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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

Automation can’t be taxed. Servers consuming electricity in data centers to generate what the next ad someone will click isn’t the same as paying employee salary. It’s not taxed.

So Trump cuts tax on the rich, and the rich cut out human workers or depress their pay.

The debt will have to be reckoned with if the govt ain’t getting their share to build infrastructure.

On the other hand US has the highest participation of people who own stock.

Unlike China, where the median Chinese doesn’t benefit from growth of state run companies.

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Corporate taxes can tax corporate revenue or profits. Stock buybacks and dividends can be regulated or outlawed. If we don't want to force corporations to pay with more equality across ranks, we can take larger portions of revenue or profit and then fund social safety nets and welfare that are targeted at those that corporations choose not to give raises to.

There are plenty of systems answers, power just doesn't care, and neither do voter bases.

> Automation can’t be taxed

Of course it can. Like, for AI, put a surtax on wattage consumed and use it to extend and expand unemployment insurance.

This also has the second order effect of further incentivising power efficiency

Tokens are probably the easiest tax target since that is also the unit of billing.

Tokens are funny money. Never tax funny money—that be Hollywood accounting.

There will be shenanigans with the definition of a token to save on tax.

The participation rate in the stock market may be high, but the ownership rate is effectively the top 10% own the entire market.

> Automation can’t be taxed.

Sure it can. Take shares in companies. Put them into a sovereign wealth fund.

That isn’t a tax by the normal definition, just seizure.

Shares aren't a real thing. They are paper invented out of thin air with intent to pull the money out of capital market. There are already many rules about what you have to do be allowed to sell them to the public.

Adding a rule that 10% of whatever you print must be put under national democratic control is not inconceivable.

Shares are proxies for ownership/control.

What you are proposing is literally what China does to ensure CCP control of all businesses.

Do you really want whoever is in power at the moment to have (even more direct) control over every business in the country?

Because that is literally how you do that.

> Shares are proxies for ownership/control.

Connection between shares and ownership is tenuous at best and rarely exercised.

> What you are proposing is literally what China does to ensure CCP control of all businesses.

10% is not control. China is not democratic. Given that, Chinese companies seem to be doing quite well under those conditions. Better than Western ones.

> Do you really want whoever is in power at the moment to have (even more direct) control over every business in the country?

Do you really want all economic power to be controlled in undemocratic manner rather than democratic?

Because that is literally what we have now and society and governments are getting impoverished and companies are getting outcompeted too.

Hardly, it's quite a clear relationship and exercised constantly - if you do the math re: share classes and look at what a corporation actually does.

In most large corporations, 10% is often the largest single shareholder and/or bloc.

In democratic countries, we pass laws and let that do the talking. If the gov't owns direct shares, whoever is in charge of the gov't is de-facto the 'controller' of them, eh?

So no congress, no laws, no vote of the people after they pick whoever is 'in charge'. Doesn't sound very democratic to me?

> Hardly, it's quite a clear relationship and exercised constantly - if you do the math re: share classes and look at what a corporation actually does.

Look at the stock market. Out of billion trades maybe one is related to actual ownership of actual company. “Shares are mostly casino tokens tied to the success of a company - or rather, the perception thereof.

> In democratic countries, we pass laws and let that do the talking. If the gov't owns direct shares, whoever is in charge of the gov't is de-facto the 'controller' of them, eh?

It could be shares without any control rights. Still reduces the amount of resources outside of democratic control. Not by taking control yourself but by removing it from unelected individuals.

And yet Zuck (as majority actual shareholder) has everyone by the balls at Meta.

That everyone retail seems okay buying shitty share classes doesn’t change what I’m saying, just that most retail investors are chumps.

So you want the gov’t to be an even bigger chump?

Chump who got a 10% of trillions of dollars for free? Any day. You are a chump only if you paid for it. And government never should. The idea of government borrowing money is insane. In theory it was supposed to punish government for overspending, but it doesn't because the punishment is just included in future overspending. Government gets poorer and since they represent us, we get poorer. And more and more money lands in the hands of petty tyrants.

And Zuck owns meta. He has 57% of voice so he can single handedly make any decisions forever. Not very democratic.

He has 13% of shares, which as I mentioned are basically casino tokens he was allowed to create out of thin air (at barely any cost) and sell to capital holders to get their actual money into meta.

Great example. The charter for Meta basically guarantees Zuck has a majority of votes no matter who owns the shares. That is how shares are disconnected from ownership and control.

> Shares are proxies for ownership/control.

But they don't have to be. There could be a law that shares paid as tax have no voting power. The government gets capital gains and dividends but no votes.

The sovereign wealth fund could be required to be structured as a black box, with visibility into it severely constrained. Selling is governed by a strict mechanical algorithm, or at random, to prevent indirect pressure by the government ("Do what we say or we'll dump all your shares").

Hahah, why?

To tax automation. That's where this thread started. Someone said you can't tax automation and I showed how you could tax it.

I'll expand on a theme I've written about many times before.

We want businesses to become more efficient and productive. We want them to produce more with less labor. This is highly desirable.

But we tax that ever-shrinking pile of labor more and more to make government finances pencil out.

That makes no GD sense.

None of what you’re proposing actually does that

It actually does. You've been too busy insulting me to read anything I wrote.

What we are doing now for sure doesn't do that.

Cool, so we should change everything and hand more power to the government which is already enabling all this with no plausible reason why it would even make it better?

Yes. The power to not borrow money from the rich is something that government direly needs. As $39 trillion dollars of debt, that we all need to pay interest on, clearly shows.

the gov’t literally can just print money, no need to borrow it at all from any individuals.

China is currently the most prosperous country in the world. Maybe we should copy whatever they're doing.

Not at all. Before the widespread availability of currency, taxes were always paid in property. Farmers paid with bushels of wheat or turnips or whatever.

Those are goods.

Shares are also not property, in the real sense.

They are fractional ownership.

> Those are goods.

Potato property. A property is whatever you own. Do you or do you not own the contents of your fridge?

> Shares are also not property, in the real sense.

I assume by "real" you mean "land". Who cares?

> They are fractional ownership.

So you acknowledge that shares are property then.

Well that just sounds like communism with extra steps.

That doesn't seem like much of a threat anymore with China as an industrial powerhouse and contries like Norway sitting on state owned industries.

What's your point? I only showed a way to tax automation. The labels are left as an exercise for the reader.

Ooh spookey

It can change if we create another currency that you have to do labor to get, but that necessitates restrictions on currency trade, which is communism, so it won't happen (and that's good because if communism did happen it would kill 100 million)

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