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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

If I was founding a new country today, I'd put in the constitution that governments shall not impose tax more than 33% aggregated in all forms on any person. Between federal tax, sales tax, social security, tolls, sales tax, property tax, registration fees, identity fees, license fees etc etc, governments all over the world have become one money-hungry institution that have failed to provide proportionally economically efficient services.

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I propose a simple Constitutional Amendment that will fix all problems in the USA:

  All Rent Seeking Is Hereby Prohibited.

  The End.

> have failed to provide proportionally economically efficient services

This myth appealing to some automagical optimality of "free markets" has been disproved in real conditions time and time again in domains like healthcare, transports, telecoms or urban planning. Please don't pull that science string when discussing societal choices, especially out here where there will be people contradicting you that probably share your technical knowledge.

Even in the developed world, governments have an enormous amount of process overheads and forgo optimizations that are otherwise obvious in places like a startup. This is for a reason aka very high functional guarantees which require extensive peer-reviews and associated approvals by a long hierarchy of authority in order to avoid corruption and abuse of its monopoly. This is the stuff free markets don't have to worry about. This is not a myth and no need to pull any strings. Anyone trying to prove that governments are economically efficient agency has a far harder task in theory and practice. This is why countries that limit government functions to things like defense and infrastructure often achieve faster and better economic efficiency. The countries which have expected the government to function like business to provide any and all services in return of payment called taxes have performed much worse.

I think it's pretty obvious that we have deeply differing opinions about social organizations, as such we both have to take care not to resort to axioms of our respective ideology if we want to talk to each other. In particular, i repeat my previous point: i do not accept your use of "economic efficiency" (for me the material well-being is only a part of the goal). Again, "monopoly [..] the stuff free markets don't have to worry about": no, free markets tend to monopolies in real-life scenarios. Indeed since wealth and power distribution is already highly unequal, any kind of structure will be abusive, with incentives to use its leverage to grow an even bigger share.

> The countries which have expected the government to function like business to provide any and all services in return of payment called taxes have performed much worse.

Again this i do not accept. For one such a government (which is usually called socialist) is very far from a business since it is strongly limited in scope (shouldn't particularly seek expansion) and doesn't seek to extract marginal profit. Two characteristics which are in contradiction with a consensual definition of "business". It would be more accurate to describe it as a cooperative which is very much anti-capitalistic in nature (i assume you agree that "business" is a capitalistic concept).

You are conflating different issues here. Income equality is not actually due to free markets. Monopolies in free markets do emerge but in the socialist system (defined as government providing services in return of taxes other than infrastructure, defense and health+education safety nets) the government is defacto army-enforced monopoly. And yes, no system is perfect.

You have perhaps not heard about how governments all over the world have enriched themselves by monopolizing everything from entire industries, natural resources to sports teams while promising better services to the public (spoiler: didn't work out for vast majority except for Norway). You have perhaps also never been involved in government grants and contracts to see first hand how extraordinarily inefficient, bureaucratic, slow, irresponsive, unmaliable, frustrating, insensitive and far behind the time these entities are top to the bottom.

To anyone dreaming of a socialist system as salvation, I would highly recommend taking up a year or two of a government job to see how it actually functions and what are your chances to improve it even a tiny little bit.

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