What’s the worst policy idea that would cause the most damage to society?
I’m tempted to say the value-added tax since our hopes of restraining the federal government will be greatly undermined if we give the buffoons in Washington a new source of revenue. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Mitt Romney may be an ever greater long-term threat to American exceptionalism than Barack Obama.
But even though the VAT is fiscal poison, it’s not the most dangerous policy proposal.
At the top of my list is global taxation.
I wrote in 2010 about some of the awful global tax schemes being pushed by the United Nations. And I also noted that unrepentant statists such as George Soros are pimping for global taxation.
I even wrote a paper back in 2001 to explain why global taxes are such a bad idea.
The details of the tax don’t matter. It’s the principle.
A supra-national taxing authority inevitably would mean bigger government and more statism. As such, it doesn’t matter whether the new global tax is imposed on financial transactions, carbon emissions, tobacco, the Internet, munitions, foreign exchange, pollution permits, energy, or airline tickets.
And the statists are not giving up. Here are passages from a news report on their latest scheme.