was created. "Employment", thus, doesn't contain all of the truth. There is "full employment" under communism, but what do they produce? "Tax preparation", for instance, produces nothing of use; those employed in compliance with regulation aren’t producing a good or service the people value, but an extra expense they're forced to make (unpaid tax-withholding forced onto employers may be considered slavery too); as opposed to the people who only see them spending money, and think this is how economies grow, the military is consuming capital, not creating it; the 100,000 people working for the IRS (according to Gary) do not produce any value for the economy, but they subtract from it. All the parasitical people who make up the State produce nothing of good; they're making us poorer. They are unlike those in the private economy who actually produce things that people value, demonstrated in their voluntary association with those producers. This is the emphasis of Henry Hazlitt's classic, Economics in One Lesson, borrowing from Bastiat, of seeing only Person A, the beneficiary, and forgetting entirely about Person B, the loser.
It's somewhat vague what "supported policies that incentivized job growth" means, since only if this were economic freedom, and not "jobs programs", could we support these "policies." Johnson seems to understand the natural law that capital will go to where it's most welcomed, seeming to be calling for an end to the corporate income tax.
Judging by his page, he means it.
"...government doesn’t “create” jobs. Entrepreneurs, businesses,
and economic prosperity are the building blocks for job growth."
While they’re correct, it’s become something of a Republican-like talking point to speak of “the private sector” while not really meaning it, i.e., while still believing in a “public sector” for defense [contracts], schooling, etc. We should praise this way of thinking anyway, since mainstream economics even leaves out the all-important entrepreneur in creating wealth, hardly speaking of their role.
It would seem it's believed here that Johnson would acknowledge that "jobs", or should we say, production, comes about when people are free and left alone; and when private property rights are upheld and producers are not harassed by government, but then he says
“The purpose of government regulation is to protect citizens from bad actors.”
If he’s saying this is how it should be, this is still just untrue in reality. Government regulation (the government not being the people) was never intended to protect the people, while it was always sold to the public on such a basis, but it was always those industries (Big Everything: Railroads, Banking, Pharma, Oil, Agriculture, etc) appealing to the government for protection from the competition in the market, to gain effective monopolies as well as to receive property from the government in the form of subsidization. It looks like he gets it, seeing that
"..powerful corporate interests actually benefit from over-regulation. After all,
they have the resources to comply with onerous laws. But for the average American,
entrepreneur, or small businessperson, they don’t have teams of high-priced
attorneys to help them navigate the bureaucracy."
Who knows what he means by saying we need "common sense regulatory policy". Any socialist, too, would say one of their global-warming environmentalist policies would be the "common sense" solution. If Gary knows his history, all these regulatory agencies were always to gain special privileges by industry through the government to eliminate competition and attain monopolies and cartels; they were never to protect the people, as the propaganda pitched to the public would have one believe. Ironically, it's socialists who support all the things they believe they're against. Of course, creating monopolies by supporting government's existence. But in this example, assisting much-hated companies like Walmart who can suffer minimum-wage laws, regulatory compliance, etc.
Whether he could explain it or not, it seems Johnson at least intuitively acknowledges that economic growth arises out of capital accumulation and the preceding savings (and not consumption as mainstream economics would have it, advocating government step into to correct things). Sadly, this clear understanding of the preconditions to a rise in the standard of living is left of out of basic economic teaching; Krugman, the ivory-tower economist, even admitting he doesn't know. Their method of economics is using statistics to build models predicting future events of human action and trying to understand how things work. It isn’t derived from a priori theory, but through mixing all this historical date to find relationships in the economy that can explain events. (Whereas Austrian economists would reverse the causality to say: no, prices are falling due to the Depression, the Keynesian view is more that the falling prices (the unnecessarily dreaded “deflation” are the cause.) They would see that if consumption fell, and so did growth, that consumption must drive growth; or if taxes were raised and there was growth, that it was because of the taxes.
Without stepping too far off course, an example, made here, would be if:
"...during an economic slump, a general fall in the demand for goods
and services is observed...are we then to conclude that the fall in the demand
is the cause of an economic recession?"
It’s like saying (or seeing) that you stopped being sick while you took a shot of whiskey. You can’t be sure of this causality, but this is how these people view the world. To them, nearly nothing can be true (this is the moral relativist position, too, to make the knowledge claim that nothing can be true) in economics unless it is “tested” in a physical-sciences-like experiment on the population. We can’t know minimum-wage laws work, they tell us, unless they’re tried out. Economics is not really a science, they say. "The economy" is just some social experiment requiring a coercive government to come tweak it to solve all these so-called "market failures." There is of course no such thing as government failures. Whatever "theories" trickle down from the State, concluding that it can solve something through "fiscal" or "monetary policy", or by regulations that are said to be for our protection, the false premise this statist-economic "logic" rests on is that "the State is us.", and so its conclusions always turn up short.
Even when there is economic growth under government, it is in spite of government, not because of it. Taxes affect relative levels of production, not absolute. We would of course be richer without taxation (relative to with it), but this doesn’t refute our contention that taxes are destructive to an economy because it’s still capable of growing under them. This is the economics, at least, that taxation discourages production. Thus government can never create jobs or wealth. It can only destroy both. Ethically, one more time, we abide by the non-aggression principle; taxation failing the test. Not bringing it up, we can assume Johnson is not 100% libertarian.
(continued here)