Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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