The Fifty Minute Hour has another criticism:
Paul Craig Roberts believes that the Heritage Institute’s Index of Economic Freedom rates the United States too highly because they fail to give sufficient weight to the immorality of taxation. . . . I have to contest the premise of the entire piece: that the level and scope of taxation in the United States abridges our freedom significantly enough to warrant a lowering of our rating as compared to other nations. That is simply false.
The Index of Economic Freedom, like most statistical analyses of its kind, is a comparative ranking. For pessimists like Roberts, that may amount to something like, “in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king,” but in any case, on a numerical ranking scale, someone has to be at the top. So even if you buy Roberts’ arguments that taxation is slavery, it’s appalling that Roberts would consider a 35 percent income tax to be worse than the crippling economic repression taking place all over the world. . . .
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