Quoth terry: > I have a lot of respect for Harry but he is wrong taxes are not > necessary if you got enought honest rational people in the country to > fund the government through donnations
Stop and hold. Harry didn't say that taxes are "necessary." He wanted to get rid of them (and of government) entirely, and he said so repeatedly. However, after 1994 he was doing a particular thing in a particular context: He was 1. Running for president; 2. In a particular society, with a particular system. That system doesn't allow for itself to just be crumpled up and thrown in the trash. Only a violent revolution could likely accomplish any such thing, and Harry Browne wasn't fomenting violent revolution -- even his pre-1994 anarchism was of the individualist/personalist type that emphasized escaping, rather than smashing, authoritarian systems. What Browne hoped to accomplish _in electoral politics_ was to _reduce_ the size of government to its constitutional parameters, and to force that reduction by eliminating the income tax (actually, he was forced to go that far -- in _Why Government Doesn't Work_ and throughout the early part of his 1996 campaign, he touted a low-rate flat income tax proposal, until LP "purists" tantrumed him into going further). He never advertised his reduction proposals, including but not limited to the continuation of a low, uniform tariff rate, as a libertarian end state. He very specifically pointed to them as prerequisites to an environment in which a libertarian end-state could become plausible and people could decide whether they wanted to preserve some shred of government or take it all the way. Tom Knapp ForumWebSiteAt http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
