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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

You don't owe $10 in tax, you owe 10% in tax. 10% could be anything and doesn't fix a value for the dollar. The system you're describing is a dollar quota, not a tax, and I don't think that system has ever existed in a western democracy.

Seriously, just try to calculate the idealized value of $1 based on a single tax, perhaps a tax you pay. There's no way to come up with anything. The theory being advanced here does not stand up to even the simplest attempt to apply it!

(There might have been a cruel feudal lord that demanded one gold coin per annum on threat of imprisonment, but I haven't heard of him if there was.)

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It's an interesting point you are making about percentages, and I'm trying to decide if you are confused or I am.

We seem to be in agreement that a dollar quota would create dollar demand, is that correct?

It seems to me that once the pump starts moving, it doesn't matter whether the government charges a percent or a fixed amount. But I think I agree with you that you can't start the pump by asking for a percent.

Makes me wonder if way down in the kernel code of the monetary system there's some kind of dollar quota, or alternatively if the current system booted off a dollar quota. Makes me think of a stamp tax or something like that.

There was never a dollar quota. They represented amounts of gold until Richard Nixon finished a process that had begun during the great depression and fully stopped honoring the right to exchange one for the other. That was the end of this system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

Since everyone was already exchanging in dollars at that time their value didn't drop to zero, although it has fell a lot since then for obvious reasons.

Since people don't really use dollars as a store of value on a large scale anymore (Bill Gates does not own billions of dollars, he owns billions of dollars worth of stocks land etc.) it's not as bad as it sounds.

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