By
Akiva
/ September 20, 2010 / 1 minute of reading
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Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, stressing “the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid”, has proposed to modernize the UK’s income tax system. Once employers provide payroll information in real-time, “it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first.”
I’m sure that subjects of the Crown have nothing to fear. The state can be trusted to process their paychecks promptly, correctly, and efficiently. Only a crank would object to this modernization plan. After all, everyone fondly remembers the Star Chamber that evolved out of a similar medieval program for keeping tabs on the Jews. Since it worked out so well last time, how could anyone expect things to go wrong now?
Economics.org.au has a nice feature in the sidebar listing various formulations of libertarianism, from Libertarianism in One Word (“Property”), One Hyphenated Word (“Self-Ownership”), One Sentence, One Paragraph, One Book, and so on. Check it out.
As an Aristotelian libertarian, I’m not a big fan of Immanuel Kant, his philosophy in general, or his take on world peace. But to say that I’m not a fan of Alexander Hamilton — that statist, bank centralizer, mercantilist, and crypto-monarchist — would be a vast understatement. (For more on what’s wrong with Hamilton, see Thomas DiLorenzo’s “What Hamilton Has Wrought” and Hamilton’s Curse.)
I discussed the democratic peace thesis and problems I see with the Kantian Triangle — resting on republican government, international trade, and international law and organizations — in my previous post, Triangulating Peace? Or, Three Foundations for Oppression? While trade is a peaceful activity and economic interdependence can promote peace among states, it can be perverted and used for corporatist and mercantilist ends by states and international governmental organizations (IGOs), which is why, though it pains me to say it, I must side with Hamilton’s take on the matter, excerpted from Federalist #6 below:
Today is the 223rd anniversary of the adoption of the modern American Constitution, on Sept. 17, 1787. Most Americans are too ignorant to even realize that this followed in the wake of the 1776 Declaration of Independence (on July 2, not July 4, 1776), and the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781. Or to understand that the Bill of Rights was not adopted until 1791, two years after the Constitution was ratified (in their hysterical devotion to the flaccid Bill of Rights (see The Bad Bill of Rights) and ignorance about the limited powers scheme of the federal government, they would have to believe there were no rights in the two-year period between 1789 and 1791).
Flag-waving yahoos grin like idiots.
Yet, adopting the Official History and hagiography of our constructivist, utopian Founders, they worship the Constitution anyway, even though it was a coup d’état, even though slavery was permitted, even though it was an illegal, unnecessary, centralizing power play by politicians (see Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power), even though it arguably led to the Civil War, WWI, the collapse of western monarchies and the regressive replacement of traditionalist limited monarchy with socialized democracy, WWII, Naziism, Communism, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (see my When Did the Trouble Start?).
Ironically, today is officially decreed to be “ConstitutionDay” by the Congress, in an act that is itself unconstitutional since the Constitution does not authorize the Congress to establish any such quasi-religious institutions or observances. The very act of official worship of the Constitution is unconstitutional. How fitting.
Down with the Constitution. What a socialist, centralizing, utopian mistake. It is time for libertarians to stop glorifying early America, the Founders, the Constitution, etc., as proto-libertarian. All states are illegitimate, including America’s. As Lew Rockwell observed in stirring words in his article The Enemy Is Always the State:
Let me state this as plainly as possible. The enemy is the state. There are other enemies too, but none so fearsome, destructive, dangerous, or culturally and economically debilitating. No matter what other proximate enemy you can name — big business, unions, victim lobbies, foreign lobbies, medical cartels, religious groups, classes, city dwellers, farmers, left-wing professors, right-wing blue-collar workers, or even bankers and arms merchants — none are as horrible as the hydra known as the leviathan state. If you understand this point — and only this point — you can understand the core of libertarian strategy.
