Neo-cons pet libertarian favors new tax

[fastpat]

Yes, those wonderful Bush'ists over at the so-called American Enterprise Institute, yet another organ for the neo-conservative sociofascists, see room for more federal taxation to support their growing government.

The Plan to Replace the Welfare State
By Charles Murray, Max Borders
Posted: Tuesday, March 28, 2006
ARTICLES
Tech Central Station
Publication Date: March 28, 2006

Max Borders: Joining us today we have Charles Murray, author of the new book, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. Welcome, Charles.

Charles Murray: Good morning.

Borders: You've studied social safety nets for most of your career. What has the welfare entitlement state done to this country?

Murray: Well you have effects on two levels. One involves the effects of social programs intended to help the poor and the disadvantaged. And that was the topic of a book I wrote 20 odd years ago called Losing Ground, which said essentially we made things worse for the very people we were trying to help.

There is, however, another whole set of effects of the welfare state in the form of Social Security and Medicaid and other kinds of programs which take money from one American and give it to another American (whom the government has decided needs the money more). Whether it's taking it from a young person to give to a retiree, or whether it's taking it from a secretary in Alabama to give to a corporation that is getting a special favor from the government, all of these transfers--and that's what they are: money from individual Americans to other individuals or to corporations--seem to me to be a classic example of shipping money to Washington, seeing large amounts of it be wasted and go down the drain, and then it gets shipped out of Washington in much reduced form for dubious purposes.

And what In Our Hands is all about, ultimately, is saying: stop that. Just, if you're going to collect all this money, give it back to people as money and let them run their lives as they see fit.

Borders: And at the same time you eliminate the considerable degree of bureaucratic interference and, for that matter, the bureaucracy itself.

Murray: Yes, that's a topic I actually don't even mention in the book. I have not calculated the number of government officials who would be put out of work by my plan, but I'm sure it numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW: http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.24127,filter.all/pub_detail.asp