Tax Hike Mike

In the new Reason Magazine(won't be online for awhile, sorry no link), David Weigel has an interesting piece entitled "Whatever Happened to Tax Cuts" that chronicled Mike Huckabee's battle with the Club for Growth. More interestingly, however, is how former Huckabee spokesman Joe Carter(now with the Family Research Council) explained how Huckabee(if he were the nominee) planned to reshape the Repub party, specifically with respect to libertarians. Huck's strategy: send them packing to the Democratic Party and use a more progressive tax and business reform package to create a new "entrepreneural class" that would give the GOP a working majority along with the Social Conservatives.

Quoting Carter:

"If Gov. Huckabee is the nominee, you'll see a shift from where the GOP is now...I see politics as more of a split between libertarians and conservatives than liberals and conservatives. If you let the libertarians go over to the Democratic Party while the Republicans win the votes of entrepreneurs(engineered via Hucks tax policy), you're talking about a new majority party."

David Keating from the Club for Growth mocked this strategy as "ridiculous," but lately the "Clubbers" have been on a losing streak in terms of their candidates winning.

Ron Paul is a "libertarian, not a Republican," and has said all along that Ron Paul is the only candidate he wouldn't support on the Republican side.

I'll ignore the fact that seeking to build an "entrepreneurial class" majority with social conservatives while kicking the libertarians out is, well, oxymoronic.

A class of dependent capitalists who are propped up by the government.

Hahaha. What kind of creativity would come out of entrepreneurs supported and subsidized by the government? It certainly won't be really entrepreneurs. This is laughable. It is however a working political majority since the state propped entrepreneurs would be the ones to supply the cash for political speech - albeit slightly corrupt political speech.

In the long run, state propped entrepreneurship is part of the long slide into fascism and economic irrelevance for the US. The more the country operates with state propped entrepreneurship (the Military Industrial Complex and more) the less true creativity will succeed in the market place. And creativity is the backbone of a true entrepreneurial class.

Libertarianism is about unleashing the creativity of entrepreneurs.

Consider the programs that could be adopted by McCain-Huckabee to promote their vision of an ownership society based on government propping up entrepreneurs.

Federal school vouchers.

Individual health care mandates.

Mandatory Social Security private accounts.

The Fair Tax.

Others?

UCrawford over at the Liberty Papers chimes in on how well Huck's strategy played out in Kansas, resulting a libertarians and moderates moving over to the Dem party, giving Kansas now a "Democratic governor, a Democratic AG, and a couple of new Democratic congressmen in a state that’s been solidly Republican..."

Kansas Republicans have had an internal bloodbath for some time. It boils down to being a state where social conservatism is not an overwhelmingly uniting issue for the Republican Party. Huckabee's plan may work well in the South and also the Midwest, where economic populism could appeal to large groups of independents and Democrats. The Great Plains, however, not so much.