Posted on 01/27/2014 11:31:00 AM PST by edcoil
Walter Williams
Thomas Sowell
JMO
Wayne Allen Root
There is no precise equivalent.
Like Reagan, Friedman had that cheerful optimism, that faith in the Free Markets and the American people that hasn’t been duplicated since.
I had the good fortune to meet him once, in 1981 at a reception during the week of Reagan’s inaugural. Got my picture taken with him, and he autographed “Free to Choose” for me.
Quite an honor...Congrats!
That advice may be found here. Essays on other subjects, such as government-controlled minimum wage levels, also are available at the site.
Williams introduces the "income inequality" matter in this paragraph:
"Democrats plan to demagogue income inequality and the wealth gap for political gain in this year's elections. Most of what’s said about income inequality is stupid or, at best, ill-informed. Much to their disgrace, economists focusing on measures of income inequality bring little light to the issue. Let’s look at it." - Walter E. Williams
In the paragraphs which follow, he does just that! Too bad we didn't have honest and articulate politicians in both Parties in Washington who would be as straight with American citizens as is Dr. Williams.
Folks already have identified modern Friedmans.
How about an ant-Friedman...that is, one who has demonstrated an almost clownish lack of understanding of basic economic principles?
I nominate our king of idiocies, that winner of the laughable Nobel Prize for Economics, Paul Krugman.
In the world of science, we call him an econ major.
Wayne Allen Root
WAR is awesome!
Wayne Allen Root
Forgot to add he was also at Columbia at the same time Obama supposedly was...
(Bbbbbwwwwwwwwwwaaaaahhhhhhhhaaaaaaa)
The problem is that there is too much work inequality. There are too many folks doing nothing and living off the labor of others. This is the issue we need to be looking at. The form of taxation we have today is nothing but slavery.
Precisely. If the classic definition of slavery is an income tax rate of 100%, then it logically follows that any lesser rate is merely a matter of degree.
Here is a time-tested antidote for poverty. It has worked every time it has been tried, since the dawn of the civilized world.
1.) Improve your value to the labor market by improving your skills and education.
2.) Get a job.
3.) Work hard at that job.
The especially annoying inequality of that is that the tax slaves spend ~50% of their working hours supporting gov't, while the takers spend Zer0 % of their time doing same.
Completely inequitable. We need secular (7. lasting for a long time ) Social Justice.
Milton Friedman is the devil who devised the payroll withholding scheme for the government. Without that hellish device people would have to fork over the entire amount on April 15 and would not be too thrilled at the prospect. Friedman’s scheme allows people to actually think a refund is some sort of windfall. You can keep Miltie.
I thought it was an executive at Walmart at the time of the passing of the 14th amendment?
He was awesome.
I'd say Dr. Thomas Sowell is the nearest equivalent we have today.
Sowell studied under him at Chicago.
“As a professor, he did not attempt to convert students to his political views. I made no secret of the fact that I was a Marxist when I was a student in Professor Friedman’s course, but he made no effort to change my views. He once said that anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
“I was still a Marxist after taking Professor Friedman’s class. Working as an economist in the government converted me.”
Sowell first... Williams... well, OK.
He helped design it in 1942. He decades later said he favored its abolition.
Beardsly Ruml is generally given greater credit for the concept of withholding.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-23/the-founding-father-of-modern-income-taxes-echoes.html
“Enter Ruml. The treasurer of R. H. Macy & Co. and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he advanced the idea of having taxpayers make installment payments during the year, either directly or at work. This would relieve them of having to pay the whole amount at year’s end and regularize the flow of revenue to the government.”
Friedman did acknowledge his role in the plan.
http://reason.com/archives/1995/06/01/best-of-both-worlds
“Reason: You were involved in the development of the withholding tax when you were doing tax work for the government in 1941-43?
Friedman: I was an employee at the Treasury Department. We were in a wartime situation. How do you raise the enormous amount of taxes you need for wartime? We were all in favor of cutting inflation. I wasn’t as sophisticated about how to do it then as I would be now, but there’s no doubt that one of the ways to avoid inflation was to finance as large a fraction of current spending with tax money as possible.
In World War I, a very small fraction of the total war expenditure was financed by taxes, so we had a doubling of prices during the war and after the war. At the outbreak of World War II, the Treasury was determined not to make the same mistake again.
You could not do that during wartime or peacetime without withholding. And so people at the Treasury tax research department, where I was working, investigated various methods of withholding. I was one of the small technical group that worked on developing it.
One of the major opponents of the idea was the IRS. Because every organization knows that the only way you can do anything is the way they’ve always been doing it. This was something new, and they kept telling us how impossible it was. It was a very interesting and very challenging intellectual task. I played a significant role, no question about it, in introducing withholding. I think it’s a great mistake for peacetime, but in 1941-43, all of us were concentrating on the war.
I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn’t found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.”
It was actually codified in law by this act.
http://www.taxhistory.com/1943.html
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