Ignoring fairness of certain taxes and issues with tax laws in general, taxes are the rent one has to pay for living in a place. If you don't have income you usually won't pay most taxes at all. It's arguable how much of the tax system works and what parts are just plain broken and favor certain interest groups, but that's an implementation detail. If you visit places where much of the population evades taxes, you'll find that the state of roads and infrastructure in general is worse than someplace with people paying their taxes. I'm with you if you argue that tax laws are unfair and do not reflect the live circumstances of most people.
If there were no taxes, you'd probably have to buy tickets to walk and drive on roads, stroll in the park, swim in a sea, etc. I suppose you want more of a pay-what-you-use society where, if you just stay at one place most of the time, you pay considerably less taxes. Whether that can work universally I don't know.
> If there were no taxes, you'd probably have to buy tickets to walk and drive on roads, stroll in the park, swim in a sea
Do you have to insert coins into your smartphone every time you call someone these days? And yet it's almost impossible to live without a smartphone today, so people buy them and pay for the plans. But, but, they do have a choice of which operator to use (and, frankly, US is the worst example here, Europe/Asia is much less regulated in this respect, so it's cheaper and simpler there). Do you see where I'm going with this example?
Yes, I only want to pay for things which I use. And have a choice of, for example, which school to send my kids to (if any) without having to pay the same price. I want things provided on the market, which generally makes them cheaper, not more expensive. Almost any example of a market you take, where government once heavily regulated or provided a product or service, but then deregulated it and invited private companies to fill in - you will find that the price fell and quality rose, giving more people (not less) access to the said service or product.
I don't want to pay for: 1) wars 2) torture 3) police abuse 4) government mismanagement 5) that guy who has no job and has a gambling addiction 6) that guy who smokes 3 packs a day and demands free healthcare 7) politicians flying big jets and employing goons with guns to protect them.
It's weird you would use the telecom industry as an example of the wonders of laissez faire capitalism. This is an industry that naturally tends toward monopolies and once acquired, have shown in the past a willingness to overcharge and under deliver.
> Europe/Asia is much less regulated in this respect
Do you have a source for that in Europe? Ofcom in the UK is far more powerful then the FCC and actively inserts itself into all aspects of the telecom industry there. Additionally the EU just passed free roaming laws, a pretty big piece of regulation.
I don't need a source. I'm from Russia and also lived in Latvia. Internet and phone calls are super cheap. I normally pay about $5/mo for my phone (unlimited calls, unlimited 4G internet) and $50/year for a decent internet connection at home. Industries are unregulated and there's a lot of competition.
You buy a recurring ticket for your phone and it's billed for anything else. It's like a tax plus extra use fees.
Privatization is not a general solution though. It needs regulation and oversight to keep unfair market practices to a minimum.
I totally get why you'd not want to finance many things, and I'm with you on most of those, but the world isn't that simple and human behavior/psychology surely isn't.
1, 2, 3, 4, 7) Totally with you here. The biggest defect is that government officials cannot be held responsible for their mismanagement and thus have no incentive to not screw up. This is totally different in a company. Steve Jobs got kicked out but that won't happen to a politician let alone made to pay for losses created. This needs to start with the people. First, getting elected to an office and office in general has to stop being about who gets the most money and money/favors must be eradicated from lobbying totally. Second, voters must stop treating elected persons as if they're replacement monarchs. They should just use Hollywood stars for that and buy their t-shirts or whatnot instead. I'd argue that feudalism still exists in the minds of most if you look at the way governors, ministers (not the religious kind) are treated with a red carpet, awe and looking up to. They're representatives voted into an office to manage things and are still just nothing more than a city clerk but with more decision power in the chain. People have a fascination with those in power and won't stop living in virtual feudalism because of that. Also that a US candidate has to look for campaign money and cannot focus on the agenda (s)he is trying to get votes for is a huge defect in the system. This is less of a problem in other countries.
The spending of taxes is broken and sadly you cannot hold anybody accountable. We could be living on Europa by now if we spent just 0.1% less on wars.
5, 6) The guy who doesn't want to work but gamble or waste his life leading an unhealthy lifestyle won't magically become a productive member of society. He will find other ways to use but not contribute. Some might argue that by supporting him to survive one prevents a worse fate for him and the society.
> Privatization is not a general solution though. It needs regulation and oversight to keep unfair market practices to a minimum.
That's a statement, not an axiom, although it's taught as an axiom. Did you know that the US military is the biggest polluter? Who regulates it? If government can't regulate itself, what kind of regulation of private companies do you expect from it, when said private companies have money to bribe it?
In reality, what regulation comes down to in 90% of the cases is just granting monopoly rights and artificially increasing barrier for entry. That is all. Give me any example of a good (in your opinion) regulation and I will almost certainly find how it works to the benefit of a small group of people.
> The biggest defect is that government officials cannot be held responsible for their mismanagement and thus have no incentive to not screw up
Precisely.
> First, getting elected to an office and office in general has to stop being about who gets the most money and money/favors must be eradicated from lobbying totally. Second, voters must stop treating elected persons as if they're replacement monarchs.
My argument is that you should show a reliable mechanism of how we can elect the right people first. If you can't show the mechanism, I'm defaulting to the assumption that politicians will always be incentivized to be corrupt. And I'd argue that there is no such mechanism, because lying to people will always be easier and more profitable than telling the truth, and so only liars will get elected. In fact, that's the difference between a businessman and a politician: a businessman has to provide a service or product first, then he gets paid. A politician just promises things to get elected and then is in no way legally bound to keep the promises.
And you can't just say "we should...". I think we should all not work and just chill and enjoy life. If I find out a reliable way to replicate that, I'll be the first to share.
> The spending of taxes is broken and sadly you cannot hold anybody accountable.
And it will stay this way. How do you expect government to behave when they spend somebody else's money (taxpayers) on somebody else (government employees and subcontractors) (see Milton Fridman "4 ways to spend money) and are not accountable for any of it?
>5, 6) The guy who doesn't want to work but gamble or waste his life leading an unhealthy lifestyle won't magically become a productive member of society. He will find other ways to use but not contribute. Some might argue that by supporting him to survive one prevents a worse fate for him and the society.
Not convinced. If the majority agrees with you, but I disagree, does it mean you have the right for the chunk of my money that will go into financing those things? I'd say no, you don't have that moral right, even though the majority agrees with you.
Regulation bodies:
Of course regulators need oversight and regulation and it's hard to get right.
Total transparency is the first step in everything. No penny can cross a table visibly without being accounted for.
But it's easy to involve malevolent parties in oversight, looking for their own outcome rather than find a universally beneficial regulation. Hard nut to crack.
Election:
Probably getting rid of all the financial madness and imitate countries where even right wing idiots can get into congress is a start. That is a reflection of the people's opinions after all. But you need to educate people and eradicate unfounded fears which are exploited by politicians. Not all education is correct as can be seen in some folks' strong opinions that look like straight from the dark ages.
Unproductive gambler:
You cannot expel the guy, you cannot shutdown the guy, so you can therapy him or support his lifestyle enough that he doesn't become a larger burden. This will be hard to sell and seen as fascist style government (or that's what people will reference anyway) if you force him to lead a more productive life.
Spending:
Put into law that misspending has consequences like getting fired. How nice it would be if, for a change, those who made the final decision or ignored the work of their underlings would have to face consequences. This is something that I believe is deeply ingrained in Japanese society but I don't know if it works. And, like a company, if you spend N, then there's no magic fountain for another N amount of money. That alone would solve a lot. Making taxes purpose-bound would go a long way in the right direction. In Germany trucks pay a road toll per kilometer but from the greater than 7 billion EUROs not much seems to be left for roads, judging by the debates on missing funds for road infrastructure. In a company people do not use the training budget for buying smokes and if they do it's a badly managed company.
Idea1:
Make government office about points to gain for problems solved, like friggin school. More points equals more credit to spend extra. If you mess up you lose rights to spend and make executive decisions.
Idea2:
Oversight and regulation for those who actually lobby and/or come up with policies for officials to sign off. Those are the same group of people lingering around DC for 50 years, and everybody thinks it makes a difference whether Trump or Bob Hope is elected president.
Idea3:
Hold candidates accountable to promises they make. Suddenly they will stop or use imprecise light rethoric that doesn't convey anything. Either way it would stop false belief in someone's promise.
From reading your post I feel like there's this thinking that's ingrained very deep in you, which is that no matter how corrupt or awful the system is, you think the solution is more government and more control... layers of control. Could you for a moment just forget about it all and think, really imagine, what a world would look without governments? But don't imagine chaotic endless tribal wars. Imagine it to be a good place. It's a good exercise: no matter your political views, just imagine a world where there are no governments and just private businesses. Make it work. Think about details. How would you make it work if you knew there is no way you can create a government?
I like to think I don't have political views, just observing faults of existing structures and finding bug fixes. I'm neither left or right or peachpie. Maybe you would call me a realist and I'm sure there's a way to put me in a box for that view, though it's important to stress that I don't subscribe to any particular political system. Humans are just too hard to manage that none of those black/white ideologies work.
Having zero governing bodies is a thought experiment laid out more than a few times in Sci-Fi, so assuming those weren't totally wrong, I don't think the human race can do without. The problem are humans and their motivations. Greed is one problem, laziness another. I don't know how to solve those. How do you make sure people do not exploit their freedom by making others suffer?
Okay, let's say there's no governing body. Now, there's a dispute. How is it resolved? Fight to death? The achievement of modern society is that we do not kill each other, and that requires rule makers, rule enforcers, oversight to keep chaos down to a minimum. If we do, it's a punishable offense. But punishment as implemented right now is totally wrong and doesn't solve anything. Putting people away for years does not make the crime undone and also doesn't turn a killer into a pet store owner. There are experiments with different kinds of containment and reintegration into society but this is also a hard problem that's unsolved.
I honestly don't know how without some sort of management entity a peer to peer society would work without rules of any kind.
Once you enact rules of conduct, you have everyone follow the rules, and something somewhere needs to make sure rules are not broken unjustifiably.
It's like distributed systems or cooperative threading, if you think about it.
> Okay, let's say there's no governing body. Now, there's a dispute. How is it resolved? Fight to death?
You've got an excellent question and I've got an excellent answer for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o
It's a short video, but I highly recommend it to you (skip the first minute or so for a short historical intro). Please come back here and let me know if it answered your question. I also hope it doesn't just answer your question, but sets in your in a different mode for thinking, mode in which problems that seemed unsolvable can now be solved.
Watched it and as I guessed you will again have, like in a distributed system, some management facility. Friedman call it a judge or arbitrator and everyone can have their own, where judges will work out contracts between themselves for disputes of their own.
So, this all sounds like P2P with an evolutionary system of contracts between all kinds of parties, where there's no universal rule book (aka what we know as a country's laws).
If this really works, good, but how do you solve that humans will see that the contract between two other parties is better and will want the same deal? Will you give it to them?
I'd really like to think this is workable as it would give custom-fit "laws" for everybody. Though, there still needs to be some kind of general laws for heinous crimes, doesn't it?
> If this really works, good, but how do you solve that humans will see that the contract between two other parties is better and will want the same deal? Will you give it to them?
Not sure I understand the question. Who is giving whom the contract? The idea is, if you don't like the laws your protection agency / law firm provides you with, you switch firms. And that way you have a lot more control under which set of laws you want to live.
Once another party is involved you end up coming up with another agreement and first you need to agree which arbiter is used. You have more choice but where's body that makes sure everybody chooses the better judge so that bad judges get nothing to rule?
You sign up for a law firm and trust it with its choice of arbiters. Much like when you buy a cake, you trust the baker with ingredients and recipes. If you later feel sick, you never go to that bakery again and trash its reputation.
The U.S. has a very strange corporate tax system. Why should Apple have to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they make selling in Germany a phone made of Korean components in a Chinese factory? That's above and beyond whatever taxes they're paying in the supplier nations and in Germany itself, which I assume are not insignificant.
As long as they pay taxes on that profit somewhere I don't care. At the moment they don't pay them anywhere, instead telling the Germans that the profits were made by the US part of the company and so can't be taxed there, and then using the US's daft repatriation laws to avoid paying US taxes by just leaving the profits offshore.
Usually states want to see taxes for stuff bought by people on their premises, and this is where Google and co are escaping, but this is all a little unclear with e-commerce and all.
