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Comment by pphysch | Hacker News Reader

> Western economies are based on consumption, not production.

Hence their present downfall.

> Machines do not pay taxes, making it harder and harder for the state to pay for the welfare of ageing populations.

Taxes are a relic of the long-gone physical money era. Vulgar taxation is a legacy technology that provides more waste than utility in the 21st century.

> Automation simply doesn't work for service-focused work.

Yes it does, increasingly over time. I just ordered my lunch through a virtual cafeteria cashier that was literally a human until a month ago. Someone still prepared it by hand by putting ~10 spoonfuls of different ingredients into a tortilla, but that is already being automated in more advanced societies.

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> Yes it does, increasingly over time. I just ordered my lunch through a virtual cafeteria cashier that was literally a human until a month ago

How does it make a difference whether a tortilla was being made by a human or a machine when that automation just opens up another job somewhere else?

I've been hearing about automation and how it will eat the world for years, yet here we are in 2022 with "help wanted" ads everywhere and businesses literally throwing money to hire people.

> How does it make a difference whether a tortilla was being made by a human or a machine when that automation just opens up another job somewhere else?

Please explain how even a medium large service automation SaaS (say, 100-1000 software developers) is going to restore the 10,000s of jobs it is obsoleting.

> I've been hearing about automation and how it will eat the world for years, yet here we are in 2022 with "help wanted" ads everywhere and businesses literally throwing money to hire people.

Tech has seen some of the biggest salary growth, and America in particular is pretty slow to adapt new tech and automation for business. Think about how it took a pandemic to finally get everyone using cashless payment systems. A ton of restaurants still haven't figured out how to do fully automated online ordering.

> Taxes are a relic of the long-gone physical money era. Vulgar taxation is a legacy technology that provides more waste than utility in the 21st century.

It isn't often I see really novel ideas on hacker news, but this is an interesting take. Will need to think about it more but definitely interesting to think about the best means of providing public goods etc and if the system we have does this.

It sounds like you're responding to a cryptocurrency talking point. How likely do you think it is that taxation (as in, "nothing is certain except death and taxes") will disappear at some point?

Taxation in the fiat CB/MMT era stops being a means to fill public coffers and becomes primarily a means to artificially suppress demand. You tax someone not to raise your funds, but to decrease their spending power.

If you need to fill the public coffers, just ask the CB! You can then use taxation to mitigate the inflationary pressure of doing that.

But generally taxation becomes a bandaid for poor economics, and institutions like the IRS are obscenely arcane and bloated. They should be eradicated and replaced by a much simpler and more automated digital accounting system.

No, this doesn't have anything to do with the virtual beanie babies known as cryptocurrency.

You are describing mmt which has been thoroughly rebuffed by mainstream economists. https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/modern-monetary-theory/

Oh no, not the Mainstream Economists. Meanwhile, the USG is busy increasing their deficit and not taxing megacorps while trying to tackle inflation.

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