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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

I have some questions for you. Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket? Between someone who believes regulations do more harm than good from someone who is pissed off at a couple of minor regulations? Between someone who believes in experimenting with new forms of governance and someone who wants to dominate the poor?

Surely some of those ideas attract selfish people, but is it that unreasonable to think that a lot of them actually believe in the stated mission?

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I have some questions for you. Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket?

If that is a problem, it is a problem for those advocating these policies. If you selflessly advocate policies benefiting the wealthy, low and behold, many of those seeking to benefit will appear. If these types generate corruption or exploitation, how do you filter them out?

In general, a lot of low-regulation, low-tax advocates claim that selfishness isn't a problem, that these approaches can benefit everyone even when everyone looks out for themselves.

The problem with such approach is they don't consider that those attracted to these approaches for selfish reasons aren't going to be satisfied with simply an efficient, meritocratic system that turns selfishness to a universal benefit and that instead the truly selfish cheat, take any resource they can get access to and essentially spoil many idealized "general benefit through individual benefit" systems, turning them into just "the strong prey on the weak" approaches.

And those on the sidelines looking at the situation can say, "Oh, looks a few people actually believed this stuff, too bad for them that the overall process was swamped by those just aiming for a buck." But this situation doesn't raise our overall admiration for any of them.

With high taxes, governments must have huge amount of power to be able to collect and spend all the money. So then, this same people you talk about, go into the government. And usually they manage to do much more harm this way than in low tax case where power is distributed to more people.

Feel free to give us a historical example where the "low tax case" distributed power to "more" people.

This year Russia introduced new taxes and that worsened the already bad economic situation. Europe doesn't produce nearly the same amount of innovation and startups as US, most likely because of higher taxes on business. Because taxes in US are not higher, people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk can spend their money on things they find important instead of all that money being handled by the few people in the government.

I am not saying that the tax should be 0% as governments provide some useful services, but 50% is way too much to buy a bundle of services you can't pick from. The only way to find a better balance is to be able to experiment with different ways of organizing government, and seasteading could help with this.

So your example of a "low tax case" distributing power to "more" people is Russia.

I think whatever point there is to this argument has been made.

No, please read the rest of the comment. My main example was USA vs Europe, where lower US taxes make possible things like SpaceX.

Space X relies on government contracts and government funded research not the tax savings of tech billionaires. And yes I read the rest.

ESA also relies on government funding, but its chief was saying that reusability is not needed because with reusable rockets workers would have nothing to do half of the year. And other NASA contractors didn't get much done either. So a particular millionaire keeping his millions was crucial for the whole thing to succeed. Could someone working at NASA accomplish the same? Yes if there was a good way to measure good and bad decisions made by different people, so that multiple routes are explored, and failing route is discarded despite its proponent being a respected person, but unfortunately we do not have a working way for that other than money.

I hope you agree that so far in all places where state tried to take all the money and redistribute everyone ended up worse off (USSR, North Korea, Cuba, Maoist China, Venezuela). You may not agree, but as far as i can tell Europe is lagging behind USA in terms of innovation because of higher taxes. And Singapore's economy is growing faster than US because of lower tax rate.

I am not suggesting that all taxes should be eliminated or even that they should be returned to their pre WW1 levels, but based on this i think it is a reasonable hypothesis that lower tax could be more beneficial for society, and if some people want to test that out on a seastead they should not be met with hostility for trying to destroy the social state and not pay taxes.

> Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral

Ask them if they are currently living in a country with a centralized government, a police force, civil society, etc. If the answer is yes, you don't have to listen to them anymore.

Probably not really. If you really hate paying taxes you can convince yourself that taxes are bad. If you ignore all evidence to the contrary and just really hate filing paperwork and following rules, you can convince yourself that regulation is harmful. If you actually want to experiment with new forms of governance, you will need to convince lots of other people to go along instead of just declaring yourself sovereign and then complaining that other countries don't recognize your right to do that just because you're rich.

And if you hate the rich, you can convince yourself that no tax rate is too high. If you just really hate big business, there's no such thing as a bad regulation, because anything that makes life harder for business is a good thing.

Is it possible to distinguish someone who thinks taxes are good from society from someone who hates everyone better off from themselves?

Absolutely you can distinguish. The person who hates everyone better off than themselves would have to make a special exemption for themselves so that all their money wouldn't be taxed away too and leave them at best on an even playing field with those they (previously?) hated. The person who believes taxes are good for society would of course happily (or at least voluntarily) pay their share of whatever the mandated tax was. Inverting the original question semantically doesn't mean that you've provided a valid counter-example.

> The person who hates everyone better off than themselves would have to make a special exemption for themselves so that all their money wouldn't be taxed away too and leave them at best on an even playing field with those they (previously?) hated. The person who believes taxes are good for society would of course happily (or at least voluntarily) pay their share of whatever the mandated tax was.

So what does this mean for people who support progressive tax brackets? Since they think they should pay a smaller share of their income than others - and specifically that those better off should pay more than they do.

This simply speaks to the impetus behind progressive taxes: that each additional dollar has decreasing marginal utility. Therefore, to extract the maximum amount of value for society in aggregate, it makes the most sense to put the highest taxes on money that has the least utility.

You could also make the argument along other lines, such as that the wealthiest individuals have benefitted most from the cohesion/quality of the society, and should therefore be most responsible for its upkeep in kind.

I don't see the relevance here. Upthread you were saying that it was impossible to distinguish "wanting lower taxes because taxes are bad" and "wanting lower taxes because I want more money". Holding similar standards of evidence would make it impossible to distinguish "I want higher taxes because the government can do better things with the money" or "I want higher taxes because of the marginal utility of money" from "I want higher taxes because fuck the rich". You then suggested that you could tell the higher-tax positions apart by the speaker's willingness to comply with the increased taxes. But in a progressive tax system, the speaker is proposing higher tax rates for others than for themselves - which is very similar to "making(sic) a special exemption for themselves so that all their money wouldn't be taxed away too and leave them at best on an even playing field with those they (previously?) hated".

Making the exemption wider doesn't really escape your earlier argument.

No, the person proposing the progressive tax is simply saying that there is an optimal, non-zero level of taxation that creates the best outcome for society as a whole. This person could be at the top or bottom bracket with no effect on the argument. The richest in our society actually generally agree with that notion, cf. Gates, Buffett, as well as those who have the most to "gain" directly through distribution of public services.

And yes, even though it wasn't my point to begin with, it is possible to distinguish ideologies in the case of wanting higher taxes vs in the case of wanting lower taxes by outcome. In the case of wanting lower taxes, without regard to ideology, both payers would want the taxes on themselves to tend to zero. In the case of higher taxes, the ideologies do differ by outcome in that the ideological party will want to pay something herself, whereas the disgruntled party would have to impose taxes on "the rich" and not on themselves (relatively) to achieve a desirable outcome (this assumes they don't "hate" themselves as well).

"I want higher taxes because the government can do better things with the money"

Note that this thinking only applies to nations which are currency users, not currency issuers.

For a nation with it's own fiat currency (currency issuers) government spending creates money, and the role of taxes is not to fund spending. Taxes fulfill other roles, like controlling inflation and expressing social policy.

> For a nation with it's own fiat currency (currency issuers) government spending creates money, and the role of taxes is not to fund spending. Taxes fulfill other roles, like controlling inflation and expressing social policy.

If government spending creates money where does the money the government spends come from?

Are you unclear on the meaning of create?

What gives it value? If you free spend and free print money to pay for said spending, the value goes away. Quite quickly, as well.

That's why you have taxes to destroy money and control inflation.

There are good reasons why budgets should be close to balanced most of the time.

> Since they think they should pay a smaller share of their income than others

What's your point? They also think they should pay a higher share of their income than others.

I think the point is that by the GGP's (defterGoose's) standards, that's not differentiable from someone who just hates the rich. (And, frankly, if I started saying that the optimal tax brackets would be 99% for all income over $200k and 1% for all income $50k-$200k, the fact that I would pay more than some other people would not be particularly relevant)

Yep. And if they make more, they think they should pay an even higher share. Which, notes, will still leave them with more money.

Hell, my roommate pays as much in taxes than I make, yet he still comes home with more money than I do.

TLDR: "Anyone I disagree with is justifying incorrect opinions." Your argument cuts both ways and can be applied to any issue, and is therefore illogical.

> Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket?

In the end, does it matter? We don't really know what each other is thinking. If we're debating social framework (like tax), we can only judge people based on their behavior. If their behavior is indistinguishable, how they arrived there is irrelevant, in a sense.

Not really. People make moral arguments to justify economic gains. Whether they really believe in the argument makes no difference if the same argument is being made.

>> Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket?

Yes. All the flat tax supporters. A great many people, wealthy people, feel that taxation should not be progressive. They agree that taxes are necessary but disagree with them paying more than poor people do.

Also, use-based taxation proponents. They agree that infrastructure needs to be built and that taxes are required to do so, but do not believe that they should pay for such things if they are not using them.

So yes, there are a great many east lines to be drawn between people who think taxation is evil and those simply unhappy with how much they as individuals have to pay.

Aren't seasteders of this sort just extreme use-based taxation proponents, when you get down to it?

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