Hacker News Reader

Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

I've come to the conclusion that Taxes are incompatible with Encryption and Free Speech. If we're ever going to progress as a civilization, something other than ancient and frankly barbaric practice Taxes has to designed and implemented.

Every justification for usage or backdoor encryption is eventually rooted in monitoring financial transactions, or preserving the means in which a state can collect them. The "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs" are perfect examples of this.

View on HN

Can you speak more to why you think taxes are barbaric? Is there an alternative?

They strike me as one of the cornerstones of civilization. I.e. the state builds things that are for the common good using those resources.

Income tax is the problem. I wish governments solely relied on property taxes and user fees for funding, even if they had to increase them a lot to make up for the loss of income tax revenue.

But that would mean the “pay your fair share” people would actually have to pay their fair share, which they will never support. We all know that the fair share is a percentage of someone else’s income you feel entitled to and not a fee proportional to the amount of state services you use.

You wouldn't necessarily need to shut down social programs. Rich people and their companies own lots of property, spectrum, water rights, intellectual property, etc, and the funding from these taxes can still be used to fund a social safety net.

As a bonus, if property taxes (or better yet, land value taxes) were 5x what they are, we probably would fix the housing crisis as all the property hoarders unload their underutilized property onto the market.

Nobody said anything about shutting down social programs, you can still have those without forcing people that don’t use them to pay for it. Like I said, pay your fair share. The USPS for the most part is an example of a government service that operates only off of voluntary funding from its users.

I'm confused, are you suggesting that malnourished kids should pay for their own lunch (or for that matter, education?). There are some services we have to collectively pay for to live in a stable society.

I’m suggesting that someone not willing to pay their own fair share should not pretend others are not willing to pay theirs.

But you aren't answering the question, if a program for people in poverty isn't funded by society as a whole, are you having the people in poverty fund it because they're the ones who use it? Your argument seems to break down under examination

I answered the question before it was asked. If you want such a program to exist, you pay for it. If your idea is to make me pay for it, you don’t believe in paying your fair share. Whether or not it is practical to follow my rule to the absolute is a different question. I’m just tired of hearing the fair share people justify not paying their fair share.

> I’m just tired of hearing the fair share people justify not paying their fair share.

I frankly have no idea who you are talking about. You're going to have to elaborate because right now it sounds like a cheap strawman.

No you haven't but what you have done is move the goal posts. Here is your previous statement:

>Nobody said anything about shutting down social programs, you can still have those without forcing people that don’t use them to pay for it

Which implies that the people paying for them are the ones using them

There are entire enterprises that operate by this principle. Private Insurance comes to mind first. The problem with insurance and with this philosophy in general is that there are a lot of catestrophic situations you can find yourself in for which you would likely purchase no insurance because you can't ever see yourself being there.

The reason government steps in in cases like loss of job and provision of welfare is because nobody ever expects to be in those situations. But when you end up in those situations, having not bought insurance prior to being there, you will naturally find them pernicious. In order to prevent that from happening, government programs provide a kind of nationwide or statewide insurance policy that you are bought into by default just in case you should happen to need it some day.

You're arguing that you never will, and that might be the case, but that's also strictly speaking a risky proposition if aggregated over the entire population of the US.

Could you clarify who the pay-your-fair-share people are? Not a jab, I'm just unclear on what you mean.

> We all know that the fair share is a percentage of someone else’s income you feel entitled to and not a fee proportional to the amount of state services you use.

So a kid with cancer needs to pay the government for Medicaid? After all, they are the ones receiving the benefit.

As long as wealth is counted as property. Most people I hear suggesting this expect personal wealth to inhabit a magical class of things that are definitely owned but are somehow not property.

edit: i.e. when wealthy people say this, it is usually just a euphemism for lowering their personal tax burden.

Wealthy people require more protection (as they are excellent targets) and more scrutiny (because their financial affairs are complicated, and they can take advantage of criminal opportunities that require large amounts of capital), so taxes should rise with wealth.

edit 2: When people believe that both income and wealth taxes should be discarded for taxes on consumption, you can be sure that they are wealthy with a high income.

Taxing financial assets has a lot of the same privacy-invading, subjective-enforcement, and loophole problems as taxing income.

However, most corporations own a lot of other assets that are already registered with the government, or pay rent to other corporations that do: real estate, mineral rights, and intellectual property. If we can figure out how to tax these things, that could help.

A major argument for income tax is that it's naturally countercyclical, which means that governments tax more when incomes are high and less when they are low. The 'progressive' — concave upwards — income tax is even more so. Per Keynesian theory, countercyclical fiscal policy acts to stabilize the economy, and the US has been more stable since the tax base shifted from property tax and tariffs towards income taxes. Tariffs, in particular, can be disastrously procyclical — a failure of a domestic manufacturer may lead to a decline in economic performance and an uptick in imports, which is then exacerbating. It might be possible for a land tax or property tax to be countercyclical, but this would likely depend on the centralized adjustment of valuations, since there is not so far any automatic technique for valuing real property other than immediately after a sale. History has taught us to be cautious about centralized economic micromanagement.

The temporal effects of income tax are often lost in colloquial debates among non-economists who have the impression that they exist primarily for moral reasons — however, the wealthy, in practice, are very good at avoiding them.

> It might be possible for a land tax or property tax to be countercyclical, but this would likely depend on the centralized adjustment of valuations, since there is not so far any automatic technique for valuing real property other than immediately after a sale.

Yeah, this is a problem that would need to be solved.

Agree that income tax is a problem, but do not agree with your solution using property tax.

I believe consumption tax is a better approach, in my opinion.

Consumption tax is immediate, indiscriminate at the time we spend the money, while property tax tends to be applied at various times throughout the life of the property.

Consumption taxes have a lot of the same privacy-invading problems that income taxes do. To enforce them, the government has to have the ability to audit the financial records of at least one of the parties in a transaction.

If there are consumption taxes, they should only be for the raw materials and energy (as part of mineral rights).

I'm with Oliver Wendell Holmes (or whoever actually said this) on that one:

"Taxes Are What We Pay for Civilized Society."[0]

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/13/taxes-civilize/

I don't think prohibitions on child porn and drugs have anything to do with taxes.

A law prohibiting child porn would make child porn illegal, not monitor my transactions and prevent encryption. That’s called the redistribution of consequences.

Generally merely declaring something to be illegal does not stop it. In most cases it also requires catching people that are doing it and successfully convicting them.

Invading random people's lives with dragnet spying to see if they have committed a crime was specifically forbidden by the fourth amendment of the US constitution for good reason, even if everyone in our government willfully forgot that amendment exists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com