When my boy Coleman was four, he asked for — and got — a Davy Crockett jacket and a coonskin cap for Christmas. Back when Disney celebrated bad asses instead of fruitcakes, he had watched a gazillion episodes of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. Ah, who remembers the words to The Ballad of Davy Crockett? “…He killed him a b’ar when he was only three…” Coleman was always pretty good at picking his heroes. When he was nine, he wore a Cal Ripken #8 T-shirt every day for a couple of years.
Not only was Davy the King of the Wild Frontier, but he was also a Congressman from Tennessee — an astute political figure and polemicist. His most prescient moment came during the "Not Yours to Give" debate. Congress wanted to pass a bill to give financial aid to the widow of a naval officer. While sympathizing with the widow, Crockett said this:
“Money with which to bless ourselves must first be taken from others. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man... Congress has no power to appropriate this money as charity."
Touché, Davy! Big-picture common sense. Davy wasn’t lost in the paradigm. If someone grows up and is educated (indoctrinated) in a certain environment, they’re unlikely to question “the way things are done.” Might it be that many of our financial and economic policy experts — churning out formalistic data — are more influenced by each other’s noisy pap than by Davy Crockett's common sense? Can’t see the forest for the trees?
Davy came from the backwoods. When he arrived in Washington in 1827, uncorrupted by the D.C. mindset, he intuitively understood basic truths. He had fresh eyes. The best steward of capital is the person who owns it. That person will take great care of what they own and will deploy their capital in the most effective way to achieve their goals. Davy didn’t cotton to fancy academic terms like "Public Choice Theory" — he just knew that politicians spending other people’s money have different incentives than those spending their own, even if the goals seem the same. He wasn’t part of the political hot-air class that welcomes every opportunity to spend the public’s money. The more they spend, the more praise they get — and the greater the chance that some of that money finds its way back to them, especially when it goes to "friendly" causes. If you’re not tainted by the system, it’s easy to see the danger in "disbursing money at pleasure" to so-called “good causes.”
Trees. Trees. Trees everywhere! I’m all for any tax cut President Trump proposes, but I get so frustrated focusing on the trees instead of the forest. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. No tax on car loans. All of these perks come with real-world consequences and administrative nightmares. Why shouldn’t I now charge my clients $1 and have them “tip” me the rest? Many managerial jobs are salaried regardless of hours worked — now every business will try to game the system to fit into the overtime bucket. No tax on new car loans? Anything subsidized ends up costing more. These simple legislative tweaks will likely spawn another 5,000 pages in the Federal Register. The forest is screaming: just ABOLISH THE IRS!
Let’s imagine Davy strolling into town today in his deerskin jacket, britches, and coonskin cap. If told that the IRS extracts money from people’s paychecks before they even see it, Davy would likely pull out his tomahawk and scalp a few congressmen. Told there are 80,000 pages of IRS regulations, he’d gather a war party and burn down the Treasury Building.
We already know Davy was violently opposed to all “do-gooder” spending. He’d whip out his buck knife and cut $2 trillion from the national budget faster than Brer Rabbit in a briar patch. Asked about revenue, he’d probably say: Did you read Rob Smith’s March 10th RealClearMarkets article on replacing the income tax with a consumption tax?
Told about Social Security, Davy would ask, “What the hell is retirement? Where in the Constitution does it say the government must pay people to quit working or stop providing for themselves?” Davy would smell a rat and instantly know that Social Security is a scallywag scam — extracting more tax money for the hot-air class while making false promises to the gullible.
Then Davy would sit under an oak tree and do some ciphering: "If, in 1981, a deer skinner made $30,000 a year and paid $12.40% in Social Security tax, and if that contribution went up 3% a year and compounded at just 80% of the historic stock market return, by age 62 he’d have $3,315,020 in his investment account." Davy would then call the Social Security office (after being on hold for seven hours) and be told the deer skinner only gets about $2,500 a month until he dies.
Davy would head back to Tennessee and raise an army to march on Washington.
P.S.: You see, folks, it ain’t about the trees. Trees are a scallywag distraction. Washington is a giant fiscal mess — as plain to anyone outside the system as corn liquor in a mason jar.
