Free Republic

Taxation: Compulsive Failure Sarah Carlsruh, November 2, 2009 Leslie Carbone spoke on October 15th at Accuracy in Academia’s Author’s Night on her book Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform. Her book, she began, discusses “how the federal government is uncritically, if not compulsively, making things worse through its wealth-spreading fiscal policies.” Referring to the Constitution, Carbone stated that the main purpose of a government is to ensure peoples’ rights and that progressive taxation—taking a person’s money “simply because they have acquired more than another”—violates those rights. Such policy, she said, is an “affront to justice.” Her book outlined...

Educating For Failure Malcolm A. Kline, October 30, 2009 Every chief executive in the past 20 years has vowed to be, as one of them put it, “the education president.” All have failed for the same reason: as with most aspects of life, top-down government solutions to education just don’t work. “Between 1960 and 1990, spending on elementary and secondary education jumped from $50 billion to nearly $190 billion in inflation adjusted dollars,” Leslie Carbone writes in Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case For Tax Reform. “During the same period, per student spending more than tripled—from $1,454 to $4,622.” “Between 1973...