Craig Westover: Taxing the rich would cost us all    • Article
by: CRAIG WESTOVER   • Updated: August 25, 2010 - 7:26 PM
Targeted tax hikes would miss their mark and do collateral
damage.  DFL gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton proposes to
balance the state budget largely through "tax fairness."
Minnesota's richest citizens, he declares, ought to pay their
"fair share" of state and local taxes.  But tax fairness is a
moral argument, not an economic one. Dayton's "tax the rich"
plan collides with the economic reality that "ought" doesn't
necessarily imply "can." We ought to have a fair tax system, but
can taxing the rich actually lead to tax fairness? It cannot.
Dayton believes targeted tax hikes will produce only the
desirable outcomes he predicts. He ignores a fundamental lesson
of economics, which author Henry Hazlitt ("Economics in One
Lesson") reduced to a single sentence: "The art of economics
consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the
longer effects of any act or policy; it consists i