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Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Abolishing taxes on movable private property, in favor of a tax on land ownership, would solve this.

No one would be persecuted internationally because they refused to surrender their privacy and property in filing an income tax return and fulfilling the payment obligations imposed on them, respectively. To enforce a land tax is straightforward: you don't pay the tax, you are evicted from the land, and lose your rights over it. Who owns what land is also always known, by virtue of the fact that registry of a land title with the government is a prerequisite of owning land.

Economists also consider it "the perfect tax":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

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Or just sell bonds like they already do for 10x what they collect in tax revenue. Taxation just lowers the interest rate.

BTC/ETH/etc create public utility (security etc) by controlled inflation without any tax. And no Bitcoin miner will ever show up at your house with guns demanding their fair share.

Tax is an anachronism of notes backed by land or gold. It’s inefficient, expensive, nearly impossible to enforce, and altogether obsolete.

You have a great username. I hope that in the future you’ll avoid promoting solutions that require violence to enforce.

>Or just sell bonds like they already do for 10x what they collect in tax revenue.

Bonds backed what? It's future tax obligations and revenue that creates the demand for the fiat currency the bonds pay interest in, and guarantee that the government will have revenue with which to pay that interest and the principal back, respectively.

>I hope that in the future you’ll avoid promoting solutions that require violence to enforce.

Violence to prevent the misuse of scarce natural resources is not aggression.

Society at large has a legitimate right to govern the usage of scarce natural resources to ensure their socially optimal utilization. Scarce natural resources are not true private property.

That is what makes a tax on scarce natural resource usage, like a land tax, different from a tax on people, like a head tax, or their movable private property, like a wealth, income or sales tax.

This is a good debate to have, so I hope you are willing to have it with an open mind.

> Bonds backed [by] what?

The train has already left the station on that. It is not now and never will be backed by revenues. It’s backed by all the protections and encumbrances of legal tender. Supply and demand. Legal stability and efficiency of governance is a massive demand multiplier for dollar investment. The inefficiencies of taxation reduce demand by far more than the revenues received.

> violence … not aggression

I think you mean that it is justified and necessary. All aggressors believe this about their own actions. It is factual aggression by a neutral viewpoint. But my point is not moral. Land tax is ill-defined, inefficient, and fails dramatically to capture the sum of scarce resources and externalities. We know this because it already exists. If your goal is redistribution, property tax may be appropriate; I’m not sure. If your goal is efficient capital reallocation, property tax is a maybe, but definitely eliminate any tax on transfer or gains.

There are mechanisms to make property tax fair and easy, with zero aggression in enforcement. The key is that the government does not seize property, it only defends property. So, if you hold title by agreement of all parties, former owner, new owner, and jurisdiction, then the government would defend your property rights. Otherwise, it would not. The government may set the price for this service, open to any party. If someone does not pay, they would not be evicted, nor would they lose ownership, but they would lose the legal and physical protection afforded by the government for those assets. Presumably this is valuable enough that most would much rather pay. This would be merely an accessory to the central fund raising mechanism, which is now and always will be bond sales.

>>The train has already left the station on that. It is not now and never will be backed by revenues.

The $6 trillion in tax obligations created each year create massive fundamental demand for USD.

>>It’s backed by all the protections and encumbrances of legal tender.

What protections and encumberances are you referring to?

>>I think you mean that it is justified and necessary. All aggressors believe this about their own actions.

Not all violence is aggression. If the land belongs to the collective, then the collective has a right to access it, and a person asserting individual ownership over a parcel is the aggressor, who is violating the rights of the collective.

>>Land tax is ill-defined, inefficient, and fails dramatically to capture the sum of scarce resources and externalities. We know this because it already exists.

I have no idea what you mean by ill-defined and inefficient. And of course, we shouldn't just be limited to land when taxing scarce natural resources. Land is just the most valuable resource in this category.

> $6T

$1.72/0.6T personal/corp income tax. $1.2T SSI. $8T bond sales (and accelerating).

> violence … the collective has a right

It’s a noble concept, but, “the collective” has never been historically distinguishable from despotism by whoever controls the money that pays the people authorized to do violence on its behalf. It is the nature of power to consolidate.

Simplicity is not for ordinary mortals. How many people did you think can wrap their head around simple taxation rules?

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