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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Good for them. The only thing that upsets me is that this technique is not available for everyone.

Watching the us government fire a $150k missile from a $170m fighter that costs $25k/hour to fly at a $250 balloon ticks me off. That’s my money. It was taken from me unwillingly and transferred to to some elite 1% senator’s golf Buddy.

Taxes are stupid and we need to move past them if we’re ever to advance as a civilization.

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This technique is available for everyone.

Only technically. The overhead to manage this rarely works out for the less than wealthy. Not to mention most non-wealthy people make most of their income as earned income.

I'm not sure what you mean by "overhead", but direct indexing has been commodified for the masses for a while. See Wealthfront for example. Even Vanguard is pushing into it soon:

https://www.etf.com/sections/features-and-news/vanguard-goin...

Now that said, I agree the benefits of direct indexing for the non-wealthy is vastly overstated and probably a mistake for most.

I do loss harvesting every year in a simple online brokerage account. There is basically no "overhead", especially since many brokerages over extremely low or 0 trading fees these days. This isn't difficult.

And you probably save a negligible amount overall for your trouble.

I’m missing the key part of this, how would things get paid for?

Voluntary transactions and/or illegitimate violence.

And how does defence work? There would be no fiat money anymore as it’s basis is gone so guess it is Gold or Bitcoin.

You would need to defend yourself so you need guns. But that would be useless against groups of people with guns so people will form groups that defend themselves. Eventuality some of those people will specialise and some people in the group pay others to defend the group in a form of a kind of “tithe” or regular payment to the common good.

Sounds like present day Somalia.

Mob protection racket as a form of government.

Couldn't the government just print money, which devalues the currency, and is thus essentially a flat rate wealth tax?

It would be a flat-rate wealth tax only on dollar-denominated assets, which would exclude among other things stocks, art, yachts, country estates... all of which rich people like to own.

Maybe everybody can start paying for their things themselves instead of forcing others?

Have you an example of a system like this working somewhere?

Of course not, because that wouldn't be a system.

Paying exorbitant fees to market makers who get to set the price to whatever they want directly (or invest billions in PR to control the market indirectly) is so much better than paying taxes to an entity you have some democratic control over!

You are among the very few who broke free. But you cannot help those who don't want to be helped, they belong to the system.

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