-By Warner Todd Huston
My friend, Leslie Carbone has published her book at last. It is titled “Slaying the Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform.”
It has just come out this week so I have not had a chance to look it over yet, of course. But here is the advance announcement and the book can be purchased from Amazon.com right now.
Description:
In the natural order, virtue and vice each carries its own consequences. On the one hand, virtue yields largely positive results. Hard work, patience, and carefulness, for example, tend to generate prosperity. Vice, on the other hand, brings negative consequences. Sloth, impatience, and recklessness, for example, tend toward suffering.
In Slaying Leviathan, Leslie Carbone argues that since the early twentieth century, U.S. tax policy has been designed to mitigate the natural economic results of both virtue and vice. When the government disrupts the natural order through taxation by creating incentives and disincentives that overturn these natural consequences, the government perverts its own function and becomes part of the problem—a contributor to social breakdown—rather than part of the solution or an instrument of justice.
Slaying Leviathan envisions an approach to tax policy rooted in natural justice. To achieve this goal, Carbone first traces the historical evolution of U.S. tax policy, from the 1765 Stamp Act to the 1997 tax cut. She then assesses the current American tax burden and George W. Bush’s tax cuts and explores the fundamental problems with U.S. tax policy. After providing a historical analysis of federal spending and of expanding governmental expectations, she offers a set of over-arching principles and instructions on how to apply them to tax policy proposals.
About the Author
Leslie Carbone served as the director of Family Tax Policy at the Family Research Council, chief of staff to the late assemblyman Gil Ferguson of California, and a speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. Her writing has been published in the Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other magazines and journals. She has lectured on more than 100 college campuses and has been interviewed on more than 250 radio shows. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
Yep, you read that right. In many states car buyers that turned in their “clunkers” for up to $4,500 off the cost of a new car are finding out that they have to pay state sales tax on the $4,500 too. And still others just might find out next year that they’ll have to pay income tax on that “free” government money. 
Hey, greetings fellow Obama critics, or should I say, fellow racists? Yes, that’s right; if you so much as dare to breathe even a scintilla of critical analysis about the national disaster train wreck that is President Obama and his socialist agenda for America, you are now a racist. Just ask the grindingly prejudiced Southern Poverty Law Center or Cuba’s why-isn’t-he-dead-yet Fidel Castro or Hollywood hackette Janeane Garofalo. They’ve demonized you nine ways to Sunday so own up to being a demon and get on with your life…preferably marginalized, ignored, unwashed, unloved and ridden out of town on a rusty rail.
In his 
Travel writer Arthur Frommer recently said that he will never visit any place in Arizona again. Is it because he was badly served at a Denny’s in Flagstaff? Maybe he didn’t like the turn down service at the Motel Six in Phoenix? Perhaps he was mad because the folks at the McDonald’s in Tucson didn’t recognize him? Nope. It’s because Arizonans are fond of the Constitution of the United States, that’s why.
I had to laugh at an Associated Press headline that is so tortured as to be beyond belief. Naturally, the purpose of the twisted headline is so that the AP could get a Palin reference into its headline in order gain attention for its story, even though the story has little to do with the Palins.