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Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

  --  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Why are you in Switzerland? If the taxes are too high, you should migrate to somewhere more "business friendly." Why not Somalia, for instance?

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Taxes in Somalia can be close to 100%, unless you have bigger guns than whoever calls themselves the government this month. :)

The price is far higher than it needs to be, though. Historically normal tax rates were around 10%, not the ~40% typical for most industrialised nations today. From around 1910 to 1950, there was a massive push to centralise control of economies, move nations off the gold standard and onto fiat currencies, expand credit as a means to reduce poverty, and massively increase state spending. The "normal" state of affairs now is largely a creation of specific government policies at that time.

Somalia's a crime-ridden hellhole - I'm not an anarcho-capitalist and I believe that freedom requires the rule of law. Hong Kong and Singapore are two places which remain close to the pre-WWI classical liberal ideal of genuinely free economies with the rule of law, and both have income tax rates of around %10 IIRC. I'm strongly considering relocating to the latter if the UK continues on its current trajectory.

Here, read a little bit more about your paradise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Singapore

Of course I've already read up on Singapore. It's a paternalistic, de-facto one party state, on a model common in East Asia. They make a different set of tradeoffs to Western nations - harsh law enforcement to achieve low crime rates, etc. I've lived in China, which does have a shitty government, but even China's problems are exaggerated in Western media.

The only things on that list I have a real problem with are freedom of speech and LGBT rights. Capital punishment and caning shock Westerners, but Singapore's legal system is actually fair and efficient; it's not like the procedural trainwreck which is the US justice system where countless criminals walk free and countless law-abiding citizens are rotting in jail.

Conscription is pretty much necessary for a micro-state sandwiched between two nations which historically hated their guts. Migrant workers aren't forced to be there (and unlike Qatar or Dubai, they're not generally lured in under false pretences). Even the freedom of expression rules are very similar to the de-facto/de-jure hate speech rules which exist in the West, and they exist for a similar reason - Singapore wants to minimise Chinese/Malay tensions.

EDIT: I just remembered that this HN user - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=frenchieinsg - initially piqued my interest in Singapore. Might be of interest to others of similar mind.

You lost me at "gold standard".

Somalia has taxes. Both income and sales taxes. Perhaps other types of taxes as well.

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