The next American Revolution?

TomPaine.com's Patrick Doherty has this great piece today arguing that liberals and Democrats should quit tinkering at the edges in their effort to retool themselves for future victory and instead should focus on "the next American Revolution" -- a complete restructuring of our market economy:

For argument's sake, let's just assume that, in fact, the problems America faces are indeed rooted in the social dysfunction and energy dependence of our economic engine. If that were the case, the challenge facing the United States would be how to convert our economic engine to one that produces widespread prosperity at home while reducing strategic conflict abroad. Given our hard resource and ecosystem realities, that means an economic engine characterized by resource efficiency and renewable energy.

Patrick argues that this revolutionary economic restructuring can be accomplished through fundamental changes to our tax structure:

What we tax shapes the nature of our market decisively. Since the income tax was made universal to fund World War II in 1942 and '43, our government has relied on the taxation of wages to generate the revenue it required to operate. Income tax was appropriate as long as America was growing in population and expanding suburbia. But with expansion slowed and the global economy hitting the sustainability wall, taxing wages creates perverse incentives. The most obvious examples are increased unemployment and a severely distorted market.

While I admit that I have a soft spot for any civilian who invokes the OODA loop ("As my friends in the military taught me, success depends on having a superior decision cycle: observe, orient, decide and then act. Democrats so far are choosing not to observe, condemning themselves to the same misconceptions that lost the last two elections."), to my mind, this is exactly the kind of "big idea" thinking our country needs.