Russian philosopher Leonid Nikonov explains the differences between socialism, cronyism, and free market capitalism. Nikonov is a contributor to The Morality of Capitalism, a new book that is being distributed worldwide by the Atlas Network and the Students for Liberty. (You can download the introduction to the book here.) Students can obtain copies of the book here; all others can obtain copies here.)

After having risen for decades, global economic freedom has fallen for a second year in a row. That’s according to Economic Freedom of the World: 2011 Annual Report co-published today with the Fraser Institute. The average global economic freedom score rose from 5.53 (out of 10) in 1980 to 6.74 in 2007 and has fallen to 6.64 in 2009, the last year for which data is available.

As the graph below shows, the United States has had one of the largest declines in the past decade. It now ranks in 10^th place compared to 3^rd in 2000, largely due to higher government spending and lower ratings on “rule of law” measures. The report documents the strong, positive relationship between economic freedom and a range of indicators of standard of living including wealth, economic growth, longer life spans, better health care, lower poverty, civil and political liberties, and so on. Economic freedom is central to human progress. As the response of activist governments to financial and ongoing debt crises fails to address underlying issues responsible for low growth and high unemployment, this report is an important empirical reminder about the wide-ranging consequences of politics or markets in determining the use of resources.

It’s hard to keep track of all the tax hikes that President Obama is proposing, but it’s very simple to recognize his main target — the evil, nasty, awful people known as the rich.

Or, as Obama identifies them, the “millionaires and billionaires” who happen to have yearly incomes of more than $200,000.

Whether the President is talking about higher income tax rates, higher payroll tax rates, an expanded alternative minimum tax, a renewed death tax, a higher capital gains tax, more double taxation of dividends, or some other way of extracting money, the goal is to have these people foot the bill for a never-ending expansion of the welfare state.

This sounds like a pretty good scam, at least if you’re a vote-buying politician, but there is one little detail that sometimes gets forgotten. Raising the tax burden is not the same as raising revenue.

That may not matter if you’re trying to win an election by stoking resentment with the politics of hate and envy. But it is a problem if you actually want to collect more money to finance a growing welfare state.

Unfortunately (at least from the perspective of the class-warfare crowd), the rich are not some sort of helpless pinata that can be pilfered at will.

The most important thing to understand is that the rich are different from the rest of us (or at least they’re unlike me, but feel free to send me a check if you’re in that category).

Ordinary slobs like me get the overwhelming share of our income from wages and salaries. The means we are somewhat easy victims when the politicians feel like raping and plundering. If my tax rate goes up, I don’t really have much opportunity to protect myself by altering my income.

Sure, I can choose not to give a speech in the middle of nowhere for $500 because the after-tax benefit shrinks. Or I can decide not to write an article for some magazine because the $300 payment shrinks to less than $200 after tax. But my “supply-side” responses don’t have much of an effect.

For rich people, however, the world is vastly different. As the chart shows, people with more than $1 million of adjusted gross income get only 33 percent of their income from wages and salaries. And the same IRS data shows that the super-rich, those with income above $10 million, rely on wages and salaries for only 19 percent of their income.

This means that they — unlike me and (presumably) you — have tremendous ability to control the timing, level, and composition of their income.

Indeed, here are two completely legal and very easy things that rich people already do to minimize their taxes — but will do much more frequently if they are targeted for more punitive tax treatment.

1. They will shift their investments to stocks that are perceived to appreciate in value. This means they can reduce their exposure to the double tax on dividends and postpone indefinitely taxes on capital gains. They get wealthier and the IRS collects less revenue.
2. They will shift their investments to municipal bonds, which are exempt from federal tax. They probably won’t risk their money on debt from basket-case states such as California and Illinois (the Greece and Portugal of America), but there are many well-run states that issue bonds. The rich will get steady income and, while the return won’t be very high, they don’t have to give one penny of their interest payments to the IRS.

For every simple idea I can envision, it goes without saying that clever lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and financial planners can probably think of 100 ways to utilize deductions, credits, preferences, exemptions, shelters, exclusions, and loopholes. This is why class-warfare tax policy is so self-defeating.

And all of this analysis doesn’t even touch upon the other sure-fire way to escape high taxes — and that’s to simply decide to be less productive. Most high-income people are hard-charging types who are investing money, building businesses, and otherwise engaging in behavior that is very good for them — but also very good for the economy.

But you don’t have to be an Ayn Rand devotee to realize that many people, to varying degrees, choose to “go Galt” when they feel that the government has excessively undermined the critical link between effort and reward.

Indeed, if Obama really wants to “soak the rich,” he might want to abandon his current approach and endorse a simple and fair flat tax. As explained in this video, this pro-growth reform does lead to substantial “Laffer Curve” effects.

But you don’t have to believe the video. You can check out this data, straight from the IRS website, showing how those evil rich people paid much more to the IRS after Reagan cut their tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent in the 1980s.

President Obama says the rich should pay higher tax rates, citing billionaire Warren Buffett, who says he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Various analysts have pointed out that Buffett takes very little salary and gets most of his income in the form of dividends and capital gains, which reflect income that was already taxed once at the corporate level. But what about the broader argument, that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes, that maybe they even pay less than the middle class?

In May, the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined, “High-Earning Households Pay Growing Share of Taxes.” John D. McKinnon reported:

Upper-income taxpayers have paid a growing share of the federal tax burden over the last 25 years.

A 2008 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, found that the highest-earning 10% of the U.S. population paid the largest share among 24 countries examined, even after adjusting for their relatively higher incomes. “Taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States,” the OECD study concluded.

Meanwhile, the percentage of U.S. households paying no federal income tax has been climbing, and reached 51% for 2009, according to a new analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation.

An accompanying graphic shows the growing share of income taxes paid by the wealthy (in green) and how the U.S. ratio of taxes on the wealthy in relation to their income compares to that in other rich countries:

A couple of years ago I predicted it (though I was hardly the only one): Darwinian conference predation, driven by football and the quest for television markets and money, would kill the Big East, and at least seriously hamstring the small, basketball-centric private colleges that made up so much of it. Huge, flagship public universities would consolidate power in service of football, I and others foresaw, and relatively small schools like Georgetown, Villanova, and St. John’s — which could never produce enough alums to regularly fill even close to 80,000-seat football stadiums — would be orphaned.

With the departure of the University of Pittsburgh and Syracuse to the Atlantic Coast Conference, that now seems almost unavoidable.

But this isn’t the fault of Pitt and Syracuse, or even the ACC (though perhaps the ACC deserves scorn for its 2003 raid of the Big East, and Pitt for its possible duplicity about its move). No, ultimately it’s the fault of a higher education system that gives flagship state schools massive size advantages over private institutions both physically and in terms of enrollment. (Though all of higher ed, of course, is awash in taxpayer dough.) This advantage is primarily thanks to taxpayer subsidies, which underwrite the schools’ gigantic enrollments and, too often, their athletics programs directly. So the ACC was largely reacting to moves by what’s now the PAC-12, the so-called Big 10 (which also has twelve members), and the impending destruction of the Big 12 thanks to the inability of two behemoths — the University of Texas and Texas A&M — to get along.

Indeed, in the grand scheme of big-time college sports, the ACC is the most friendly of the emerging “superconferences” to private schools; with the addition of Syracuse it will have five of them, the others being Duke, Wake Forest, Boston College, and the University of Miami. But it will almost certainly be considered the weakest of the superconferences in football, and if you look at the latest Sagarin ratings of the ACC schools, note the cellar-dwellers: Wake, Duke and Boston College.

This is depressing if you enjoy high-level, private school hoops. Of course, a few football-free private schools do enjoy regular success — Xavier, Gonzaga, and most recently Butler — but their resources are significantly smaller than the members of the current Bowl Championship Series conference schools, with lucrative BCS television contracts tied, first and foremost, to football. So with the likely demise of the Big East, the going is likely about to get much tougher for the likes of Seton Hall, Providence, and other Big East, hoops-only schools, even if they are able to hang on to relevance.

Is federal anti-trust action needed to deal with this, as some have suggested? I’m no anti-trust expert, but I’d say absolutely not. For one thing, when this has been threatened before it has had little to do with fair competition, and much to do with federal legislators trying to get the flagships in their states in on the BCS. That will do private schools little good, and hardly seems motivated by a real desire for fair competition or justice. We should also hope that Congress will focus on other, more important things, like, say, getting Washington back to its proper constitutional size. And most important, attacking the BCS will do little to address the fundamental problem: As long as states furnish huge subsidies to public universities, those institutions will always have a massive size advantage is the world of college sports.

So good-bye, Big East. Government schools have killed you. 

Wow, this is remarkable. The alternative minimum tax (AMT) is one of the most-hated features of the tax code. It is such a nightmare of complexity that even Democrats routinely have supported “patches” and “band-aids” to protect millions of additional households from getting trapped in this surreal parallel tax universe — one that requires taxpayers to calculate their taxes two different ways, with the IRS getting the maximum amount of money from the two returns. (Hong Kong, by contrast, give taxpayers the option of calculating their taxes two different ways, but they’re allowed to pay the smaller of the two amounts.)

Notwithstanding the AMT’s status as arguably the worst feature of the internal revenue code, President Obama apparently wants to double down on this horrific policy by creating a new version of this nightmarish provision.

Here are some excerpts from the Wall Street Journal’s coverage, including a key observation that Obama’s scheme is just another version of the AMT.

The administration’s principle resembles the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was first adopted in 1969 and was intended to hit the superwealthy. The AMT has been hitting an increasing number of the middle class because it wasn’t indexed for inflation, and Congress has continually wrestled with how to get rid of it.

The WSJ article also notes that a glaring inconsistency in the White House’s rhetoric. the plan is supposed to be a “very significant” tax hike, but doubling the tax burden on millionaires would only raise $19 billion per year. In other words, the Administration’s class-warfare rhetoric is probably just cover for a tax hike that actually will hit a lot of people with far more modest incomes.

The proposal also could apply to a broader selection of taxpayers—all households with incomes of more than $1 million. Those earners are expected to pay an average of $845,000 this year, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Assuming the households in the group of 22,000 pay that amount, even doubling their tax burden would raise just $19 billion a year at a time when deficit reduction is being measured in trillions of dollars. That doesn’t take into effect any change in taxpayer behavior prompted by a new tax regime. A senior administration official said that depending on where the minimum rate is set, the plan could be a “very significant” revenue raiser. The official wouldn’t provide details. …Some conservative economists say such a proposal could put a drag on capital markets and ignores the fact that many companies have already paid tax on the income before it is distributed to owners as dividends or capital gains.

The New York Times, to its credit, provides a fair description of the issue (including a much-needed acknowledgement that Warren Buffett may not have been honest and/​or accurate), and also suggests that Obama may be proposing to replace the existing AMT with this new version (though that presumably would negate its impact as a revenue-raiser).

Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday. Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to draw opposition from Republicans, who have staunchly opposed raising taxes on the affluent because, they say, it would discourage investment. It could also invite scrutiny from some economists who have disputed Mr. Buffett’s assertion that the megarich pay a lower tax rate over all. Mr. Buffett’s critics say many of the rich actually make more from wages than from investments. …The administration wants such a tax to replace the alternative minimum tax, which was created decades ago to make sure the richest taxpayers with plentiful deductions and credits did not avoid income taxes, but which now hits millions of Americans who are considered upper middle class.

Actually, the AMT also hits lots of middle-class families since having kids is considered a “preference” for tax purposes.

But that’s just an insult layered on top of injury. What makes Obama’s new scheme so destructive is that it would (though the White House has not explained the details) somehow classify dividends and capital gains as “preference” items — even though everyone acknowledges that such income already is double taxed!

In other words, Obama claims to be concerned about jobs, but he is proposing a big tax hike on the saving and investment that is necessary to create jobs. Amazing.

Regular readers will recognize this video about Obama’s class-warfare tax policy. But if you haven’t seen it, five reasons are presented to explain why it will backfire.

But look at the bright side. At least accountants and tax lawyers (and don’t forget bankruptcy specialists) will get more business if Obama’s plan is implemented.

Lots of media are reporting that a new poll from the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center shows that 53 percent of Americans believe that “the government [should] give legal recognition to marriages between couples of the same sex.” Google “gay marriage poll,” and you get 284 news items. Good. It’s news. Even though it’s just about what other recent polls have found. And even though 48 percent also said they supported a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, suggesting that at least 1 percent of respondents are as confused about their position as Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann.

But the survey had much else in it, as well. In fact, here’s an interesting data point from the survey, released a day earlier than the gay-marriage results:

82 percent of respondents say “The Federal Government should not have the power to require all Americans to buy health insurance.”

That is, 82 percent of Americans oppose the central plank of President Obama’s health care policy, the one that’s roiling the courts right now and headed for the Supreme Court.

But Google “poll health care mandate,” and you get no national media results. It’s sorta like it didn’t happen. But it did, and Democratic campaign consultants have no doubt noticed it.

As usual, not everything in the poll was encouraging. 61 percent say they oppose “giving the President more power at the expense of the power of Congress and the courts,” but that’s down from 73 and 75 percent the past two years.