Issue Position: Liberating Our Economy

Issue Position

Prosperity is what free people choose and what free people create.

Real prosperity can't be counterfeited. You can't get prosperity by printing money. You can't get prosperity by creating a Federal Prosperity Agency or appointing a Prosperity Czar. And you sure can't get prosperity by taxing away the profits of small businesses to subsidize the losses of big businesses.

Prosperity is a byproduct of liberty. Free people produce abundance: abundance of food, clothing, energy, medicine, and other things that satisfy human want. Free people invented the steam engine, the light bulb, the telephone, the airplane, and the antibiotic. And if we want innovation and abundance to continue, we know that our liberty has got to continue.

There's a paradox here: When the government leaves us alone, real prosperity emerges from the individual choices of hard-working Americans who just want to be left alone. But when the government tries to take on the job of producing prosperity, we get what we have today: ruinous taxation, reckless spending, staggering unemployment, and a sagging dollar.

The most important element in a Libertarian program for liberating our economy is to stay out of the way. There are, however, some particular excesses from decades of government meddling that richly deserve legislative attention so that they can be repealed:

* Stop overspending. The government is currently violating the Hippocratic Oath ("First, do no harm"), the Rule of Holes ("When in a hole, stop digging"), and countless other cultural treasures of common sense by acting extremely aggressively to make our economy worse. The aggressive fiscal and monetary policies distort savings, investment, and consumption, and will most likely either fall flat or create new bubbles that will inevitably have to burst sometime in the future. Our mounting debts threaten the stability of our financial system as well as our political system. This all needs to stop.

* Reform the tax system. I discuss this more fully elsewhere, but it is hard to overemphasize how important fundamental tax reform is. To pick just one example, one of the main reasons our health care system was so lousy before Obamacare made it worse is because of tax deductions the government blessed back in the 1950s. The government uses tax goodies to nudge people into doing what the government thinks best. Experience shows the government rarely knows what is best in economic matters.

* Deregulate and decriminalize business. Once a representative has been in Congress long enough to become a know-it-all, it is very hard for him to avoid reaching for the bluntest tool in the shop: federal criminal statutes. Between 1998 and 2007, the number of federal crimes on the books increased by 50%, and many of these statutes are used to prosecute people who are simply conducting legitimate business transactions without a shred of criminal intent. According to a recent story in the Washington Examiner, the 109th Congress (2005-2006) proposed 446 new crimes "that did not involve violence, firearms, drugs and drug trafficking, pornography, or immigration violations." My guess is that most normal people would have a hard time coming up with 10 real crimes that don't involve violence, guns, drugs, sex, or immigration, let alone 10 new crimes that didn't already exist before 2005. What are we to make of 446 new proposals -- more than four a week? What's the matter with the people in Congress?

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