Hacker News Reader

The tax filing industry is against it, essentially. Various attempts by the IRS to move in this direction have been stopped.

There used to be a libertarian wing that thought paying taxes should be a little painful so people wouldn't vote for more taxes, but I've not heard anyone say that since the bush era.

View on HN

The Grover Norquist folks in the RNC were not libertarians.

My favorite part about Norquist and the starve the beast folks is the utter hypocrisy of their silence in the face of Trump's tariffs.

So much for the "drown the government in the bathtub" talk - turns out it was always just about the rich not paying more.

Pretty wild to me that we're at the point where even Penn Gillette recognizes that modern American Libertarianism is ultimately just about rich white men who want to do whatever they want with no consequences

It’s not really ironic, he just broke with the LP per se. He’s given interviews with Reason where he says his core beliefs haven’t really changed.

Who said it was ironic? I just said it was wild

Norquist has always been a partisan hack. To his credit he was against the Iraq war when that was unpopular with Republicans, but he’s acquitted himself especially poorly in the era of Trump.

That said he’s not and never was a libertarian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com