December 6, 2012
POLITICAL CAPITAL OP/ED

A Tax Both Ralph Nader and Ayn Rand Could Love

Here is a puzzler worth pondering as Congress scrambles to find enough tax revenue to feed its insatiable appetite for spending. Can you come up with a tax that both uber-communitarian Ralph Nader and uber-individualist Ayn Rand could support — a tax both progressives and libertarians could get behind?

In order to meet Rand’s criteria for justice, a tax must be voluntary, that is, collected without coercion. In order to meet Nader’s criteria for “fairness” it must be progressive, that is, the rich must pay the most while the poor pay little or nothing.

In order for this voluntary progressive tax to gain market share and achieve a sustainable equilibrium it must be tied to the provision of a government service that can be alternatively supplied by private institutions. It’s not necessary for the private services to be an exact replacement, just close enough that taxpayers could choose the private option if the government tax rate, sure to grow over time, becomes egregious.

Figure it out yet? Here’s a hint.

To read the rest of the column click here.

My interview today on Fox & Friends

Entrepreneur’s efforts sunk by regulations

December 3, 2012

Enraged Greek Journalists Thrash Their Pension Fund Manager

By Bill Frezza

If you want to get a peek at what the future holds for entitlement democracies like our own, look no further than Greece. The spectacle of enraged journalists “punching, kicking, and tearing at clothes” on the way to sending their pension fund manager to the hospital offers a poignant vignette of the coming war of all against all when the broken promises made by generations of politicians come due. The story, recently reported by Reuters, shows a society that is unwinding, crushed by unfunded liabilities that have piled up for years across both the public and private sectors.

What helped kill the Greek Journalist Union’s pension fund was a requirement to pool the union’s investments with other pension funds, placing them in Greek government bonds now trading for pennies on the dollar. With no chance that these bonds will be redeemed at face value and every prospect of default, retired and soon-to-be-retired journalists worked themselves into a frenzy, attacking not the politicians that robbed them, but one of their own members responsible for looking after their nest eggs.

That’s probably how U.S. pension fund victims felt when their bonds were wiped out as part of the extra-judicial Chrysler bailout. The difference is that they had no one to beat up. But as the federal government’s credit rating heads south and the rule of law that protects private assets continues to erode, don’t be surprised when the mob starts looking for the nearest bystander to pummel and the largest pile of assets to plunder.

You can read the rest of the column here.

NewsMax TV Interview with Bill Frezza.

“I’m optimistic that we’ll go off the fiscal cliff. It’s the best deal on the table.”

November 2012, The Skeptical Outsider

Curing Cancer By Throwing Spaghetti At The Wall

You know scientists are getting desperate when National Cancer Institute (NCI) researchers publicly boast that their approach is not limited to the realm of rational behavior. Heck, as long as funding is infinite, why not keep going back to re-drill the same dry holes hoping dumb luck will produce a gusher?

I did a double-take when I read a series of news articles describing an ongoing study in which 100 existing cancer drugs were tested in pairs to see if their abysmal effectiveness could be improved via combination therapy. Experimenters at NCI’s Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis ran 300,000 experiments to test 5,000 possible drug combinations against a panel of 60 cancer cell lines looking for an improvement in kill rates. The idea is to identify a few combinations that might be worthy of progressing into clinical trials.

If this isn’t a sign of intellectual exhaustion, I don’t know what is.

You can read the rest of the column here.

November 28 2012
POLITICAL CAPITAL      OP/ED                                                                      

Grover Norquist’s Gnomes Duke It Out With The Tax Fairness Fairy

No one seriously believes that federal spending is going to be brought under control any time soon. Regardless of what deals are cut during the lame duck session of Congress, Uncle Sam is expected to continue gobbling larger chunks of our economy while imposing new regulations on the rest. The media, treating this like an inexorable state of nature, have made it clear that Washington’s top priority should be making sure that “the rich” pay their “fair share.”

After all, so the narrative goes, the American electorate was offered a clear choice and the tax-the-rich tribe won, so let the search for tax fairness begin!

If only it were that simple. The tax fairness debate is fascinating because it doesn’t look like extracting the maximum number of tax dollars from the rich with the minimum damage to the wider economy is the real goal. What matters is creating the perception of the rich genuflecting before the altar of “fairness”—a conveniently flexible political concept if there ever was one.

So what exactly is the “fair share” of taxes the top 2 percent, or anyone else for that matter, should pay?

Read the rest of the column here.