More Than A Tax Number

I am often dismayed by tax-first reasoning. It seems that many of the arguments that people make for a particular piece of legislation or reform rely on net tax burden. For example, a common argument for legalizing immigrants is that they will help increase tax revenue to pay for things like the stimulus biil or Obama-care or the Iraq War. This is pretty silly. Increased tax revenue does not mean better economic conditions. The reasons to support amnesty for illegal immigrants are two-fold. The economic case for free-movement of labor is as rock solid as the case for free trade. In fact, trade is not free without the ability for labor to move unrestricted. The second, and most important reason, is that it is the right thing to do. Why should anyone person have the right to tell anybody else where they can or cannot live? Immigrants' lives depend on it, and no one has the right to tell any other person that they cannot move to improve their standard of living merely due to the location of their birth.

The same is true for legalizing marijuana. Yes the War on Drugs has been a miserable failure and a complete waste of money, but weed should be legalized because its health effects are negligible and because legal adults should be able to make their own decisions without Big Brother's restrictions, not because weed could be taxed and increase federal tax revenue. This is a tertiary benefit. When you hear discussion of a piece of reform listen for this. I always ask myself, "is it good or bad?," not "how does it affect net tax revenue?"