Comments Elsewhere

I can’t speak for Chaohinon, who kindly reposted my article here; but I am the author of the article that was reposted, and in what follows, I do speak for myself.

@aaronman,

First, the Federal government doesn’t need money, they can print it or steal it.

There are lots of things the government can’t do without money ready to hand (like pay salaries or build expensive war materiel), and the government’s capacity to tax and to inflate is finite. (Specifically, tax seizures are limited by declining productivity and by increasing compliance costs; the ability to raise money through inflation is self-limiting due to declining international credit, and eventually the collapse of purchasing power under conditions of hyperinflation.) Admittedly, the federal government is nowhere near either limit right now: they’ve got a long ways that they could hike taxes or inflate money before these mechanisms broke down. But how’s that an argument for just giving them more money to work with?

He’s doing a favor for his constituents by not distorting their economy.

I have no idea what you are talking about here. How does putting putting stolen tax money back into the hands of the U.S. Treasury “not distorting their economy”? The economy has already been distorted by the seizure of the money in taxes; it will be even further distorted by whatever purposes the Treasury decides to put it towards.

Second, government spending itself is just as bad as the violence used to finance it.

Could you say a bit more about what standards of badness you are using to judge that spending is just as bad as the violence used to finance it?

Speaking as a libertarian, when I measure the badness of things, one of the things that I look at first is whether it is coercive or not coercive — whether any individual person’s rights are being violated. Of course, there are many bad things that aren’t coercive — things that are stupid, or foolish, or otherwise oughtn’t be done. But I tend to think that things that are directly coercive — that involve not only doing dumb or silly things, but involve hurting people, stealing from them, beating them, bombing them, locking them in cages, etc. — are, on the whole, much worse than follies or errors that aren’t forced on people against their will.

He obviously doesn’t know why austrian economists oppose central planning.

Well, most Austrian economists oppose central planning because they advocate one version or another of the calculation problem — either the version spelled out by Mises in “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (which has to do with the lack of meaningful factor prices in a planned economy) or the somewhat different, but also very interesting, version developed by Hayek in “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (which has to do with the inability of centrally planned economies to make use of dispersed, often tacit, localized knowledge). Those Austrians (like Rothbard) who believe in a strong version of natural rights also oppose government central planning because they believe that economic intervention by the state is not only economically destructive, but in fact morally criminal.

What I don’t know is what any of this has to do with whether or not Ron Paul ought to return money to the U.S. Treasury. The money that goes in there comes back out in central planning; so if your aim is to get rid of or minimize central planning, then you ought to do your best to keep money from going back in to the extent that you can.

@lord chronic:

I don’t see what the real criticism of him here is, would you have prefered if he had just kept it?

Yes, I think it would be better if Ron Paul put it straight into his pocket and used it to buy beer than if he gave it back to the Treasury. What I’d most prefer is that he pick some taxpayers at random and split it up amongst them, since they (unlike him) aren’t drawing a tax funded salary, and this would represent actually “paying back the American people,” and specifically people who would be getting back something of what the government robbed from them. Certainly, what he sends to Treasury is not going to be paid back to anybody, except perhaps for Goldman Sachs or Bank of America.

And if you don’t agree with fiscal conservatism what exactly are you advocating?

Anarchism.

The reason I don’t want the government to get back $100,000 is because, ultimately, I want them not to get any money at all.