Short Take: Tariffs are the Best Form of Taxation
Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
Anti-tariff Libertarians are regime cucks or traitors.
Assuming we don't get Anarcho-capitalism, there are 3 places you can tax an economy to fund your (ideally small) government.
1. Income taxes
2. Sales taxes
3. Tariffs
You can tax the money when it goes to workers, business owners, and investors as wages, earnings, and returns... this creates all kinds of distortion where you punish work
You can tax it at the point of sale when it's spent... this makes it harder for small players to run businesses, because of compliance costs
Or you can tax it when necessary goods cross the border, and maybe you get some distortions where tea, import luxuries and others cost 2-3x.
HERE's the thing.
The tariffs, taxing it when it goes through a port of entry, is the only one that imposes basically zero compliance cost and violates privacy not at all. If the port was entirely privately owned and unregulated, pure anarcho-capitalism, you'd still have to declare you goods and pay a fee... It’s just with tariffs the official is a government employee and the fee is larger.
By contrast FORCING EVERY ADULT IN THE COUNTRY to fill out and return elaborate paperwork and surrender all personal information regarding every dime that's ever entered one of their wallet or accounts... That's not only a violation of the 4th and 5th amendment, that's totalitarian.
Likewise forcing ever business to tax every single sale they make and report it makes small business formation, right down to lemonade stands prohibitive bureaucratic exercises... in 1850 90% of Americans were self-employed or small business owners, now it's 10%.... And a MASSIVE part of that is the fact you now require anyone who wants to do productive work to also become a part time government bureaucrat and surrender all information about their business, how they're surviving, or submit to being a wagie subordinate of someone who does.
This is also totalitarian.
.
If you care at all about freedom, liberty, and limited government, and can't implement Hoppean Anarchy... Then Tariffs are the ONLY form of taxation that are at all tolerable.
.
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Addendum:
"Georgism GEORGISM! What about Georgism!? Land value taxes for everything!!!!!"
Land value taxes create perverse lifestyle distortions where people squeeze themselves into the smallest environment they can, and then refuse to breed because housing costs so much…
so you create misery and crash your population and race within a generation, and make everyone die childless and miserably in the most depressing circumstance by distorting the most important market after food, and making everyone feel miserable and poor.
Not only that! You create an economy where merely stretching your legs is taxable event, no one ever feels they actually own their land or anything else because they're paying eternal rents to the government, and you break their spirits into becoming urban bugmen, even as they miserably age and the world becomes ugly without any children or attractive young people to populate it and remind the aging zombies of life.
By contrast Tariffs distort import good and luxuries and Living spartan on local foodstuffs, and local or old wares, doesn't actually affect your percieved status or the percieved cost of having kids. People ate horrendous diets of disgusting poverty foods in the 30s during the depression, and kids were still being born because kids can't really judge the status of food and don't effect it's quality... Whereas squeezing kids into a cramped apartment really damages quality of life on the margin, and destroys your percieved status when you bring a girl home (by contrast even very poor guys will buy a good meal when they date, because that's a one time signalling expense... not an eternal tithe they're locked into like a highly taxed apartment.)
Amsterdam implemented land value taxes… they had a race to produce the narrowest houses possible to minimize the tax burden. Houses 4 feet wide and 4 stories, then quickly lost all imperial expansive power, because no one wanted to have families, fewer kids were born, and they lost the youth and energy that made them great.
Honestly I do not know the type of person who’d want Georgism except for the kind of spiteful person who doesn’t like to see other people have nice things and gets a perverse thrill out of the idea of no one ever feeling that they own anything free and clear, no one ever being able to live off grid, be self-sufficient, or return to folkish subsistence lifestyles (because you always need more government paper to pay to mere continue occupying the home you built). And who LIKES the idea of disincentivizing people to have children, eventually poisoning the economy with demographic aging, and forcing increasingly immiserated people to lead lifestyles of artificially cheapened city bug-life.
It disgusts me.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD A CONTINENT AS UNDERPOPULATED AS NORTH AMERICA AND WITH SUCH CRAPPY BIRTHRATES BE TAXING AND PUNISHING PEOPLE FOR OCCUPYING SPACE.
Just. Tax. Imports.
Tip:
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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
I was just pondering this same idea the other day, and had come to a similar conclusion. It seems that a tariff is essentially a consumption tax that is collected early in the process, then paid by consumers, without any violation of privacy, when they make a purchase of the finished goods.
Well said, but the biggest benefit is that all taxes punish behavior, and punishing being economically dependent on foreign trade is much better than punishing income or domestic sales. Because foreign governments can embargo you as leverage over your sovereignty.
One concern is that it can be difficult to get federal government spending low enough to fit within a tariff budget (like the US before 1913). Wait, I guess that's another benefit.
But really state and local gov are still going to rely on sales tax or something much worse like property, income, inheritance...