If only it wasn't against my priciples to bash sense into idiots using a hammer

I had been aware of the moronic Richard Murphy from my previous incarnation as a tax recruiter, (boo, hiss), but had thought I would never suffer his paucity of thought again until finding this via longrider. The deeply charmless RM, in addition to conflating tax avoidance and tax evasion, cannot it seems understand the difference between Libertarians and the far right:

"He moved out of the political mainstream and into the Neo-Con, libertarian hinterlands."

So far, so easy to dismiss him as a fool or perhaps less generously as a knave given that DK took time to provide him with the correct information and received poorly thought out insults in return, (if you wish to be insulting for fucks sake put a bit of effort in).

There does exist however, despite the obvious differences, a general perception by the hard of thinking that Libertarianism is an extreme right wing position. Part of this is that those schooled in the classical Left V Right model of political differentiation find it hard to pigeonhole Libertarianism. Left, Right and Centre will all come up with various fixes for the problems of the day and they all believe that more government in some form is the answer. Give us more power they cry, give us more of your money, let us take your rights away so that we can fight evil better and all will be well they tell us, the bastards.

The difference with Libertarianism is the desire to take back powers from government. Big government was an interesting experiment that has clearly failed. In the same way that multi-nationals will break themselves up to become more economic because disseconomies of scale have reached epic proportions, it is time to give our state a severe pollarding. Taxation should be reduced not only because this would let us keep more of our own money but because limiting a government's resources limits the government. This is not a classically right or left position, (though it sits more easily with the right), because it says nothing about where the remaining burden of taxation should fall.

We could for instance remove low earners from income tax altogether, rather than facing a 90% marginal tax rate as they do now, (the tax credit system makes me want to put out the Goblin King's remaining eye it's so wasteful and counterproductive). Or we could go with this idea:

"Dr Eamonn Butler wrote that, 'If the government sector had grown only in line with inflation, rather than far above it, taxpayers would be £200 billion better off – enough to abolish income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax.'"

Any ideas as to which is the only party to think that getting rid of income tax is a good idea rather than shoving yet more cash into the endless maw of big government? Yes, that would be the Libertarian Party, (we're meeting on Saturday at 3, upstairs in this pub, do come along).