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Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

> benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads

That is a terrible basis for argument: we mostly each get similar usage of services (roads, police, yadda yadda) which should be an argument for a fixed amount of tax per person (a poll tax).

If you wish to argue that we get what we pay for: then rich people pay wayyyyyy more so they should get more government services???

The wealthy surely don't get better policing: instead the wealthy pay heaps for their own insurance and security systems.

Be careful making any argument based on services received for money spent because the well off pay a lot and don't receive a lot for it.

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Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. The entire concept of property becomes pretty meaningless without some very basic concepts of a legal system and territorial integrity. Without that you can only own what you can physically defend.

Wealthy people and large companies do generally employ security, but that is merely supplemental. They enjoy the backdrop of a society where the vast majority of people at least recognize the basic concept of ownership, and where protection from external state actors is provided. More to the point, they live in a system where most people see negative expected return from just killing them and taking their stuff

Abstractions like insurance further require a system where agreements can be made and mostly enforced, and where the need for the insurance is low enough for the premium to be workable.

The small security team at any given company is there to handle the the exceptions that don't conform to the larger society's rules. It doesn't replace that protection entirely. You'd need a standing army for that, and you'd have to work full time just to maintain its loyalty.

Even with no direct services whatsoever, people benefit from society in more or less direct proportion to their wealth -- and arguably the benefit accrues exponentially as wealth increases, given that this enables the exponential growth of capital.

> Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place.

What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income.

My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less.

There's a balance to incentives.

I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.

I find this softer position much more amenable than your GP comment.

However, you conflate "businesses" with "entities that pay only some minimal poll tax". It turns out that progressive tax does not preclude complex society. Corporate tax does not kill business on touch. All you've argued for is the existence of the Laffer Curve.

Commercial activity predates currency, and is omnipresent across every tax system that has ever been tried. Where money, there trade. Where trade, there value-add. Or at the very least, combing the beach for pretty shells.

There are tribes without the concept of personal property or money, that make things and build value. No tax can extinguish human creativity.

I'm cagey about secondary effects, but I'm cautiously optimistic about debasing the trait of self-enrichment. I see no reason to take on faith that people acting out of self-actualisation would build a lesser technology. You know you're on a site full of nerds, right?

The existence of the internet protocols is a case in point.

Conversely, I prefer a world without facebook and robocalls.

> The wealthy surely don't get better policing

_Surely not._

> rich people pay wayyyyyy more

Citation needed

> so they should get more government services

...such as corporate welfare, political influence, favourable prices on public land and institutions, regulatory capture?

The acid test for your frame is whether you would have made as much wealth on a desert island, with no market, no value-added inputs, no communication and no currency. If so, then great, you truly did not depend on society. I admire your self-reliance.

Otherwise, you have benefited from the sum effort of every human, living or dead, in the chain of causality leading up to the circumstances in which you made your pile. I'll leave natural resources aside.

I _love_ that a bunch of libertarians are seasteading. More should go. I am happy to write off tax debt for anybody who goes seasteading for, let's say, five years.

If your raft calls into port for trade, then you pay duty and sales tax, but at that point you've admitted defeat. It's not like they'll accept your raftcoin anyway.

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