Economist Bruce Bartlett has recently published an excellent article debunking the "Fair Tax," a proposal to replace the federal income tax with a 23% sales tax that has been endorsed by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and a few other conservatives. As Bartlett explains, some prominent Fair Tax supporters falsely claim that it is what he calls a "double free lunch." Against both empirical evidence and basic economic theory, they claim that people will get to keep all the money they would now pay as income tax without experiencing any increase in the prices of goods and services they purchase (even though the latter would now have a hefty new sales tax attached to them).

In addition to Bartlett's many well-taken objections, there is another serious problem with the Fair Tax and other schemes to replace income taxation with sales taxes: they makes the true cost of government less visible to voters. For all its flaws, the income tax system at least gives taxpayers a fairly clear indication of what their total income tax liability is: every April you have to calculate it, or hire an accountant to do it for you. In a sales tax system, by contrast, you don't really know how much money you're paying the federal government in all. To be sure, you can calculate the amount by keeping close track of all your purchases and then multiplying by 0.23 at the end of the year (assuming the proposed Fair Tax rate of 23% is the one enacted). However, given that most voters are "rationally ignorant" and have little incentive to keep close tabs on government policy, it's unlikely that many will do so. Moreover, as Bartlett explains, Fair Tax supporters intend to supplement their basic proposal with a complex system of rebates that would make the total tax burden even more difficult to calculate. The net result of the Fair Tax would be to make the true cost of government less visible to voters. That, I would argue, has been one of the effects of the somewhat similar value added tax (VAT) by which many European countries raise a large part of their revenue.

I'm not suggesting that this effect is Huckabee's objective or that of other Fair Tax supporters. The libertarian in me is a bit suspicious of Huckabee's motives, given his simultaneous support for high levels of government spending and "nanny state" regulation. A political leader with Huckabee's views has an obvious interest in establishing a tax system that would reduce public awareness of the costs of the many government programs he advocates. However, I don't doubt that there are many people who support the Fair Tax in good faith, and perhaps Huckabee is one of them. Whatever their motives, however, the potential harm caused by the enactment of the Fair Tax is likely to exceed any benefits.

UPDATE: It's worth noting, as Bartlett points out in his article, that the 23% Fair Tax rate is misleading. If one were to calculate the FT tax rate the same way we normally describe income taxes and state sales taxes, the true FT rate would be about 30%. The 23% figure is arrived at by calculating the tax's percentage of the total price of a good, including the tax, as opposed to the conventional method of calculating the tax's percentage of the pretax price. If you want a more detailed explanation of this point, see Bartlett's article. For the purposes of this post, the bottom line is that the misleading way Fair Tax advocates calculate their proposed tax rate is likely to make it even more difficult for taxpayers to figure out how much they are actually paying to the government each year.

Paul Caron of TaxProfblog claims that law professors tend to be unhappy and tries to explain why. He argues that legal academia is a "miserable" job because it is characterized by 1) anonymity, 2) irrelevance (inability to see any impact your job has on the lives of others), and 3) "immeasurement," (inability to measure whether you are succeeding at the job or not). UCLA lawprof Steve Bainbridge takes issue with Caron's assessment, pointing out that there is no proof that law professors are, on average, more unhappy than professionals in other fields. He also notes that professors do not in fact generally suffer from anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement. I think Bainbridge generally has the better of this argument. In particular, he is absolutely right to note that academics don't lack for measures of their success (or lack thereof). Our achievements and failures are measured by citation rates, conference invitations, offers of visiting positions, promotion to tenure, pay increases (which at many schools are at least partly merit-based, and of course student evaluations. None of these measures are perfect. But collectively they should give most professors a reasonably good indication of their professional standing.

In addition to the points Bainbridge makes, I would note that it's hard to believe that being a lawprof is an unusually "miserable" job in light of the fact that there are so many more people who want get into legal academia than there are jobs available. According to AALS data, in most years, less than 15% of applicants for entry level law professor jobs succeed in getting a position. That is a very high demand for a "miserable" job, especially when we consider the fact that most of these applicants could earn higher salaries as private sector lawyers. It's possible that all these sophisticated graduates of top law schools (and sometimes of PhD programs as well) are misinformed, though I tend to doubt it. In any event, very few people leave legal academia to go into the private sector, even though people who already have lawprof jobs are presumably well-informed about how "miserable" such positions are.

There are also important advantages of being a professor relative to most other professional jobs. They include opportunities to travel to interesting locations, an unusually high degree of control over your schedule, and spending most of your time working on issues that interest you.

Obviously, some professors really are "miserable." And the job certainly isn't right for everybody. I know people who are happy working at law firms who would hate the academic life. However, it's unlikely that the life of the average lawprof is more miserable than that of the average professional in most other fields.

There is no shortage of poorly informed rants against libertarianism; similarly, it's easy to find silly screeds against atheism. Dinesh D'Souza, however, has achieved the unusual distinction of combining these two genres in a single column. Let's start with the part about libertarians:

Many libertarians are basically conservatives who are either gay or druggies or people who generally find the conservative moral agenda too restrictive. So they flee from the conservative to the libertarian camp where much wider parameters of personal behavior are embraced.

It is true that most libertarians oppose parts of "the conservative moral agenda" (at least to the extent that that agenda is to be enforced by the state). The rest of the above is hogwash. The vast majority of libertarians are neither gay, nor "druggies," nor even people with unusual personal lives of any kind. And there are very few libertarians who have "fled" from conservatism, because most libertarians were never conservative to begin with. There are many prominent libertarian thinkers who are former liberals or socialists, such as Hayek, Friedman, Richard Epstein, and quite a few others. Very few if any were former conservatives of any kind - much less ones who fled because they were gay or wanted to use drugs. To top it off, D'Souza also commits the common mistake of conflating libertarian opposition to state regulation of "personal behavior" with "embracing" such behavior (more sophisticated conservative critics of libertarianism, such as Kay Hymowitz often make the same mistake).

The anti-atheist part of D'Souza's screed is even sillier. He starts by suggesting that Christopher Hitchens' fondness for alcohol (and possibly that of other atheists who drink a lot) is somehow related to his rejection of religion (as if there aren't plenty of theists who drink to excess). He ends with this:

I agree that many nominal Christians have also forgotten the message of Christmas. Even so I wonder: what's the atheist equivalent of Christmas? Darwin's birthday? For many libertarians I suppose it's the day they get their tax refunds.

Here, D'Souza makes the common but foolish mistake of conflating atheism with the theory of evolution. In reality, you can be an atheist and reject that theory (as the Soviet government to a large extent did under Stalin) or be a theist and accept it (as the Catholic Church now does). And, as Radley Balko points out, D'Souza is seriously misinformed if he thinks that libertarians celebrate tax refunds as opposed to decrying them as a part of the government's deceptive scheme to extract what are effectively coercive interest-free loans from the taxpayers.

As for the "atheist equivalent of Christmas," atheists no more need an equivalent of Christmas than we need an equivalent of Ramadan or Yom Kippur. Part of the point of atheism is that we do not believe in the need for holidays that honor deities. Obviously, there are atheists who celebrate theistic holidays for cultural or family reasons or just to have a good time. But atheism as such has no need for "equivalents" of religious holidays. Indeed, since atheism is not a comprehensive belief system but merely a rejection of the existence of God, it has no need of any holidays at all. Rather, individual atheists will choose to celebrate particular holidays for ethnic, historical, or philosophical reasons that generally have no connection to atheism itself. Just as atheism is compatible with a variety of different moral and political views, it is also compatible with a variety of different holidays.

There once was a time when Dinesh D'Souza was a reasonably serious public intellectual. I didn't always agree with him then, but his writings were at least worth considering. This column, coming on the heels of his book arguing that we should sacrifice many of our freedoms in order to allay the anger of Muslim fundamentalists, suggests that those days are gone. There are weighty arguments to be made against both libertarianism and atheism. Sadly, Dinesh D'Souza is no longer likely to be the one to make them.

UPDATE: Just in case, I should clarify that in denying that "many libertarians" are "gay...or druggies," I am in no way accepting D'Souza's equation of these two categories. As I'm sure regular VC readers know, I don't believe that there is anything wrong with being gay. Indeed, it is probably true that the percentage of gays among libertarians is higher than among social conservatives. However, even if gays are twice as common in the libertarian community as in the nation as a whole, that would still make them only a tiny fraction of the total.

I think Eugene is right to suggest that Will Smith did not really say that Adolf Hitler was a good person, but merely claimed that Hitler himself believed that he was doing the right thing. The latter is, as far as I know, an uncontroversial statement among experts on Nazi Germany. However, it's striking that so many observers - including the reporter who interviewed Smith and Instapundit - seem to conflate the two.

The confusion is at least in part the result of a shortcoming of the pop culture image of evil. We tend to think of evil people as those who know what they are doing is wrong, but do it anyway. In reality, most of the world's greatest evildoers, Hitler included, actually believe that their evil actions are morally praiseworthy. Many - notably the Nazis, Communists, and today's radical Islamists - have elaborate ideologies that validate those actions. Indeed, it is striking that most of the great mass murders of the last century were committed by Nazi or Commmunist regimes in order to advance their strong ideological and moral commitments. If Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao had cared only about their narrow self-interest and holding onto power, they would have killed many fewer people. Even serial killers often believe that their actions are justified - either on weird ideological grounds of some kind or as a response to real or imagined slights that they have suffered. In real life, there are very few cackling villains open reveling in (what they admit to be) their evil ways. As Smith said of Hitler, the typical mass murderer "woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, . . . set out to do what he thought was 'good'."

We often praise those who seem "principled," are "people of faith," or show other signs of genuine moral commitment. The most dangerous evildoers, however, are not those who lack principles altogether, but those who believe all too fervently in the wrong ones.

UPDATE: I do, however, think that Smith was naive to suggest that Hitler's type of evil could be addressed through "reprogramming," at least not if "reprogramming" simply means education and persuasion. By all accounts, Hitler was strongly committed to his ideology and was unlikely to change his mind about its fundamentals. Of those prominent Nazi leaders taken alive by the Allies at the end of World War II, very few (such as Albert Speer) ever admitted that Nazi ideology was wrong, despite extensive efforts to persuade them to do so.

With the possible exception of attending committee meetings, grading final exams is the most boring part of a professor's job; that - plus recovering from ankle surgery- is what I have been doing the last few days. Tis definitely the season to be jolly.

Every once in a while, however, the monotony is broken by a hilarious exam blooper. In my Property class, I always cover the Calabresi-Melamed framework which distinguishes property rules, liability rules and inalienability rules.

This year, the students seem to have grasped it well. However, I did read one exam that repeatedly referred to "the Bernard Melamud" theory. What (other than my inadequate teaching, of course) could have led the student to make this mistake? I eventually figured out that he or she must have confused Calabresi and Melamed with novelist Bernard Malamud. Malamud did write some books where legal issues feature prominently; his most famous novel, The Fixer, is a fictionalized account of the trial of Mendel Beilis, a famous anti-Semitic "blood libel" case in czarist Russia. Unfortunately, however, Malamud - unlike Jane Austen - didn't focus much on property law and wasn't much of a law and economics scholar.

It's a minor mistake by the student and one that I didn't penalize much; but humorous nonetheless.

UPDATE: As commenter JonathanM points out, Malamud did in fact write a property law-related novel, The Tenants. Perhaps the student had read this book recently, applied a Calabresi-Melamed analysis to to the plot and began to conflate their theory with Malamud!