Thursday, January 23, 2003

...

From this auspicious beginning, the very comely Ilana Mercer launches into an attack on income tax as an expression of this desire of the socially inferior to tear down their betters. After a brief resume of the experimental protocol (participants were given random amounts of cash: by sacrificing a little of their own, they were able to purchase the "right" to force someone else to sacrifice theirs). In her final paragraph, Mercer proposes her idea of a fair solution to the tax problem:

... the least toxic tax is probably a poll or head tax, where all are taxed equally. Let the poor set the rate. This will sever the blood supply to the metastasizing state like nothing else.

Less for the "federal Frankenstein" is also less with which it can facilitate human wickedness.


Of course there's something resembling argument in the middle but as the resemblance is purely accidental I hope you'll excuse me if I ignore it.

What I'm curious about is the experimental study itself and if anyone can provide information on it I'd appreciate it if you'd drop a comment or an e-mail. I'm also interested in whether anyone has studied the opposite hypothesis: that most people might be prepared to accept others getting richer as long as they genuinely stand to get richer themselves in the process. No, that's a stupid idea - forget I brought it up.

Afterthought: Mercer's home page has this quote from Proudhon:

Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order

I wonder if she knows that he's also the "Property is theft" guy.

- *** -

No comments: