As for taxes, we could stop taxing productivity and start taxing consumption. After all, productivity is what makes a society more prosperous.

Someone who is adding to the total wealth of  this country is not depriving you of anything. But someone who is consuming the nation’s wealth, without contributing anything to it, is. Yet our tax system penalizes those who are
producing wealth in order to subsidize those who are only consuming it.

A Taxing Experience

Unless spending is reduced, then of course more tax revenues are necessary in order to reduce a deficit or bring down a debt. But tax revenues and tax rates are two different things, even though the same word—“taxes”—is used
to refer to both.

What “tax cuts” cut is the tax rate. But tax revenues can rise, fall, or stay the same when tax rates are cut. Everything depends on what happens to income.

A Taxing Experience

The promotion of “self-esteem” in our schools has been so successful that people feel free to spout off about all sorts of things—and see no reason why their opinions should not be taken as seriously as the views of the people who actually know what they are talking about.

“Random Thoughts,” May 4, 2000

Government is a blunt instrument. Its policies should be limited to what blunt instruments can do.

It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say—which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.

Random Thoughts, June 10, 2003

The essence of bigotry is denying other people the same free choices you have.

Lying about Yosemite, June 15, 2004