A flat tax is even worse than the present system, as Murray Rothbard and Laurence Vance have pointed out. As Laurence also points, beware of anything called a fair tax. Taxation is the taking, with the threat of violence (and imposition of violence), other people’a money. It’s why Murray called the state a “gang of thieves writ large,” Beware also of claims to abolish the IRS, since the regime must still take people’s money by force. And since Rand’s tax plan is also a VAT, see here and here–as long advocated by big-government Heritage Foundation types–there will have to be an even larger and much more intrusive theft bureauracy.

Unfortunately, Rand’s chief advisor on this is Art Laffer. When I first went to work for Ron Paul, he was kind enough to take me to a congressional talk by Art. He assured the assembled vultures that he had no interest in cutting taxes per se. “I’m a liberal Democrat; I want more welfare spending,” he said. The point of the Laffer Curve was to set tax rates so the government would get the maximum revenue, and raising tax rates above that point would cut government revenue, and that would be bad. For more on VAT and other burglarizing devices, see Rothbard here and here.