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Monday, April 06, 2009

Taxation with representation still sucks

That's the title of my latest Center for a Stateless Society column.

Teaser:

In a market transaction, each party to the transaction receives full expression of his or her values -- either all parties believe they benefit, or the transaction doesn’t take place. In a state transaction, the political class substitutes its own values for the values of those it claims to "represent," having coercively separated the wealth to be spent from the "represented." And while it has its powers of coercion handy, it generally makes additional use of them in negotiating the terms of the transaction itself. From front to rear and top to bottom, a state transaction is inherently designed to benefit the political class at the expense of everyone else. "Representation" is a fiction, or at best a scheme of misdirection.


Here's the whole thing.

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