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Comment by justsomehnguy | Hacker News Reader

> Who do you know that gladly pays more than they legally have to pay?

What paying more in taxes gets more done in the things paid by taxes.

It's like there is a direct dependency between a money received from the taxes and the things made/built on the tax money.

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I don't know if that's really true. The government tends to be inefficient, and I sometimes wonder if having more tax money available just allows them to be even more inefficient.

The rule of Bureaucracy: grow to absorb all available resources

The rule of Capitalism?

The rule of monopoly?

The rule of feudalism?

Greed isn't exclusive to to systems of government.

You're just listing different kinds of bureaucracies. The principal difference with capitalism is that there isn't supposed to be any constraint on everyone trying to do it, and then competition prevents any one entity from absorbing all the resources.

This, of course, doesn't work if the incumbents capture the government and pass regulations that constrain the competition which is supposed to be keeping them in check.

Indeed, so capitalism in its purest, unbridled form has the same flaw: it becomes all consuming. Hence the need for regulation, another form of bureaucracy.

The question is how to constrain that bureaucracy to upholding competition without allowing it to be captured by private interests or, itself, expand to consume excessive resources.

Ah yes, Parkinson's Law.

  (defun parkinsons-law (k m p n)
    (/ (+ (* 2 (expt k m))
          p)
       n))
 
  Where:
  The retval is the number of new employees to be hired annually
  k is the number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
  m is the number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
  p is the difference between the age at hiring and the age at retirement
  n is the number of administrative files actually completed

For an average person, there's not. Like, if I pay twice as much taxes as I do now, literally nothing would change in anything paid by taxes, and I have no ways to effect that change. Same if by some miracle I stopped paying all federal taxes, there's literally nothing that would change in federal government's actions or budgets.

If everyone thought this way the government would be bankrupt.

or $35T due.

"Bankrupt" doesn't makes sense as a concept when when you can print the currency of your debt

The government is already bankrupt and has been for years, you haven't been paying attention as it seems. It's called "deficit budget", and not only they do it every single year, they regularly raise the ceiling they set for themselves of how much debt they are willing to take. They dug a $35T hole and they keep digging, faster every year.

It is extremely disingenuous to put this conundrum at my feet, as if my actions, with my puny tax which I am too lazy to even calculate how much it would be in percents, but it's sure to have quite a bunch of zeros in front, had even the tiniest influence on those decisions. It never did and never will. Maybe Buffett's decisions may, but not mine. So stop trying to shame me for things that have nothing to do with me and never could have anything to do with me.

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