Stop the Warrenville Tax Increases!

The Daily Herald is reporting that the Warrenville City Council is considering the creation of three additional taxes and the increase of a fourth. If you live in Warrenville, be sure to contact your City Council members to let them know what you think of this idea. At the very least, the City Council should be able to show that they have made every attempt to cut any non-essential spending before forcing their citizens to contribute even more during a rough economy.

For those who really want to dig in, click here for Warrenville’s annual budget.

Take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz!

If you’ve ever met a Libertarian, you’ve probably seen the image above a time or two. For those who haven’t, this is taken from the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, a project of The Advocates for Self Government.

The idea is that the typical left-right, linear political spectrum is too simplistic and does not accurately reflect the complexities of political ideologies. As an illustration, the usual layout has Stalin on the far left and Hitler on the far right, when both were totalitarians who favored heavy government control. In that model, where do you put those who believe in limited government?

The World’s Smallest Political Quiz measures responses on two criteria: personal freedom and economic freedom. Conservatives would tend to rate highly on economic freedom but low on personal freedom, liberals would tend to rate highly on personal freedom but low on economic freedom, and Libertarians would rate highly on both. In this model, Hitler and Stalin would be right next to each other down at the bottom extreme with low ratings on both personal and economic freedom. Granted, this quiz has only ten questions, so it has its limits, but if you’re curious to see where you fall, just click on the image above to get started.

New Poll: Which Libertarian Debate Would You Most Like to See at Our August Meeting

If you’ve followed politics for even a short time, you’ll notice that people who disagree with each other often completely misunderstand the reasons their opponents have for believing one thing or the other. A perfect example is the way people talk about Republicans hating the poor or Democrats hating America. To promote a better understanding of why Libertarians believe what they do, we’re planning to hold a Libertarian debate at our August meeting (the first meeting after the DuPage County Fair in late July). Please let us know below which topic you believe would be most interesting, educational, entertaining, etc.

Can a Tax Be “Fair”?

Several Republican Tea Party favorites support the Fair Tax, a national sales tax that they hope would take the place of the income tax. Here’s a brief libertarian take on the issue. As for me (Josh), I agree with economist Murray Rothbard’s argument in his article “Strategies for a Libertarian Victory”:

[I]f libertarians should ever call for reducing or abolishing taxes in some particular area, that call must never be accompanied by advocating the increase of taxation in some other area. Thus, we might well conclude that the most tyrannical and destructive tax in the modern world is the income tax, and therefore that first priority should be given to abolishing that form of tax. But the call for drastic reduction or abolition of the income tax must never be coupled with advocating a higher tax in some other area (e.g., a sales tax), for that indeed would be employing a means contradictory to the ultimate goal of tax abolition. Libertarians must, in short, hack away at the state wherever and whenever they can, rolling back or eliminating state activity in whatever area possible.

Libertarians are Pro-Market, Not Pro-Business

Art Carden just might be my favorite living economist. Before you let your eyes glaze over, understand that when Carden writes, “economics” doesn’t mean “mathematics”; it means “common sense”. In this article, he explains why the common criticism of libertarians–that we are “corporate authoritarians”–couldn’t be further from the truth. When some big corporation lobbies to have laws passed to limit competition, or seeks an exemption to allow them to pollute the property of others, or asks for a bailout because they are “too big to fail”, the libertarian must oppose such efforts. As Carden puts it in his article:

Businesses should not be protected from competition, losses, and bankruptcy when they fail to deliver for the customer.  All three are essential to truly free markets and free enterprise.

“Free Market” Doesn’t Mean “Pro-Business”