Henry Haller wrote: HH> is it fair to say "Taxation is extortion," instead of "Taxation is theft?" <HH
extort v. "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or UNDUE or illegal power". [emphasis added] Much taxation is indeed undue and thus morally equivalent to extortion, but not all of it is. I don't begrudge the part of my taxes that pay for the legitimate functions of government, as defined by the economic concepts of rivalry and <http://marketliberal.org/GovtRole.html> excludability. The theory of political economy is over 2500 years old, but it was only 50 years ago that economists formulated the theoretical foundations of what is now the textbook economic analysis of the optimal scope of government. That analysis is profoundly libertarian, and it's just bizarre that a party calling itself "Libertarian" hasn't embraced it. The reason for this is a historical accident, in that the ideology of the LP was dictated in the 1970s by someone (Murray Rothbard) who froze his own anarcholibertarian dogma a decade or so before the cumulative revolution in the 1950s and 1960s in the areas of modern welfare economics, public choice theory, behavioral economics, and information economics. A pioneer of string theory said in the 1970s that it is "a part of twenty-first-century physics that fell by chance into the twentieth century". Unlike physics, economics has not often had to wait on (or invent) new mathematics in order to make progress. I sometimes get the feeling that much of twentieth-century economics was in retrospect somewhat obvious and should have been already been developed before 1900. It would have been nice if the insights of modern economics had been available as the libertarian movement became self-conscious in the early decades of this century, but it was not to be. Oh well, at least we'll have front-row seats as the insights of modern economics continue to seep into our culture's political consciousness. The question of why the LP disputed those insights instead of championed them will make for an interesting footnote in future history books.
