A Letter to the Towson College Republicans
Alexander S. Peak

10 April 2006

[Dear College Republicans,]

Many Libertarians, especially in Maryland, support the FairTax proposal.  I, however, do not.

This information, presented in the previous email, is misleading.  It won’t simply abolish the income tax.  If that’s what it did, I’d support it.  Rather, what it does is replace the income tax with a national sales tax.  This would be just as bad, in my opinion, as the federal income tax.  I’ve heard proposals of up to thirty-five or forty percent on everything sold.  Add to that Maryland’s five percent.  Do we really want prices to skyrocket like this?

It is argued by FairTax supporters that the American people would suddenly realize how much they’re spending in taxes, and that they’d demand better representation in Congress.  This is absurd!  They already know that they’re being taxed to death.  They won’t vote for better representation because too many of them fear that they’re “wasting their votes.”  If our goal is to decrease taxation, the solution isn’t to “reform” the tax code, the solution is to massively cut both spending and taxation.  Let’s cut to the chase.

The argument that we need all this money, and that we thus must have either a federal income tax, a national sales tax, or both, is equally absurd.  We did well, arguably better than we are now, without either of these taxes for over a hundred years.  The government simply does not need all of the money it collects.  If it were to limit the functions of the federal government to just that which is authorized by the Constitution, if we were to get rid of all the unconstitutional departments of government (e.g. Department of Education, DEA, ATF, SSA, SSS, NASA, FEMA), the federal government would have more than enough to fulfil its constitutional duties (e.g. national defence).  [And, arguably, the military would function more efficiently, too, if we threw less money at it.  Throwing money into federal bureaucracies never improves anything.]

Yours truly,

Alex Peak
CLT President
wwwnew.towson.edu/clt

P.S.  Since we’re on the topic of taxation, I find it worthwhile to point out the inherent irony in the title if this page: “IRS Wants You to Know About Schemes, Scams and Cons.”