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.For the hidden assumption of those who wantto eliminate deductibility (not only of state and local taxes but of manyother expenditures and loopholes ), is that the government is really thejust owner of all of our income and property, and that allowing us to keepany of it, or any more of it than before, constitutes an illegitimate subsidy. Or, more specifically, that the federal government must collecta certain amount of taxes from its subjects, that this amount is somehow 184 Murray N.Rothbard: Making Economic Sensewritten in stone, and that any person or group paying less than somearbitrarily allotted figure means that someone else will have to pick up histab.Only then does the idea that a tax cut is equivalent to a subsidy makeany sense at all.But this is a curious argument indeed.There is no warrantfor the notion that payment of some grand allotted total is so vital that itmust override any devotion to the rights of person and property, to theidea that people are entitled to keep the property they have earned.The recent emphasis on tax allocation, on concentrating on fairshares or alleged subsidies, has been a clever and largely successfuldevice to divert people s attention from the real problem: that taxes areburdensome and oppressive for everyone.The agitation for tax reform has managed to deflect people s attention from the need to lowereveryone s taxes to a great crusade to try to make sure that the other guypays his fair share and is not being subsidized. In that way, the longsuffering citizens are encouraged to fight among themselves, to try to getsomeone else s taxes increased, instead of maintaining taxpayersolidarity and keeping their eyes on lowering taxes, period, wherever andhowever they can.Such a grand taxpayers coalition can only bemaintained if there is a tacit agreement that, regardless of whose taxes arecut and by how much, no person or group will have to suffer an increaseof taxes, and this means all coerced payments to government, whetherthey be called taxes, fees, revenues, contributions, or closing ofloopholes. 59That Gasoline TaxThe big bad gasoline tax, one of the favorite programs of left-liberalism, is back in the limelight.After having denounced the schemeduring the campaign as a tax on the middle class, then President-electClinton professed surprise that so many luminaries at theinterregnum economic summit championed the idea.Of course, he should not have been surprised at all, since Clinton smuch-vaunted love of diversity clearly does not extend to theintellectual realm.At the Little Rock economic summit, the economistsand businessmen ran the full gamut from left-liberal to left-liberal(my own invitation, as they say, got lost in the mail).The only questionsseem to be: how high should the gas tax increase go the moderate 50 Fiscal Mysteries Revealed 185cents a gallon suggested by Tsongas (the mainstream) or the morerigorous $1 or more a gallon suggested by Rivlin (the administration)and how many months or years are we to be allowed for the tax to bephased in?The official arguments for the gas tax are general (helping to cut thedeficit) as well as specific to this particular tax.On the glories of the gastax per se, one common argument is that the tax would force the consumerto conserve more gasoline by purchasing less.That it will, but why is itsuch a good idea to force people to buy less gas?If the federal government slapped a $500 tax on the sale of chess sets, itwould surely conserve them by forcing people to purchase a lot less.Butwhy is this dictatorial coercion, this forcing a lower standard of livingupon American consumers, supposed to be a good thing in a free society?One favorite answer of the pro-gas-taxers is that consumers will be led,by the tax, to conserve scarce fuel.But conservation of resources in one ofthe major function of the free price system.The market economy iscontinually being forced to choose: how much of product X or product Y,of resource X or Y, should be produced now, and how much should be conserved to be produced in the future? Not just of oil and gas, but ofeverything else: copper, iron, timber, etc.In every area, this conservation, this decision on how to allocateproduction over time, takes place smoothly and harmoniously on the freemarket.The price of every resource and product is set on the market bythe interaction of demand (ultimately consumer demand, and the relativescarcities of supply).If the supply of X, now and in the expected nearfuture, falls, then the current price of X will rise.In this way, an expectedfuture decline in supply is met right now with a rise in price, which willinduce buyers to purchase less, and producers to mine or manufacturemore of the product in response to the higher price.You don t need a taxto accomplish the task of allocation and conversation.In fact, a tax is a most clumsy way of meeting the problem.In the firstplace, since government knows very little and the market knows a lot, thegovernment will not hit the proper target; indeed, since government scoercion comes on top of market action, a tax is bound to overconserve, to reduce the production of a good below the optimum.And second, 186 Murray N.Rothbard: Making Economic Senseunlike a price rise accruing to producers, a tax provides no incentive forsupply to increase or productivity to improve.And why is gasoline supposed to need non-market conservationmeasures? On the contrary, over the past decade, the real price of gasoline(corrected for inflation) has fallen by 40%; in short an increasingabundance of oil and gas relative to demand has demonstrated that there isno need to worry about conservation of oilAnother argument for a gas tax is that it will force consumers to use gasin a more fuel-efficient way.But the entire worry about fuelefficiency is absurd and ill-conceived.Why should automobiles only beefficient in using fuel? There are many aspects of efficiency, includingefficiency per man hour, efficiency in use of tires, and efficiency in the cartaking you where you want to go.The market coordinates all theseefficiencies in the most optimal way for the consumer.Why the fuel fetish? Moreover, federal rules mandating ever-greatermiles- per-gallon have already greatly increased the cost of cars andcrippled auto safety by forcing upon us ever-lighter-weight automobiles.Another argument claims that a higher gas tax would reduce ourdependence on foreign oil. But in the first place, the tax woulddiscourage the use and production of domestic oil as well as foreign; andsecond, haven t we demonstrated, with the Gulf War, the willingness touse the direst coercion against even the sniff of a possible threat to ourforeign oil supplies? And besides, what s wrong with free trade and theinternational division of labor?Probably the dopiest, though one of the common, arguments is thatother countries have a much higher gas tax: the United States now has agas tax that is only 37% of the retail price, whereas in Western Europethe gas tax averages over 70%.Maybe we can find lots of countries with a higher TB rate
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