For those unaware of the current shenanigans being pulled by US politicos—Rep. Charles Rangel is about to try to pull a Dan Rostenkowski on the US: It is time to do another fake “tax reform” to get people conned into suppressing their sense of dread, foreboding and doom.  People associate these negative feelings, for good reason, with paying their “fair share” to the IRS.  So politicos pretend to address these negative feelings by “simplifying” the collection of income taxes for a government that is replacing white people (code word “middle class”) through a combination of centralization of wealth in favor of a small percentage of “white”—largely Jewish—families that promote immigration and the welfare state, and centralization of government in favor of a fecund non-white populous that promotes immigration and the welfare state.  This replacement of the white population, in combination with the New Media’s encroachment on the Old Media is creating an unstable situation.  Democrats like Rangel are pretending to address this with “tax reform” but they have a problem:  Ron Paul is more effectively addressing the reaction to the replacement of whites.  Candidate Paul is doing this by proposing the elimination of the income tax and massive elimination of government programs.  Since the centralization of government is even more of a culprit than is centralization of wealth in the replacement of the white population, he is getting major traction during this time of building revolutionary sentiment.

What follows is my submission to the above linked “Politico”, an online news and forum site run by a former political editor of the Washington Post, regarding this issue.  Keep in mind the target audience isn’t MR:

A source of revenue consistent with libertarian philosophy, but also, surprisingly, with the “Robin Hood” camp, is to replace all other taxes with a use fee on property rights that would not exist in the absence of government’s support of those property rights.

In the absence of government, one’s property rights are limited (by the limits of self defense) to one’s home, subsistence land, and tools to extract subsistence therefrom—so an equivalent dollar amount in property rights value should be exempted. This results in a single tax on households only, not corporations (since households ultimately own their stocks and bonds), at a rate equal to the the risk free interest rate (modern portfolio theory used the short term Treasury instrument rate here), on their net assets (assessed at their liquidation, or “no risk” value) in excess of $300,000 (or whatever is the current figure protected as “home and tools of the trade” under bankruptcy protection).

This would be nearly revenue neutral as a tax reform. In political economy this is a kind of “economic rent” tax—the kind of tax that relatively libertarian economist Milton Friedman has declared the “least distorting” of the free market. What the politicos like Rangel refuse to face, and where guys like Ron Paul get their grassroots support against guys like Rangel, is protesting the “public choice” version of economic rent, aka “rent-seeking”, by politicians who hold these rents hostage for those who can afford the lobbying muscle to bend legislation to their special interests.

Few working families can afford this lobbying muscle which is why a revolution is mounting. The way out of the public choice box is, interestingly, another “Robin Hood” scheme put forth by everyone from Martin Luther King to the American Enterprise Institute: Even distribution of government’s transfer programs to all citizens in the form of a citizen’s dividend.