The Freedom Bulletin

In both 2002 and 2008, the Center for Small Government sponsored a ballot initiative to eliminate the Massachusetts income tax. Unfortunately, it was defeated each time. Now, they are sponsoring an initiative – Question 3 – to roll back the sales tax from 6.25% to 3%. This is a much more modest proposal, and not quite as exciting for small government people like me, but hopefully this makes it more likely to pass.

State government simply spends too much and taxes too much. Taxes have gone up and up. Tax increases that are supposed to be temporary end up being permanent. I cannot remember any tax in Massachusetts ever going down in my lifetime. The only way that Massachusetts politicians will ever cut spending is if they are forced to.

Question 3 will cut approximately $2.4 billion from the $52 billion state budget – not as good as the $11 billion that ending the income tax would cut, but a good start. It will allow each household to keep an average of $900 more of their own money each year.

If you live in Massachusetts, please, please vote yes on 3. Even if you don’t like any of the candidates for governor, it is worth going to the polls just to vote on this question. We need to stop this unsustainable spending trend and send Massachusetts in a different direction.

If you live in Massachusetts, and you are sick of our state’s current trend of higher taxes, more spending, and more laws restricting people’s actions and taking away our freedom, please vote for Charlie Baker. Baker is not perfect. I wish, for example, that he supported Question 3 (to roll back the sales tax to 3%), and that he opposed the individual mandate in principle.

But, Baker is a heck of a lot better than our current governor, Deval Patrick. In addition to supporting a progressive income tax and thinking it is okay for illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates, Patrick decided, instead of spending less, to raise the sales tax in the middle of this horrific recession. And, due to the unfortunate voting system that is used in America, which makes it almost impossible for independent or third party candidates to win, Baker is the only viable alternative to Patrick. He has some ideas that would truly make our state a better place, such as requiring doctors to actually make their prices public and to cut spending by at least $1 billion (PDF). To paraphrase Baker’s most recent ad, if you want change, change governors.

A video of Baker’s rally last weekend with New Jersey governor Chris Christie at Memorial Hall, Melrose, MA:

Paul Loscocco, the running mate of independent Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Tim Cahill, dropped out of the race today and endorsed Republican Charlie Baker. In a somewhat sad series of events, Cahill’s campaign manager and senior advisor also quit last week, but Cahill declares that he will stay in the race.

In addition to being sad, this turn in the gubernatorial race illustrates why our electoral system, plurality voting, is simply bad. Plurality voting, which is used in almost all elections in the USA and in most of the world, means that in each race, you vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

Although this is probably the simplest voting method, it’s far from the best. A result of this system is that independent and third party candidates are maligned for “taking away” votes from the major party candidate who is the most similar to them.

I support Baker in the governor’s race, but I’m not happy that so many of my fellow Baker supporters constantly bash Cahill, almost more harshly than they criticize Baker’s chief opponent, Democrat (and incumbent) Deval Patrick. Of course, it makes sense for Baker and his supporters to wish Cahill wasn’t running, since if his ideas and image are indeed more like Baker’s than Patrick’s, then his presence in the race hurts Baker.

But the only reason this makes sense is because of the stupid voting system that is in use. Adopting a better system, such as Borda count, range voting, or my personal favorite, instant runoff voting, would get rid of this problem by allowing people to express their true preferences without inadvertently helping their least favorite candidate.

I want Baker to win but I also admire Cahill’s decision to run as an independent, and I wish there was a Libertarian in the race, so that these views would get more exposure, even if he or she had no chance of winning. In the Massachusetts Senate special election, I liked independent/libertarian Joe Kennedy the best based on platform alone, but I recognized that he had no chance of winning, so I supported Scott Brown, whom I like, too. I wish that I could have these opinions without feeling torn between two camps (Republican and libertarian), and without the members of the two camps angrily insulting each other. I wish that I, and everyone else, could vote in a way that expresses our true preferences. With a different voting system, we could.

This is sad news – Wonderland Greyhound Park, the 75-year-old racetrack in Revere, closed today. The voters of Massachusetts chose to ban greyhound racing in a 2008 ballot initiative, and Governor Deval Patrick and the state legislature recently failed to come to an agreement to allow casinos or slot machines at racetracks, something that Wonderland was hoping for.

In addition to 100 employees losing their jobs, Massachusetts is also deprived of a landmark that, although not the most upscale place to say the least, is a unique part of our state’s culture and character. The voters made the wrong decision to ban greyhound racing, which is not in itself harmful to dogs. The governor and the legislature failed to agree on a bill authorizing casinos or racetrack slots, which is kind of pathetic since they are both in favor of allowing some number of casinos.

The loss of Wonderland leaves Massachusetts a little bit worse off, and it is the decisions of our voters, governor, and legislature that caused this. Massachusetts needs some new leaders (and a change in the anti-liberty attitudes of many voters) who will make the state a better place instead of a worse one.

Photo courtesy of Zchangu @ Wikipedia, CCASA 2.5

The Massachusetts Bureau of Health Care Safety and Quality recently approved a system that increases doctors’ ability to monitor people’s prescription history. Previously, the Department of Public Health monitored a database tracking prescriptions for only a few drugs, but doctors did not have the ability to view the database. Now, even more medications are included in the database, pharmacists are required to update it, and doctors have full access to it.

Needless to say, paternalistic and anti-liberty people fully support this attempt to fight “doctor shopping” – going to more than one doctor to get prescriptions for the same drug. But I see it as the government stamping out the last tiny, pathetic remnants of freedom that are left in the American medical system.

It is bad enough that people are required by law to have a doctor’s permission to have medications. To give doctors access to people’s prescription history, making it even harder to obtain medications, just violates people’s rights even more. As I recently explained, people have the right to control what happens to their own bodies. Doctors have no right to deny people medications that they want and are willing to pay for, and they have no right to know anything about our medical history unless we want to tell it to them.

Here’s a radical idea: Why not repeal the Durham-Humphrey Amendment and the paternalistic medical culture that goes with it? Why not have all medications available in stores and allow people (with or without a doctor’s advice) to decide for themselves what to purchase? Then we wouldn’t have to worry about “doctor shopping.” People would have no need to lie to doctors or beg for their permission for the medications that they want. We could independently and autonomously make our own decisions and would have the final say over what happens to our bodies.

People have the right to do anything, as long as it does not violate the rights of others. The fact that an action is risky or unhealthy does not change this. The new prescription monitoring system might improve people’s health, but more importantly, it decreases our liberty.

It just keeps getting better! Not only is Virginia suing against the federal requirement to have health insurance, but a man named Michael Merlina is suing the Massachusetts Health Connector Authority, the entity in charge of implementing the state’s health insurance mandate. He was fined $2000 for failing to have insurance, and the Connector denied his appeal.

It’s awesome that someone is challenging the state’s individual mandate in the court system, but even better that three of out the four gubernatorial candidates (at least to some extent) support Merlina and criticize the individual mandate.

Republican Charlie Baker isn’t explicitly anti-mandate, but he makes a good point about Massachusetts’s long list of benefits that all insurance plans must cover:

“The whole plan was for people to have more affordable options, and Gov. Patrick eliminated them. Michael Merlina is arguing that the price of health insurance has become unaffordable, and he’s right.”

Said Independent Tim Cahill (I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that he’s against the mandate):

“He’s not asking for a handout – he just wants to be left alone. I feel for him. I hope he wins, and throws the whole insurance mandate up in the air.”

And Green-Rainbow candidate Jill Stein is surprisingly anti-mandate as well:

“All health-care nonreform did was created a windfall for insurance and pharmaceutical companies that are in bed with Beacon Hill.”

Health-care nonreform…what a great name! I might have to start using it.

A couple of years ago, the individual mandate was considered a moderate measure, supported by Democrats and Republicans alike and only opposed by the “far right.” In the early stages of the federal health-care nonreform debate, the individual mandate was considered a given and was rarely mentioned. All of the debate focused on the public option, Medicare cuts, abortion funding, and other things that, although important, are not as important as the mandate from a pro-liberty point of view. Now almost every time federal health-care nonreform is mentioned in the news, the individual mandate is mentioned, and usually called unpopular and/or controversial. How awesome that three out of four gubernatorial candidates in Massachusetts, where the individual mandate was first enacted in 2006, disapprove of the mandate to some extent. People are finally realizing what freedom truly is and how severely the individual mandate violates it.

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is facing a lot of flak for docking his and his wife’s yacht “Isabel” in Rhode Island, where he doesn’t have to pay taxes on it. I actually don’t think there is anything wrong with Kerry’s decision (and the author of this letter in the Globe agrees with me!).

Kerry is a typical Democrat who has voted for tax increases on the national level several times, so his desire to avoid the 6.75% Massachusetts sales tax does come off as inconsistent…but maybe Kerry is starting to realize how excessive taxes are in Massachusetts. I don’t agree with Kerry’s opinions about taxes if his votes are any indication, but I agree with his decision to try to avoid the sales tax (if that was, indeed, the reason behind keeping the boat in Rhode Island). When a tax is unjust, people have the right to do anything they can to avoid it.

Unfortunately, Kerry just said that he will pay the roughly $500,000 in state and local taxes that he would have owed had he kept the yacht in Massachusetts. I wish he had stuck to his guns in order to make a statement against the recent sales tax hike. Wouldn’t it be awesome if our Democratic senior senator took a stand against the ever-growing, ever-spending government of Taxachusetts?

Edit: As Jeff Jacoby points out, Kerry isn’t even doing anything illegal. He is just living his life in the way that makes the most financial sense, given the tax laws.