Below is my response to a thoughtful and noteworthy response from Mason over at RIGHT of left:

Thanks for the kind words. I find little disagreement with your response. I see the debate over direct taxation (as justified as it is) as a distraction to a more important and underlying debate. The means by which the government extracts wealth from us is not nearly as important as the way, and in what magnitude, it is allocated.

I firmly believe that individuals are far more able to efficiently allocate scarce resources than government. Any and all attempts by the government to stand in the way of voluntary transactions between individuals — through government spending, regulation, or currency manipulation — distorts the market resulting in misallocation of resources (ex. excessive home building). Money and resources are diverted from useful and productive sectors of the economy into wasteful ones. Central planners (government) no matter how smart or savvy, are incapable of determining the proper allocation of these resources. Only individuals, through mutually beneficial transactions, guided by market based prices, are able to properly and justly determine what is useful and what is not.

This issue will not be sufficiently addressed until the issue of our money and the people who control it (federal reserve) are confronted, and we return to a sound market based currency. Only then will their be a restriction on the ability of the government to confiscate and squander the hard earned wealth of individuals.

As for Ron Paul: Tthey called him a loon because he predicted, long before the vast majority of others in Washington, that we were headed for a crash of the housing market to be followed by a recession. They called him a loon because he called for sound money that cannot be inflated at the will of government. They called him a loon because he predicted, before the Iraq war had even started, that it would be a quagmire costing much more (in resources and lives) and lasting much longer than initially anticipated. They called him a loon for wanting to abolish the IRS, the department of education, and other bloated, inefficient government departments. They called him a loon because he believes that the market, through countless voluntary transactions is a vastly more efficient and just means of allocating resources than government central planning. The debate over his lunacy has ended. He was right, they were wrong.

Ron Paul introduced legislation aimed at shedding some light on the unaccountable actions of the Fed: HR 1207 Federal Reserve Transparency Act. Whether or not it would have significant impact or not, i don’t know, but the fact that so many congresspeople — democrats and republicans — have refused to support it, is pretty astounding to me.

Some serious changes need to be made, and fiddling with the tax code isn’t going to do it.