www.JoeCobb.com

by Kim Hawk

TIMELINE
• November 2004: Jack Tanner, first registered libertarian elected in Lee County, Florida, with 129,000 votes.
• January 2005 to June 2006: Jack is unable to reduce wasteful spending.
• July 2006: Tom Clark runs for Seat 3 against incumbent Mark Smith. Kim Hawk runs unopposed for Seat 5.
• November 2006: Tom Clark wins. First libertarian majority on an elected board in Lee County, Florida.
• January 2007: Jack Tanner emails agenda to interested agencies.
• Jan. 11: New board votes 3-2 to eliminate wasteful spending.

Six-thirty a.m. Thursday morning was clear and cold. I felt nervous and excited about my first meeting as an elected Lee County politician. The first indication of something special was the sign at the entrance to the old Twistee Treat building on Hancock near 41 indicating our meeting had been moved to a larger room.

Jack had emailed the agenda and invited media. Everyone knew what was likely to happen. Bureaucrats began to file into the room. Federal, state, county and city managers of agriculture, utilities, water and parks departments took their seats. Jack had never seen anything like it. Two years ago he couldn’t get board members to attend. The air was electric. I could feel the tension in the room. Our two employees Nik and Garry were there. Mark, the board member unseated by Tom, was there with a scowl on his face. No media were present. Cookies and doughnuts sat largely untouched in the center of the table. My stomach was in a knot. I didn’t know if I could do what I came to do.

Chairman Jack Tanner quickly moved through the agenda until he opened the floor to discuss the termination of the mobile irrigation laboratory and our two employees. The next 45 minutes or so were consumed by a series of earnest and emotional pleas by the government managers. Phrases like “millions of gallons wasted” and “billions of gallons saved” were used. Papers were pushed around with columns, charts and graphs. A case was cited in which an elderly, feeble, poor woman, unable to manage her lawn sprinklers, was “saved” by our wonderful program.

Familiar threat

The process was disturbingly familiar as I have witnessed this play acted out in many state, county and city boardrooms over the years. Politicians eager to be re-elected are unable or unwilling to stand up to intimidation and embarrassment that comes with a difficult or unpopular decision.

The Cape Coral utilities manager was impressive and forceful. At one point he said, “Citizens don’t protect themselves so we have to.” He concluded, “You may as well keep this program because if you don’t we will find a way to continue, and the taxpayers won’t save a dime.”

I have heard this threat before. For years myself and a small and determined alliance have successfully fought off a county sales tax. Lee County officials repeatedly scolded us saying, “If you kill this tax we’ll just find another way to raise taxes.” Ever since I was a child, threats and intimidation have provided me with the energy and determination to do the opposite and face the consequences.

I waited until everyone had their say. I started by telling a familiar but fictional story. I said, “Imagine county police coming to my home and taking my wife to jail in handcuffs because I failed to pay a fine for making unnecessary trips in my car and wasting gasoline. Imagine her living with a criminal record caused by a law she didn’t know existed.” I went on, “We don’t make criminals out of people who waste gasoline because we have a relatively free market in gasoline. We do make criminals out of people who waste water because we don’t have a free market in water distribution.”

I turned my attention to both our employees and said, “I feel sad that I am about to vote to end your jobs but I am going to do what I believe is right, not what I think is nice.”

I now know how uncomfortable and awkward it feels to look government workers in the eye and tell them “You’re fired.” I felt sad for the two men whose income was lost and at the same time I felt exhilarated thinking of the thousands of taxpayers who will keep more of their own money.

Nirvana

I looked around the room. Some looked bewildered. Some looked shocked. Our employees, Nik and Garry, were visibly angry. Garry was muttering something I’m glad I couldn’t hear. Jack called for a vote. Ron Edenfield brusquely pushed back his chair and stood, announcing, “Let the record show I don’t have time for this. … ” Ron walked out. Jack was unfazed. Paul Dinger voted to keep the service saying, “I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.” Jack, Tom and I voted to end the program.

The government managers were mumbling to each other. I heard phrases like “this is unbelievable!” They stayed behind to discuss their next move.

I felt many conflicting emotions on my way out. As the day wore on I gradually realized that this was a dream come true. I am 49 years old. For 35 years I have complained about our intrusive and expensive government. Now I am government, and I am doing something about it. I have found my nirvana. Jack, Tom and I will do whatever we can to prevent other agencies from thwarting our attempts to reduce government waste and regulation. We owe this to the taxpayers and ourselves.

I believe this event should be celebrated as the historic and encouraging story that it is, not as a promotion of the Libertarian Party but as a fundamental shift of political thought. Libertarianism is a philosophy and a way of being, not just a party name. Ninety-seven years of unchecked government growth have given us a $9 trillion debt, a failing government school system, an endless war on drugs, bankrupt pension schemes and unaffordable health and home insurance. All of this is financed by taxes that have increased from 10 percent of the average worker’s income in 1914 to 50 percent in 2007. Radical change is long overdue. Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.” He implied what I believe. We are the solution.

— Kim Hawk is a member of the Lee County, Florida, Soil & Water Conservation District Board.

Copyright January 25, 2007, News-Press.

by Brian Doherty

Libertarianism may seem hopelessly marginalized in American politics. The national record of the Libertarian Party since 1972 — the first year it fielded candidates — isn’t too bright. Ed Clark, the party’s presidential candidate in 1980, received 921,000 votes, the highest ever, but Michael Badnarik, the 2004 nominee, garnered merely 397,000.

Americans continue to be suspicious of radical third-party alternatives — if they are lucky enough to be aware of them — thanks largely to media that foster a feedback loop of “they can’t win, so why cover them?” However, including about 600 candidates on every level — local, state and federal — the Libertarian Party attracted more than 13 million votes in 2006.

But counting votes for third parties isn’t the best way to judge the growth and prospects of libertarianism in the United States. Libertarian ideas should never be counted out in this country because they are at the heart of its founding.

The central insight of libertarianism is in the Declaration of Independence. We have the right to life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness (though no guarantee of achieving it). Government’s only purpose is to help protect those rights — and if it fails, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

But from the declaration on, in some libertarians’ telling, it has been downhill for liberty in this country. Certainly libertarian sensibilities were offended by the expansion of government’s ability to tax, manage and regulate the economy and our private lives in the 20th century, and by the projection of U.S. military might overseas for reasons other than direct defense of the American people.

In the immediate aftermath of the New Deal, the modern American libertarian movement first began to coalesce in the works of such feisty American female novelists and philosophers as Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, and in the insights of Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.

But the libertarian movement began as a reaction to how alien the ideas of unbridled individual and market liberty had become. When former Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce chief Leonard Read launched the first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1946, his ideas about limited government and free markets were so marginal in the United States as to seem almost seditious.

Lane was investigated by the FBI in the early postwar years for daring to write on a postcard that Social Security was the sort of socialistic government management of people’s lives we fought wars against. True Social Security, she insisted, was canned vegetables and slaughtered pigs in your cellar. She and Paterson refused to accept anything from the Social Security system.

In 1950, the Buchanan Committee, a House panel investigating lobbying efforts, found Read and his foundation positively un-American because they opposed price controls, public housing, the draft and loyalty oaths. The committee subpoenaed records, called Read to testify and ordered some of his supporters to report on which organizations they backed. One foundation funder, Southern California Edison Vice President William Mullendore, denied Congress’ right to make such a “harassing and burdensome inquiry” into his attempts to influence his government. Mullendore got away with his defiance — but today’s campaign finance laws allow such governmental intrusion.

When, in 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater used libertarian ideas to decry the excessive growth of government, he was defeated by what was at the time the largest margin of votes in U.S. history. He also was condemned as “psychologically unfit” by more than 1,000 psychiatrists (who never met him) for his belief that the managerial-welfare state in the United States had strayed too far from the country’s roots.

Libertarian ideas had a tumultuous period of expansion in the years after Goldwater. Rand became a campus favorite, selling novels of uncompromising libertarianism to tens of millions. A Harvard philosophy professor, Robert Nozick, won a National Book Award for his 1974 book, “Anarchy, State and Utopia,” which rigorously maintained that if we have rights, then most of the functions of the modern state, including redistributing wealth and outlawing certain drugs, are philosophically illegitimate.

Also in 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize for economics. Hayek is best known for his 1944 book, “The Road to Serfdom,” which demonstrated to those who believed in a benign socialism that government economic control tends inexorably toward political tyranny. Two years later, Milton Friedman, a man as well known for his libertarian polemics as for his economic contributions, also won the Nobel Prize for economics. Libertarian ideas were moving toward the mainstream.

And then Ronald Reagan, who declared that “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism,” won the presidency. Libertarians never believed that Reagan fully lived up to his small-government promise. But his libertarian ideas were a key part of the GOP’s electoral appeal.

Over the decades, both major parties have successfully run on libertarian fumes: see Reagan’s talk of tax cutting and entitlement reform; control over inflation since the 1980s, largely thanks to Friedman’s monetarist ideas (Friedman also persuaded President Nixon to end the draft in 1973), and President Clinton’s overhaul of the federal welfare system, which echoed the beliefs and data in libertarian Charles Murray’s 1984 book, “Losing Ground.” One of the biggest policy debates of the Bush presidency has been about privatizing Social Security, an idea in the works at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, since the 1980s. Introducing market incentives and competition into government services — ideas that originated at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles — are increasingly popular with local and state governments looking to cut costs and improve services.

A full libertarian victory is certainly unlikely, as a cursory survey of the leading presidential candidates going into 2008 shows. But libertarians can take heart in Americans’ growing dissatisfaction with military intervention overseas, with the prospect of an entitlement state in which recipients far outnumber taxpayers and with government manipulations and intrusions in education, immigration, abortion and stem cell research. In such a political context, libertarian wisdom about keeping government out of our lives as much as possible looks more and more promising.

March 25, 2007

Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

A special income tax is hidden among the instructions on your Federal form 1040. If you are younger than retirement age, you would have no reason to notice it at all. It is found on line 20 of the long Federal tax form, identified as “Social Security benefits.”

You don’t get Social Security benefits yet? Learn about this tax now, before it hits you - hard. Every dollar you put away into tax-sheltered savings (except Roth IRA contributions) will one day pay this tax. This tax is a classic of political stealth and deception.

Line 20 does not tax Social Security benefits, since these benefits are not taxable. Instead, this special tax falls on other income you receive after you begin receiving Social Security benefits. This tax changes your gross income, and that is what changes your tax rate when you receive money from a retirement account.

The tax increase is not small. It jumps up your marginal tax rate by 50 percent. So if you are in the 15 percent tax bracket, your marginal tax rate becomes 22.5 percent. And if you are already in the 25 percent tax bracket, it can raise your marginal tax rate by 85 percent: instead of paying 25 percent tax to the IRS for what you get from an IRA or 401(k) plan, you will pay 46.25 percent on this money.

Imagine two twins, both with identical jobs and incomes. But let’s say one twin saves lots of money and the second twin spends everything. Assume that each twin receives identical Social Security benefits, but the first also receives distributions from a 401(k) plan he contributed to, and never paid taxes for, his entire life. Taxes will be due when the retirement distributions begin. If the second twin keeps on working, because he has no savings, his marginal tax rate will be perhaps 15 percent. But the retirement distributions from the first twin will have a tax rate of 22.5 percent on every dollar. If the twins were in the 25 percent tax bracket, the frugal, prudent twin would pay 46.25 percent on every dollar.

Only professional income tax preparers, and members of Congress, are aware of how this tax works (only a few Congressional staff understand it). For a chilling look at how it is calculated, check out the instructions and the worksheets that come along with Line 20. You’ll find a masterpiece of confusion.

This tax was first passed in 1983. In those days, Social Security was headed for bankruptcy by 1990, so a tax increase was the solution Senator Bob Dole and Alan Greenspan, not yet chairman of the Federal Reserve, decided to give us. They knew it would be political dynamite to change anything about Social Security, so they crafted this sneaky idea. Social Security would not be touched! Instead, other income you get in retirement would be taxed at a higher rate.

To delay any visible effects of this tax for at least 10 years, a large $25,000 exemption was granted ($32,000 for married couples filing joint tax returns). But the exemption was not indexed for inflation. Congress did that on purpose, so eventually everyone would come under this special tax - but not until the culprit members of Congress had retired. A quarter century has passed and this tax now affects the savings of almost every retired American. In a few years all but the poorest retired people will pay this extra tax.

Last year, Congress passed amendments to the 401(k) law to enroll all American workers automatically, and a special retirement savings credit, form 8880, has been part of the tax code for the past four years. It is as if Congress knows raising taxes directly is unpopular, so they design schemes to collect more revenue indirectly from people’s tax-sheltered retirement savings. Young people who are encouraged to save for retirement are being suckered (only the Roth IRA escapes this tax).

Is your plan for retirement to give the federal tax collector half of what you’ve saved? The only good news in this story is that California state income tax does not have this higher rate feature. The tax systems in Arizona and about 40 other States do include this extra tax, automatically incorporating it in your “adjusted gross income.”

The lesson to be learned from this sneaky tax on retirement savings should be to toss out the entire tax code and replace it with a federal system of simple, flat-rate State taxes (see my book on this site). It is treacherously undemocratic for any tax system to be as incomprehensible as the one in the United States today.

What is the connection between his advocacy and his lapel symbol?

See the reply to Al Gore published in the Sunday Telegraph (London), Nov. 19, 2006, by Christopher Monckton, and the newly revised data on global warming published by the Goddard institute for Space Science.

Hitler’s passion was purifying the human race, based on the fashionable scientistic fad of eugenics - based on a misinterpretation of Darwin - which dominated the politics of race and social class from about 1860 through the 1950s.

Today’s scientistic fad is “climate change caused by industrial civilization” based on extreme assumptions and a misinterpretation of computer forecasting models. Unlike the older version (socialism), the new version of anti-capitalism doesn’t even pretend to be “progressive.”

Environmental conservation is everything. They don’t want to make poor people better off. They are conservatives. Overpopulation and “development” and economic growth are negative things. If most of the human race must die “to purify the earth,” people like Al Gore are ready to lead them there.

H. L. Mencken once wrote, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.�

Gore exemplifies the same moralistic authoritarianism, in the name of “saving humanity from its sins,” and antipathy to property rights and capitalism, which has characterized all forms of socialist passion in recent centuries. Like any form of moralistic passion, it displays disregard (even contempt) for skeptical disagreement and uses exaggerations, even false statements, for persuasive effect.

[Note: John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience (2006), chap. 2, pp. 70-72, presents evidence how authoritarrian conservatives, like Al Gore, wilfully manipulate the truth in seeking power.]

He’s saving souls, after all !
He says he is saving the planet. Do you trust this man?

Why?

Or, consider British PM Tony Blair, who is leaving office after a decade of strong economic growth and a tumble in popularity as bad as Margaret Thatcher’s after a decade. The British get tired of the same old face. But he needs a continuation of his career too. What cause has Balir taken up? You guessed it. The Stern Review was his launching paper to campaign for some big position like President of the European Union (a symbolic post, but a bully pulpit).

The debate about climate change is worth having, but moralistic crusades to suppress economic development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are not worth a single human life. No one disagrees that wise enviromental management is important, and also that energy saving technology should be vigorously pursued, invented, and installed.

But all this can be done with more deregulation of industry, private property rights and the rule of law in underdeveloped countries, and lots of direct foreign investment to utilize cheap foreign labor, which will increase those wages and boost living standards among the poorest human beings.

Those are my values.

Ron Paul announced his candidacy for POTUS this morning. I support him.

Here are some comments my email received today:

Linda wrote: “Ron Paul makes me nervous in some ways—Washington rumor mill stuff in large part, but some of it has some credence. Then again, most of them make me nervous. Obama is the most interesting new face in the race IMHO—notice I said interesting. I reserve further opinion until after I’ve finished his book. Has Paul written any autobiographical books or other books on how he thinks politically?”

Joe would reply: Ron Paul has written a lot of books and articles.

This list is from Gene:

Ron Paul has written a couple of booklets, mostly about the Gold Standard. Everyone who is backing him is doing so because of his record in Congress:
(a) Voted against the Patriot Act (along with 2 other Republican Congressmen, 75 Dems & 1 Independent)
(b) Voted against authorizing the Iraq War (along with 5 other Republican Congressman, 132 Dems & 1 Independent)
(c) Always votes for tax cuts, votes against most spending bills
(d) Votes against military spending, opposes conscription
(e) Sponsor of the Liberty Amdendment to abolish the income tax
(f) Lead sponsor of Industrial Hemp bill
(g) Co-Sponsor of bill to stop federal government from interfering in states that have passed medical marijuana.

His many columns on various issues can be accessed here:
(A) Anti-war columns
(B) Columns on other issues

He is a life member of The Libertarian Party. Texas does not have party registration, so he is not even a registered Republican.

On two issues at least, he takes stands that I disagree with:
He voted for the Wall at the US/Mexico border. He opposes abortion.

He is also a Christian, and more comfortable with religious displays in the public square than I am.

He is the most ideologically transparent candidate in history. Much of what he has written, of course, has been ghost written. I was a ghost writer for some of his stuff on the gold standard back in the 1980s. But Ron Paul is a clear thinker. He learns from ghost writers like me. It is like being his college professor for one semester. But the teacher writes the paper, and signs the student’s name.

Frank Luntz, in his new book, Words that Work (2007), points out it is most important for the political leader “to be” the message. Ron Paul does that very well.