For centuries before the science of economics was developed, wrote Murray Rothbard, men searched for criteria of the “just price.” Gradually it came to be realized that there is no quantitative criterion of justice that can be objectively determined. The only possible objective criterion for the just price is the market price. Why do not economists abandon the search for the “just tax” as they abandoned the quest for the “just price”? One reason is that doing so may have unwelcome implications for them. The “just price” was abandoned in favor of the market price. Can the “just tax” be abandoned in favor of the market tax? Clearly not, for on the market there is no taxation, and therefore no tax can be established that will duplicate market patterns. FULL ARTICLE

Anthony Gregory writes:

My friend, not exactly a libertarian but not a socialist (pro-market, anti-war, anti-cop) — okay, pretty libertarian, actually — thinks that if the US government, for the last 40 years, had spent nothing on war or welfare or anything else, but retained the same tax schedules, it would have been able to fund the creation of a dragon.

Yes, a dragon. As in a large flying nearly reptilian beast that breathes fire.

Aside from some limits of socialist calculation, he has a point. Maybe even with government inefficiency taken for granted, he might be onto something.

[keep reading]

On the subject of writing well, Stephen Carson directs me to this takedown of Dan Simmons’s The Da Vinci Code.

It begins at the beginning — a critique of the first word of the first sentence of the book:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.

[…] Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don’t do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist’s profession but also his prestige in the field.

There’s more.

Not only more from this critic, but a list of links to other critics of the same author and book.

Why pick on Brown?

I don’t think I’d want to say these things about a first-time novelist, it would seem a cruel blow to a budding career. But Dan Brown is all over the best-seller lists now. In paperback and hardback, and in many languages, he is a phenomenon. He is up there with the Stephen Kings and the John Grishams and nothing I say can conceivably harm him. He is a huge, blockbuster, worldwide success who can go anywhere he wants and need never work again. And he writes like the kind of freshman student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching.

Jeffrey Tucker posted an old pro-capitalism / anti-communism cartoon to blog.Mises (one which I posted here last year, by the way). A commenter mentioned an old Loony Toon in which Elmer Fudd plays an elf explaining to a shoemaker the merits of industrial capitalism, the role of savings, and the nature of profits. Unfortunately, said the commenter, you can’t seem to find it online. The next commenter announced that he had uploaded it:

An unsigned editorial, written by Murray N. Rothbard, appeared in the April 15, 1969 issue of The Libertarian (soon to become The Libertarian Forum). In it, Rothbard emphasized: The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that taxation is simply robbery. No more and no less. Those who claim that taxation is, in some mystical sense, really “voluntary” should then have no qualms about getting rid of that vital feature of the law which says that failure to pay one’s taxes is criminal and subject to appropriate penalty. FULL ARTICLE