The Tom Woods Show, episode 1118.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of Liberty Education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

Hey, everybody, big news we have just announced the details of the Contra Cruise for 2018.

That's right, this is the Liberty event of the year

that Bob Murphy and I co-host. It's a seven-day cruise. It is the most fun you can possibly imagine.

Plenty of special guests to be announced in the coming days and weeks, but comedian and

podcaster Dave Smith will be joining

us once again on the Contra Cruise, which this year is taking place along the Mexican Riviera,

October 21st through 28, 2018. Check it out at contracruise.com.

Hi, everybody, Tom Woods here. Today's topic is a little bit unusual, but we are, after all,

on episode 1118. I think once in a while I'm entitled to an unusual topic, but it actually

is a fairly important topic in economics. It just may seem a bit removed from some of the

things we talk about here, and that is the question of the preferred tax type.

And I know you're thinking, what form of poison do I want? Well, how interesting is that?

But what's interesting about it is that the discussion about this and the evidence that's been brought forth in the mainstream that says that people actually would prefer an income tax over an equal excise tax reveals a lot about the differences between neoclassical economics and the Austrian School

of Economics that we hear on this podcast endorse. That, of course, is the school we associate with

Libby von Meeses and F.A. Hayek and Israel

Kersner and Murray Rothbard and people like that. And those are the good guys in the profession,

in our view here. And the dispute over this tells us a lot about the way both sides go about

doing economics and go about drawing conclusions. And that's really,

not because I prefer an excise tax to an income tax or vice versa, that's quite beside the

...