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Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

This is all based on the premise that the $2.85b in tax revenue automatically belongs to the state in the first place.

I understand that most people agree with the above view, and they have what they believe are good reasons to think that. (And no doubt many will reply with these reasons...)

But I don't agree. I don't think that any such forcible takings are justified. If people want (as I do) a government to protect them from a Hobbesian nightmare, let them choose to pay for it voluntarily. Such a government could publish lists of people who have paid, and how much they chose to pay, and maybe with a brief description or statement outlining why. People could then choose for themselves whether or not to have dealings on people on the basis of what they find in that list.

One benefit of this is that you could say, "not a dime from me because you're invading Iraq," or "none of my money may be used to fund executions, drug prosecutions..."

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One of the useful things science fiction taught me was to look for where the magic comes in to a fictional world. E.g., travel at sub-light speeds makes it inconvenient to write about interstellar empires, so the author creates a magic FTL drive covered over with science doubletalk.

The magic in your fantasy is infinite cognitive capacity. As if each person could carefully look at the list of hundreds of millions of taxpayers across federal, state, county, and city jurisdictions, extract all the information they needed, fairly contextualize it in the total economic and social environment, and then respond appropriately when they meet somebody new over dinner. All the while managing to live their lives, do their work, raise their kids, etc, etc. And that's not even counting the labor of figuring out the correct amount to pay for each function of government, which on its own is an impossible task for a single individual.

In practice, with human cognitive limitations, what we'd have is chaos, parasitic behavior, and a race to the bottom. Which is why we have a system where the free rider problem is instead solved by having a variety of locales one can move to so that individuals can choose the sort of public investment approach they'd like to live under. If you would like to live in 19th-century conditions, you can buy a chunk of land in the middle of nowhere for approximately nothing.

19th-century conditions wouldn't exist in my scenario. None of the knowledge gained over the last century would be lost. And therefore living standards would be high, and grow higher.

I am still thinking about your comment regarding cognitive capacity. I believe that this is something the media could solve, just by normal reporting.

I want to emphasize that success here isn't measured by the number of "free riders" that exist. I think that success is simply that enough people contribute enough funds to prevent anarchy and do little else. And if you're the CEO of a sizable company, it's not hard to see how anarchy would ruin everything...

"The magic in your fantasy" is a very good check for evaluating the mechanism effects of a new product or service. Thanks for this!

You're describing a plutocracy. People with large sums wealth decide the fates of everyone else.

Do you have any evidence that such a government has the slightest chance of working?

Well, it depends on what your goals are. What I've outlined certainly won't support a welfare state, military adventures overseas, drug wars, etc.

But it would be successful in ensuring that people aren't living in anarchy. It doesn't cost that much to keep police, courts, legislatures, etc. going. 19th-century America did this much without an income tax.

Any such scheme you run into free rider problems. If I am low income I feel justified in not paying at all. Where something like half of the income tax revenue comes from people considered to be poor.

Free riders with no money are fine. And for someone with huge holdings that attempts to free ride? That's exactly what that list is for.

That doesn't solve anything. All you've got is public shaming, and if history has been any guide, the ability to be shamed may be one thing that's anticorrelated with money.

In my country (and presumably yours) there are large companies using any measures they can find to dodge/shift tax obligations. When that information is made public, people gripe a bit but it all carries on. What would the list do in your scenario?

What exactly are we to do with that list? Shall we descend on their house with torches and pitchforks to force them to pay up?

And it should be published on blockchain of course.

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