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During the 2008 economic crisis, Iceland’s government froze offshore accounts held by foreign investors in that country’s currency, the krona. Recently, the government of Iceland announced it would unfreeze the accounts if the account holders paid a voluntary “departure tax,” which could be as high as 58 percent. Investors who choose not to pay the departure tax would have their investment “segregated” into special funds that only invest in CDs issued by Iceland’s central bank. These CDs are expected to only provide a rate of return of at most 0.5 percent a year. So investors in offshore accounts can thus choose between having their money directly seized via the departure tax or indirectly seized via the inflation tax.
Iceland’s freezing of offshore krona accounts was part of a “stabilization and recovery” program implemented under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which also provided Iceland with a $1 billion loan. So US taxpayers not only helped the IMF bail out Iceland’s government, they may have helped the IMF advise Iceland on how best to steal property from American investors!
The IMF’s role in Iceland’s seizure of the property of foreign investors shows the hypocrisy of IMF officials, who recently expressed concerns about the increasing support for protectionism supposedly exemplified by the Brexit vote. However, freezing of assets held by foreign investors is a particularly harmful form of protectionism, while Brexit was more about rejecting the European Union’s bureaucracy than rejecting free trade. Perhaps what the IMF and its supporters are really worried about is losing their power to use taxpayers’ money to force other countries to adopt IMF bureaucrats’ favored economic policies.
Iceland is not the only government to turn to a departure tax to raise revenue. Just last year, in order to raise revenue for federal transportation programs, Congress gave the IRS the power to revoke the passport of any American accused of owing more than $50,000 in back taxes.
As an increasingly desperate Congress looks for new ways to squeeze money out of the American people to fund the welfare-warfare state, it is likely that more Americans will have their liberties limited because the IRS accuses them of not paying their fair share of taxes. It also is likely that the Federal Reserve will follow the example of its counterpart in Iceland and devalue the holdings of anyone who dares to resist the IRS’s demands.
Those hoping that the presidential election will result in real changes are bound to be disappointed. While Donald Trump seems to appreciate how current Fed policies help the incumbent administration while harming the people, he does not appear to understand that the problem is not with certain Fed policies, but with the Fed’s very existence. While Mr. Trump does support tax cuts, he also supports increasing government spending on infrastructure at home, militarism abroad, protectionism, and an economic cold war with China.
Hillary Clinton has actually said it is inappropriate for candidates to criticize the Fed. Sectary Clinton has also called for massive increases in government spending and taxes. Hillary Clinton may be more hawkish than Donald Trump, since Mr. Trump has rejected Secretary Clinton’s calls for a new cold war with Russia.
Instead of looking to politicians to save us, those of us who understand the dangers of our current course must continue to spread the ideas of liberty among our fellow citizens. Politicians will only change course when a critical mass of people stops falling for the war party’s propaganda, stops demanding entitlements, and starts demanding liberty.
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Remember when libertarianism was cool? Me neither.
How about a big government that enforces a nationalist state and levies tax revenue to crush leftist elements throughout society? Something tells me a lot of “libertarians” wouldn’t mind this.
Face it, people. Libertarianism was only popular because it nationalism was so badly repressed in the west that young men had to resort to a weird, autistic ideology. An-cap style True Believers are a small group of nutters and will always remain that way.
If you ever live in a non-western country you will quickly realize that American libertarians are the exact same kind of people as the nationalists in that country. Why stay in denial?
Political activists do presumably have something in common (which isn’t to say every political cause is equally useful in any particular time and place), but they are also the people who drive needed reform and police vested interests. Even an old conservative like myself can see the need for those things, provided they are kept in check. Though as a conservative of the liberal (English, not American, usage) leaning rather than the authoritarian type, I have a natural sympathy with libertarian ideas.
For many years I self-identified as a libertarian. The thing that drove me away from libertarianism was my gradual realisation that its inability to deal with issues of collective behaviour (race, religious and national loyalties, genetic predisposition etc) was not just inherent in the dogma, but also of overwhelming importance in the modern societies of the US sphere.
Nevertheless it’s rather ironic to criticise libertarianism under a piece by Ron Paul in the context of the current US election campaign, in which the best hope the world has is the profoundly flawed Trump and the alternative is the potentially terminal case of establishment corruption, big government authoritarianism and imperial suicide that is Hillary Clinton. We face this situation basically because the vested interests and neocons in the Republican establishment successfully torpedoed Ron Paul’s candidacy (as they did Buchanan’s career previously) because it refused to kowtow to their interventionist foreign policy agenda and their globalist domestic needs.
Ron Paul – the best US President the world never had.
Remember when libertarianism was cool? Me neither.
Only cool people use “cool”. We can see how uncool libertarians are by their not using it already.
I don’t think you described the supposed fault in libertarian theory quite accurately. Libertarianism has never denied the idea of collective behavior, if by that you mean that individuals are capable of cooperation. Indeed, a major premise of libertarianism is that a coercive state is unnecessary because humans are quite capable of cooperating to meet collective needs without coercion.
The real objection is that, in certain realms, coercion of the individual on behalf of the collective is necessary in order to preserve liberty in other realms. So an individual cannot be allowed to employ an outsider, but must be prevented by force, since his action would otherwise endanger the liberty of the rest of the group.
The standard libertarian objection to all talk of collective needs and wants is that the collective does not exist on its own. Whenever a collectivist talks about the “people” or “society”, what they actually mean is a small group of people claiming to act on behalf of “society” but in reality looking out for their own interests. This is the State.
I think there’s room for acknowledging collective needs of some sort, e.g. the idea that a culture of liberty requires limiting participation to a certain type of person, without endorsing statist coercion. The problem is that our own government has outlawed freedom of association and discrimination in the private realm for so long that few can conceive of how a truly free society can select and assimilate new members without coercion from the top.
Pish. What drove me away from the Libertarian Party was the idiots running it. Libertarianism as a political basis is just fine, but like all doctrines, it must be adapted to the society through rules and regs. Libertarianism per se, like all philosophical positions, is inadequately structured for real-life applications.
Yes, God Bless Ron Paul. I would have been proud to have him as our president.
As an aside, it’s ironic that the more socially liberal States would have more unambiguous freedom to institute their preferred policies on things like marijuana, homosexual marriage, etc., without federal interference if Ron were president, compared to centralist semi-dictators like Obama, Clinton, and the other candidates. Unlike the bushes, obamas, and clintons, Ron Paul could read the constitution, cared about our liberties and form of government, and would have respected the tenth amendment.
Those folks are the most opposed to people like Ron Paul, though. What they want, indeed what most people on so-called left or right want, is not freedom to pursue their own private behavior, not even the right to enshrine their values and policies into the law of their own State.
What they demand is the right to force everyone, more than three hundred fifty million people spread over thousands of miles, to live their way through the fed gov.
Like the bumper sticker says, Don’t blame me, I voted for Ron Paul.
Yo Paulie, I agree with you about this situation.
No, I mean collective tendencies to behave in particular ways based upon often pre-rational group loyalties, or upon shared racial or cultural tendencies or characteristics, not collective behaviour in the sense you use it here. I can see that my use of the term was misleading, though I think my subsequent clarification should have helped.
Libertarians struggle to grasp that national loyalties, religious beliefs, racial genetic differences etc are more than delusions and cannot just be defeated by declaring them to be merely unfortunately widespread individual errors and ignoring them. This results in the antiracist, open borders, internationalist and other foolishnesses to which most libertarians are prone. During one of the purges of the libertarian “movement” a few years back it was commonplace to hear libertarians declaring that racists cannot be real libertarians, and libertarianism must oppose racism.
Here’s an example of the kind of muddy-thinking stuff such libertarians resorted to in their desperate attempts to make their philosophy match their desperate desire to be seen as “goodies”:
Libertarianism = Anti-racism
You are referring here I think to another issue which is not unique to libertarians but rather applies to all ideologically based political movements – the issue of where the ideologists must compromise their ideological purity in order to win wider political support.
“So an individual cannot be allowed to employ an outsider, but must be prevented by force, since his action would otherwise endanger the liberty of the rest of the group.”
The doctrinaire libertarian response would be that the individual has no duty to protect the liberty of any group, other than one to which he has voluntarily signed up.
I don’t think you understood my point. Loyalties to some social collective are not intrinsically incompatible with libertarianism; on the contrary, the existence of such feelings contradicts the idea that a centralizing coercive state is needed to ensure the loyalty of the individuals. For example, why does the state have to force individuals into military service if individuals have loyalty to the group? If individuals in fact experience such feelings of loyalty, then they will leap to the common defense spontaneously, without the need for conscription or other manners of coercion.
The concern libertarians have with all this talk of national loyalty is that the actual policies being recommended are meant to coerce the individual, i.e. they in fact constitute an implicit denial of the possibility of collective loyalty. Libertarians do not believe that a centralized state is capable of truly realizing the interests of the collective; at best, they realize the interests of a majority, while in reality, they realize the interests of a political class with only a tendentious connection to the popular will.
We are certainly talking across each other.
See my comment above for what I actually meant by referring to the “national loyalties, religious beliefs, racial genetic differences etc” that libertarians seem implicitly unable to grasp, and my illustration of the point by reference to the Sheldon Richman piece.
Libertarians are clearly correct in this.
I think we’re talking past each other as long as we talk in vague abstractions about group loyalties and racial differences, rather than concrete details of policy. If your theory is different from libertarianism, how does that manifest in different policy proposals?
Libertarianism may be perfectly applicable among “high IQ” populations AND with some salient rational thinking skills and or universalistic but reasonable feelings.
And still will be applicable in current first world nations with “avg IQ”.
Libertarianism as well new leftism are both ideologies created by and for “smart” people because seems most of them are favorable for: Economic or social “liberty”.
When libertarians talking something they are indeed looking for the mirror and talking for themselves… Usually happens because self projection is a common place.
Libertarianism isn’t a perfect “capitalistic leftism” because it’s too extremist in their state-zero project. Only it don’t make libertarianism a perfect hybrid of capitalism and socialism, both convenient parts.
Western is becoming progressively like China a hybrid of the worst capitalism and socialism have, dictatorship, any respect for human rights (sorry bloody wars in middle east, cultural wars and slow destruction of biological integrity of human diversity, all of this based on deplorable lies don’t appear to be “respect for human rights”), massive propaganda, consumerism, continuous exploitation of working force and social inequality.
Look at the Icelandic public,taxed thru the roof,paying over 12c pr kWh from there own built power plants,massive amounts of young people leaving because of corruption,capital guarantied by the “government”mini IMF test platform.
PS Every single soul in Iceland is registered,so for a 330 thousand soul farm it is highly centralized,controlled and corrupted (nobody dares to speak that knows).
“Sectary Clinton”– perfect Freudian typo. She certainly is sectarian!