The Other Kind Of Inflation

In addition to being one of the most picturesque places on the planet, Andorra is a textbook example of what happens to an economy when a limited government sets up a liberal tax regime.

Like conjuring money out of thin air, taxation is just another form of inflation that either directly or indirectly sticks the end-user consumer with a higher price.

Think about it– when businesses get taxed on their payrolls and profits, it’s consumers who end up paying for it at the cash register. When governments decide to pass sales taxes or increase VAT rates, it’s consumers who end up paying more.

This is theft, plain and simple… a robbery from everyday, hardworking people perpetrated by unproductive bureaucrats. Governments around the world collect trillions of dollars each year by sticking consumers with higher prices, only to go waste it all trying to centrally plan their economies.

In his recent book Daemon, author Daniel Suarez summed this up when he wrote, “Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that [central planning] cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared…”

The major fallacy in politicians’ logic is that if governments can collect enough tax revenue, they will be able to dump it all back into the economy, creating jobs and stimulating growth.

It sounds great in theory, but in practice, government spending is prone to massive misallocations and value distortions… let alone corruption and bribery. This is how we end up with bridges to nowhere, empty cities, expensive wars, and millions of dollars of stimulus money spent on giant signs bragging about how much stimulus money has been spent.

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