Questions for Dino Rossi, Republican Candidate for Governor of Washington State

Herein are my questions for Dino Rossi, the Republican candidate for Washington State Governor. He’s generally supported by those who supported Ron Paul, but there are a substantial number of “swing voters” among Ron Paul supporters that might go to other candidates, so his campaign is interested in discovering its constituents concerns as the political boundaries are being realigned by the current crisis of leadership within the Republican Party.

Since I had some minor success with Ron Paul resolutions at the Washington State Republican Convention, I decided to cash in what little political capital I had to inquire, in a Socratic manner, where the supposed heir to Ron Paul’s support in Washington State, stood on my concerns previously related in Libertarian Government Finance: Economic Rent Citizens Dividend and Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology.

Some may wonder how these issues are exposed by the questions I posed. I won’t go into it too much here except to say that immigration dilutes each citizen’s “share” of the land trust called his nation, and once we understand the importance of land its connection to ecology is imminent.

I can’t really ask the questions I want to ask without clarifying terminology in which the questions are asked. So indulge me.

Dino likes to talk about treating the taxpayer as a customer. I like that idea too since it treats government services as a quid pro quo—the government delivers value for value received. This is actually a principle that underlies taxation with representation. It is, however, even more important than that in libertarian philosophy:

If the government eliminates taxes and yet provides services, it makes sense for those services to be paid for by those so serviced. This is what _I_ and most _rational_ human beings would call a “use fee”. The phrase “use fee” has, however, been so distorted by government abuse that it has become a hot button for those who rightfully despise misappropriation of funds by the government. This misappropriation is not inherent in the phrase “use fee” but rather in its connotations arising from long government abuse.

The reason I go on about this semantic problem is because I think “use fees” are central to the strategy that must be pursued toward a more libertarian government:

If government can try to collect fees from those serviced by the government—in effect replacing “taxes” with “use fees”—we have taken the first step toward identifying market niches that can be targeted for privatization.

So here are my questions for Dino:

1) What are the government services most readily converted to funding from “use fees” rather than “taxes” so that we can actually treat the “taxpayer” as “customer”?

2) Which of those services, to be paid for by use fees, are least appropriate to privatize?

3) Is there a sense in which citizens can be considered, not just customers, but stockholders? If so, is there some place for citizen’s dividend that might, along the lines of the AEI’s Charles Murray’s ideas outlined in his book “In Our Hands”, fulfill the social function of transfer programs?

Posted by James Bowery on Saturday, June 21, 2008 at 04:22 PM in
Comments (1) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by ben tillman on June 28, 2008, 01:07 AM | #

Those are excellent questions.

Next entry: McCain Turns Against Technosocialism?

Previous entry: Taking RD to our people

Existential Issues

White Genocide Project

Of note

General News

Science News

Science Categories

All Categories

The Writers

Each author's name links to a list of all articles posted by the writer; the hashes link to authors' homepages.

Links

Endorsement not implied.

Controlled Opposition

Crime

General

Immigration

Islam

Jews

Nationalist Political Parties

Science

Whites in Africa