Gary North in a Mises Daily email...
The heart of the disagreement between Keynesians and Austrians is easy to state. Each group has a unique selling proposition (USP). I have boiled them down into four words each.
Keynesians: Federal deficits overcome recessions.
Austrians: Tax cuts increase liberty.
Ooh, That Time Has Come Round Again!
38 minutes ago
6 comments:
Having read the whole thing, yes, I had reached more or less reached the same conclusions.
Where I wildly disagree with these people is which taxes to cut; I'm sure we can agree on reducing income tax, sales taxes etc, no prob's, but where they have a complete blind spot is the fact that privately collected taxes (land rents) cannot be reduced or cut, the only question is whether to collect them publicly or privately.
Doesn't that miss the point? The short Hayek is "You know less than you think you do."
D, at least Hayek was never scared of parading his own staggering stupidity:
If the factual assumptions on which [Land Value Tax] is based were correct, i.e., if it were possible to distinguish clearly between the value of 'the permanent and indestructible powers of the soil,' on the one hand (a), and, on the other, the value due to the two different kinds of improvement - that due to communal efforts (b) and that due to the efforts of the individual owner (c) - the argument for its adoption would be very strong.
MW Hayek was not at all stupid.
He did though probably belong to that other great class of mankind that includes people like Gordon Brown - clever idiots, or more elegantly the 'intellectually autistic'.
Apologies for the laziness/arbitrary bunging of something off-topic into the fray but, I distinctly remember that around the time the jump to 20% VAT was due to hit you explained why it was unlikely that the hike would deliver, overall, the extra £ billions that it was HMT was assuring everyone, it would. I for one agreed with this summation but also (perhaps because of a deep cyncicism) felt that the minions within HMT would ensure that "some way" would be found to show that the increase did raise the additional VAT and issues about "overall tax revenues" would be smudged as much as possible.
This would appear to be the case - in this piece Ian Cowie highlights and increased VAT take AND increased Income Tax take, and yet somehow fails to explain why, in the light of these miracles, government borrowing has also remained largely unchanged, and that deficit definitely so ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/tax/9013764/Income-tax-payments-hit-record-high-of-153bn.html
Anon, I think that article just serves to illustrate poor journalism - of course nominal receipts are going up in a flat economy, it's because of monetary inflation and tax increases.
As to your (my) point, that's inconclusive because he's talking about figures for 2010-11 which only included three months of the new 20% VAT rate.
Cowie says that VAT increase to 20% meant that VAT receipts went up in 2010-11 so clearly he doesn't know much about the topic.
And I don't know where he gets his figure of £451 billion either. HM Treasury say total tax receipts for 2010-11 was £530 billion.
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