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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

National governments which can print their own currency don't require people for tax revenue. They use taxes to compel people to acquire their currency to give it value. If they can instead compel AIs to acquire their currency, they won't need humans for that either.

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I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but the purpose of taxes isn't to "compel people to acquire their currency", it's to remove that currency from circulation and prevent the currency they've printed from inflating itself out of existence.

Reducing inflation is indeed one of the reasons, but what I was getting at is that the government doesn't "need" people for tax revenue to pay for its services, contrary to popular belief. It needs taxes to make its money valuable.

L. Randall Wray, "What Are Taxes For? The MMT Approach" (2014):

> Sovereign government does not really need revenue in its own currency in order to spend. It is the tax that 'drives' the currency. If we eliminated the tax, people probably would not immediately abandon use of the currency, but the main driver for its use would be gone.

Fair enough, both points are valid

There are two types of citizens: debtors and creditors. Printing currency pays the debtors. Raising interest rates pays the creditors. Income taxes take from debtors. Property taxes and printing money take from creditors.

The government is made up of human beings too. I doubt most of them are psycho to such a degree as to let 99% of humanity die for no real reason.

At the risk of being incredibly banal, the current US government shows you absolutely can consolidate enough of such psychos.

Game theory is a helluva thing.

All you need is 1% of humanity to be psycho enough to let the other 99% die out.

And I do not have much faith in the charity of the most powerful 1%. Charitable people often do not make it into that group.

I agree and I think uncertainty causes people to miss this. A dystopian world is good for no-one. The shitty things people do to each other are scarcity motivated and call me delusionally optimistic but I think a world of total and complete abundance doesn't incentivize people at the top (who are there because people at the bottom allow it) to mercy kill everyone else with AI drones.

> I think a world of total and complete abundance doesn't incentivize people at the top (who are there because people at the bottom allow it) to mercy kill everyone else with AI drones.

They will have one of the strongest incentive: to remain at the top. Moreover, it will not be that hard. In Soviet Union one honest socialist with four revolvers (major general Vasily Blokhin) could easily kill up to a thousand people per day personally (if he were laboriously working overtime). And back then there wasn't even a global governmental surveillance or AI-drones with explosives.

> They will have one of the strongest incentive: to remain at the top.

At the top of what? After all the massacres the remaining billionaires and their families would be all that's left of humanity. Who would want to rule over a human-empty, machine-led Earth for the rest of their lives? Not to mention the attitude and morality of their families and those close to them.

I can think of several billionaires who would be quite fine ruling over a devastated and machine-led earth. Their families are chosen or bred to agree with their amorality, and they and their dynastic families would rule with pleasure.

Yes, they can print, but they can also tax capital. It's not actually impossible. We already do it a tiny bit, we've done it more in the past, and contrary to the dogma blasted from the billionaire-owned media outlets and drilled in billionaire-think-tank-approved Econ 101 curricula the universe will not actually explode if we do it again.

We're assuming the oligarchs control the government so they can be rich and powerful and use that to lead lavish lives. Well with these hypothetical AGI imbued robots, they could just construct lavish lives directly.

Not much different from the feudal era. You still need access to good lands (energy production, minerals) but an army of computers and robots instead of serfs and knights. Like Asimov's world of Solaria.

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