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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

Tax are also a way to contribute to the public good. Not paying the tax is refusing to contribute.

So although I do understand it's a sad situation, the movie team should have first made sure it could pay the tax and then do the stunt.

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How do you justify burning assets for tax purposes then? It’d be much better if they could simply give the planes to the taxman if they couldn’t pay the tax.

It's possible for a policy to result in an net positive even if it entails some individual negative examples.

it's a given for any policy, but we aren't talking about generalizations here; in the end, it's the particular that matters.

It depends on the alternative you are suggesting. No taxes? A bureaucracy so vast that can handle all imaginable edge cases? Individual discretion of the tax assessor? I think all these could fix this particular problem but might lead to worse outcomes overall.

i suggested the solution right there - forfeiture of the assets that the taxman can't get the tax for.

Ugh I must have been half asleep when writing the original comment (toddler woke up at 4am). I mistook your comment for a knee-jerk libertarian reaction, but what you propose does make a lot of sense. I stand corrected.

Some taxes are necessary, but taxes which people avoid by altering their behavior in ways that are bad for society are terrible.

Wouldn't any tax then be terrible, as people will always try to change their behaviour to avoid it and in general paying taxes is a public good?

You can’t avoid most taxes, it’s taken out before you see the money. Some history was destroyed here because of an inability to pay taxes. You can argue whether taxes are good or not but that’s what happened.

It's not realistic, but if the definition of a terrible tax is one "which people avoid by altering their behavior in ways that are bad for society" seems like it's catching pretty much every tax in that.

Most people don't start shopping at grey/black markets in order to avoid paying sales tax. Most people don't pay their employees under the table to avoid paying income tax. Most people don't move or de-value their own homes in order to avoid paying income tax. Those taxes make up most tax revenue, and wouldn't get caught in that definition.

So it's only those with the means to avoid the taxes are those who suffer under terrible taxes?

That's why pollution taxes are a great idea. You want people to alter their behavior to avoid the tax.

I'm sure the public good is served best by burning down WWII bombers.

In a paradoxical sense yes... Obviously in this case it was pointless zealotry, but one of the main purposes of import taxes is to artificially limit imports to favour internal markets, in this sense free stuff is actually worse than expensive stuff.

You mean so the domestic market for WWII era bombers is protected?

The hallmark of the bureaucrat is favouring process over outcomes. These people are the enemy.

I mean that this is the reason why import taxes exists, had it been with some generic item th UK manifactured mostly internally at the time it would have been sort of reasonable.

I am not a fan of calling people "enemies" I prefer to look at their incentives and context so that when can learn how to change them so that we will have less "enemies" in the future

In this case the airplanes had also an historical significance so it is hard to justify forcing their destruction.

> I mean that this is the reason why import taxes exists

If your point was about the generic usefulness of import taxes, then I have misunderstood you, no objections there.

> I am not a fan of calling people "enemies" I prefer to look at their incentives and context

I suspect you are in your rationalist phase right now, given the Scott Alexander link in your bio. I used to be one too. This is a good starting point, but it is just that - a starting point.

> can learn how to change them so that we will have less "enemies" in the future

What you probably have in mind is to have a civilized discussion among reasonable people and thus determine the best overall outcome for the best of all of society. Changing the system so that the resulting forces will produce different outcomes.

I'm not really qualified to elaborate on the topic of changing power structures (in essence: of the problem of governance), so I'll just stop here. But its a different problem than you imagine, and you will recoil from the things that are required to succeed.

Interested if you could elaborate further here or have some pointers to good references. I feel like I'm at a turning point in my life where I'm starting to see things a little differently. Sometimes bewildered by how little knowledge or control there really is.

> Interested if you could elaborate further here or have some pointers to good references.

Twitter is good. I don't want to recommend specific accounts. Keep an open mind, judge for yourself who has the best arguments.

> I feel like I'm at a turning point in my life where I'm starting to see things a little differently.

That number is growing.

> Sometimes bewildered by how little knowledge or control there really is.

There is a lot of knowledge, its just not evenly distributed.

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