Government
The Case for Wisdom, Temperance, and Common Sense.
With all the chaos occurring within western democracies right now, I thought it timely to focus on solutions rather than the troubles we face. In the primer to this publication, it states that Liberty Itch will present ideas that will champion your rights as an individual, challenge concepts that threaten those freedoms, and warn you of impending coercion. My contribution, as...
Hate income tax? You shouldn’t
Some taxes are more damaging than others. But when working out which taxes are more damaging than others, you should not judge a tax by its name. The impacts of income tax and GST can be much the same, because income tax and GST largely tax the same thing. So a special hatred for the idea of income tax relative to...
AI Dystopia
Many voices are warning about the impending dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). They fear everything from mass unemployment to societal collapse, the destruction of humanity by ‘the singularity’, the malicious, sentient AI boogieman (boogie-robot?) from so many science fiction novels and films. It only takes a brief play with publicly available AI tools, such as Chat GPT, to understand the...
The Tax Power
The Commissioner of Taxation has too much power. Libertarians consider tax to be either theft or, at best, should be low and flat to cover bare necessities. It certainly shouldn’t be as complex as it is or run to thousands of pages. Most mainstream tax reform proponents have grandiose visions that would only add complexity and likely raise the overall tax...
The Federal Government Should Deliver a Decade of Surpluses
A government’s balance sheet indicates whether it is engaging in intergenerational redistribution. If the government has negative net assets it is leaving future generations with more obligations than benefits. A government with positive net assets is leaving future generations with more benefits than obligations. Governments have no advantages over individuals in making decisions about what to leave to future generations,...
Too Much Government
Expectations of the role of the government have been rising steadily over the last decade. They rose substantially during the eastern states’ bushfires in late 2019 and early 2020, and again in response to the floods that followed in NSW and Queensland. And they reached stratospheric levels during the Covid panic. Judged by the number of lives lost, those bushfires...
