Libertarian Presidential hopeful Gary Johnson evidently thinks democracy, the Constitution and our republic should be replaced with market wisdom alone. It's interviews like this that make me think back to the good old days when John Schmitz ran for President and was widely repudiated by all but his very tiny base. Now the John Schmitz types have overrun democracies everywhere, and then there's Gary Johnson, who thinks the markets should do that.
JOHNSON: Well, we've been talking about this for years, that this is a downgrade that should happen and will happen since statistics -- the Federal Reserve was buying up to 70% of our debt, so borrowing is one thing, printing money is another thing and we're printing money! That's something people need to recognize and when it goes to 100%, printing money to actually buy up our own debt, that's the monetary collapse.
CAVUTO: The argument for doing something like this is, you know, the genie out of the bottle argument, obviously, that it's hard to put that back in...[unintelligible]...it's that we'll be forced to be disciplined. Do you buy that?
JOHNSON: Well, force -- let's force it now. Let's force it now. Let's not raise the debt ceiling to deal with this, as difficult as it's going to be and I don't want to downplay just how difficult it's going to be.
CAVUTO: Even if it means raising taxes as part of the deal to force it?
JOHNSON: I don't think it's a matter of raising taxes. I would not advocate raising taxes. I'm advocating on the side of the fair tax which would eliminate business to business tax, I'd eliminate the corporate tax. I think that reboots the computer, reboots the American economy for decades of real growth. Back to fair tax. Eliminate the income tax, eliminate the IRS, have one federal consumption tax, simplify, fair, encourage savings.
To summarize, what Johnson thinks is that we should suffer a default to "force discipline" while eliminating all taxes on corporations and individuals and instituting some kind of national sales tax which is the most regressive tax there is.
Ah, liberty.
What bothers me most about this guy is that he's spouting the most radical talking points of Republicans' plans, talking points that more or less knocked Huckabee out of the running in 2008, and yet he's treated with utmost credibility by the likes of Neil Cavuto and Fox News, as well as pundits writing about how "interesting" he is.
John Schmitz was interesting too. So was Lyndon LaRouche. But we didn't give them a mainstream platform to pretend like they were actually serious.
