Libertarian financial advice

Presidential candidate Harry Browne has a consistent platform: Social Security -- gone; income taxes -- gone; minimum wage -- gone.

By Charles Pappas

Oct 19, 2000 | Harry Browne has the best reason for running for president you'll ever hear: "Because my wife told me to."

His wife is probably the only person who could tell Browne -- an investment guru, author and two-time Libertarian Party candidate for president -- what to do. A rouser and snorter among the other candidates, whose positions on the issues are as automatic as a golf course sprinkler system, Browne wants to take an "intrusive, oppressive and obscenely expensive" government and liposuction it thinner than Kate Moss during Lent.

Check out his positions on the issues of the day.

Dope: "On my first day in office I will pardon everyone who has been convicted of a nonviolent federal drug offense."

Guns: "So it's time to face reality and repeal these [gun] laws -- all of them."

Same-sex unions: "Marriage is no business of the state whatsoever. It is between two individuals who want to do whatever they want to do, and that is up to them."

Only 485,798 people (about 0.5 percent) voted for Browne in 1996. But if you want to do a "glass is half full" interpretation of those results, that was 70 percent more than in 1992. Browne got more votes in 1996 than the U.S. Taxpayers, Peace and Freedom and Socialist Workers parties and miscellaneous write-ins put together. This year the 29-year-old Libertarian Party is running about 2,000 candidates nationwide. Some 166 Libertarians now hold elective office, more than twice as many, they claim, as all other third parties combined. We caught up with Browne to talk about money, which, as Tom Neal observed in the film noir classic "Detour," "causes problems in the world simply because there's too little of it."

After you're inaugurated, who goes first? The IRS?

Why not? Anytime you have a government organization that's supposed to collect a tax, it will never be "user friendly." Despite all the attempts to tame it, the IRS will never be warm and cuddly and respect citizens, because it still has the power to coerce them.

What about a flat tax?

As I said, anytime you entrust your government with the power to collect a tax, it will always abuse its citizens. We have to take a hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners attitude toward it and rip the whole thing out.

And replace it with ...?

Tariffs and excise taxes, like the ones you already pay for your telephone, or for gasoline. Of course, the only good tax is a dead tax. We actually need only about $100 billion to run the government, not the $2 trillion-plus we have now. That amount could even maintain a military as long as we didn't want one big enough to shove people around.

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