Another brilliant idea

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:02:58 GMT

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED AUG. 6, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Another brilliant idea

When Professor Wilson and his "Progressives" introduced the personal income tax in the early years of this century, scores of Americans reported earning millions of dollars per year.

Within a handful of years, the number of citizens reporting million-dollar incomes had dropped to virtually nil.

Why? How could all those millionaire have gone broke during the boom times of the early '20s?

The answer, of course, is that they didn't. They merely hired lawyers and accountants who knew how to set up corporations, foundations and family trusts, so less of their cash flow showed up as "taxable personal income."

Economists have long understood that when you tax a behavior, you create an incentive for people to do less of it.

Imagine the ferry boat which has been charging 25 cents to haul travelers across the river. Nearby, a bridge opens up, charging little or nothing. As business falls off, the ferry man is tempted to raise his rate to 50 cents -- and then a dollar -- in order to keep covering his overhead -- including the large staff of folks assigned to collect the fares. Is this likely to work?

The city of Las Vegas believes it has to offer indirect subsidies to get businesses to locate or stay downtown, because fewer and fewer people go downtown unless they must -- to pay a parking fine, say.

So, the city builds tax-subsidized parking garages as an incentive to those businesses that can be conned into locating or expanding downtown -- even if the city has to illegally seize private property to do so, even if they end up building basement parking garages under projects that fail before they're done, like that splendid fenced-in hole now known as NeoNecropolis. (Memo to James Cameron: cheap location available for "The Abyss, II.")

These garages often sit three-quarters empty, but the city still has to pay interest on the money it borrowed to build them. Now: Where to get that money?

Wednesday the Las Vegas City Council came up with a brilliant solution: Raise parking meter fees -- already doubled from 25 cents in 1996 -- to a dollar.

Even though parking meters were originally justified as a way to benefit merchants by encouraging customer turnover -- not as a revenue measure, since taxpayers had already paid for the streets and obviously couldn't be taxed a second time to use them -- this is now justified with the promise that it will raise an additional $865,000 per year to pay the debt service on the half-empty downtown parking garages, while also covering the salaries of the city's 25 meter maids.

"If a person wants to come downtown, a dollar isn't going to deter them," explains Mark Paris, president of the Fremont Street Experience.

Oh, good one. I've got a couple of extra bucks, honey -- want to go downtown and watch the crack whores roll the winos?

A couple of bucks won't deter someone who really "wants to ride the ferry," either. But the ferry's still going out of business, isn't it?

A few miles to the south of City Hall, the Las Vegas Strip offers newer, flashier entertainment and hardly anyone pays a dime for parking -- you don't even have to walk across the street, or remember to "get your ticket stamped."

Las Vegans have already demonstrated they'll drive miles out of their way to shop or see a movie at some suburban mall with well-lit, ground-level parking. Why do the councilmen think the only "movies" being shown at NeoNecropolis these days are the security surveillance videos?

Outside the city limits, the Las Vegas Strip shows us the free market at work -- bold, creative entrepreneurs vying with each other in open competition to offer ever better bargains to the paying public.

North of the Stratosphere Tower, the traveler quickly realizes he has entered an enclave laboring under a very different worldview -- kind of like crossing the old line from West Berlin into East Berlin. New businesses are scared off or bankrupted by protectionist regulators who look with disdain at upstarts like Froggy's or the Topless Girls of Glitter Gulch, scrambling to "show them who's boss" by coming up with new, ever more expensive "code violations." (Yes, the "Topless Girls" survived -- but owner Herb Pastore re-invested his profits in New Orleans, not here.)

Small businesses -- groceries, gas stations, restaurants, dry cleaners, all going mom-and-pop concerns -- are seized under eminent domain and bulldozed to make room for expensive, tax-subsidized white elephants designed to benefit established downtown casino owners who prefer to keep their own reinvestment to a minimum, while charging $4.50 for a side order of asparagus. But don't worry -- it's all been carefully thought out, and the result will be a huge jump in gaming tax revenues ... any day now.

As the years go by, are any of these promises kept? Instead, the city fathers seem puzzled that downtown business continues to stagnate.

Oh, whatever shall we do? Here's an idea: let's further punish the few folks who still do go downtown, by quadrupling the parking fee!

After all, it worked for the British in Massachusetts, the Austrians in Switzerland ...

Would the last one out of downtown, please turn out the lights?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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History

Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair