Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that it costs the government more to protect a homeless person or a person with a house? Do you think it costs the government more to protect a person with a house, or a person with a mansion?

Piles of wealth require protection. Without government protection, they would be expropriated without considerable expenses on private security.

Income tax is the tax that is hard to justify. Wealth taxes are taxes to protect wealth, and sales/transaction taxes are taxes to enforce sales and transaction agreements.

Libertarians believe those should be the only functions of government. If you don't even believe in those, you're an anarchist, or maybe even a Mad Maxist.

edit: imagine the absurdity of people sharing a rented shed paying as much for fire and police protection as a person in a mansion.

View on HN

Yeah, income tax is the real evil.

I live in Scandinavia, and the high income tax (and no property or inheritance tax) keeps the class system intact for generations. You can't work your way up when the government is taking almost 60% of your income.

That said, I'd still prioritise abolishing sales tax on groceries and electricity here. Both are incredibly expensive and make life a struggle for a lot of working people.

Most countries have more of a scaled income tax, but Sweden has 57% if you earn 1.5x the average. Why is that?

To keep the class system intact. The ultra-wealthy don't pay much more tax (and don't pay property or inheritance tax, and capital gains tax is also lower than income tax (wtf?)). It's a far less progressive country than the marketing would have you believe.

And unfortunately all the political parties are just focussed on giving more money to the boomers or liberalising the housing market, so it won't change any time soon.

I think inheritance tax differs across Scandinavia, just a small point really not detracting from your message. In Denmark there's definitely one, Sweden it's none or much lower, not sure.

You can even chose to pay 0.375% on your assets p/a, instead of the capital gains tax. Pretty good. But you’re exaggerating the income tax situation. ~60% is the marginal tax rate, you only pay that for a part of your income over a certain level.

Can you choose year by year? I’d think most years 37.5bps on assets would be way cheaper than capital gains, but in a down year, you might choose to pay capital gains. (Or you could “bunch” realized gains into every other or every third year and take the wealth tax option only that year.)

It’s a special kind of account, you can sell everything and withdraw the proceeds, then buy new assets outside that account. So you can choose, but not retroactively (unfortunately!)

Consumption taxes are regressive and bad, but at least they're justifiable. Without government protection, the poor/weak have no rights that the rich/strong have to respect; they end up enslaved, serfs. So they pay a poverty/weakness tax.

Imagine the effort that a government has to put in to offset racist discrimination, as an example. While we might say that racism is a problem caused by the racist, we can't say that racism is a problem for the racist. It's a problem for the race being discriminated against. Levying a tax to pay for that expense makes sense in a purely payment-for-services model of government. Lots of Europe used to charge Jewish taxes, and the Islamic world both Jewish and Christian taxes.

"Without government protection, the poor/weak have no rights"

Without government protection the poor start cutting off heads, see the French revolution. Every time there is civil unrest, from peasant uprising in medieval Russia, to Occupy Wallstreet to Anonymous DDOSing websites, the government is out in force to out it down.

Having a few limits on power, like "you cant discriminate by race, but discriminating by class is cool" does not mean thay the state is suddenly protecting the poor.

I see it more as a reasonable way of shaping behaviour. Like taxing diesel, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. is fair enough if it helps create a better society.

Taxing electricity whilst trying to encourage people to switch their homes from gas and their cars from diesel, is just crazy.

You then run into the question of whose vision of a better society you're enforcing. But aside from that you can really look at those taxes as something to offset the additional costs of commerce in those things. We've agreed that emissions are a danger, cigarettes raise health care expenditure, and alcohol raises police expenditure. We use those to justify the specific amounts of the taxes.

If this weren't the justification, there's no reason not to just ban the things you don't approve of altogether, rather than just taxing them.

> Do you think that it costs the government more to...

These are trick questions, it costs the same amount. The cost to arrest a criminal is the same no matter who they are robbing. Ditto the fire & police protection - those emergency services protect lives that are equally valuable.

And it is obviously cheaper if wealthy people take on private protection - they already pay the vast bulk of government services which are mostly rich -> poor transfer payments. If it were a reasonable option, the billionaires of a country would take their own private army over a government funded one. It would cost them half as much as the taxes they pay if they live in the US (because transfer payments make up around half of US government spending).

"If it were a reasonable option, the billionaires of a country would take their own private army over a government funded one"

We already ran this experiment, it was called Feudalism. We don't have Barons and Lords because they got obliterated by unified nation states in wars, every time.

There are people who'd give their life for America/Freedom/ etc, have you ever met anyone who would for Mark Zukerberg?

Under current system police enjoys mahor privilidges - qualified immunity, resisting arrest is a crime, etc. Since such multiple private army/police's might come into conflict, those privilidges have to go. We'll be back at feudal warfare

> We don't have Barons and Lords because they got obliterated by unified nation states in wars, every time.

Arguably the most militarily successful empire in history [0] has Barons and Lords and is nearly contemporary with this conversation (Elizabeth II isn't even dead yet). I agree democracy is better, but "we're better organised and we'll whack you if you don't pay protection money" is a weak justification for taxes. The counterargument is that bullying is a decent tactic but a bad strategy - it is hard to get people to seriously buy in to bullying and relatively unstable when the situation changes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire

I don't think British Empire is considered feudal society, the English civil war probably marks the end of anything you could call feudalism.

The argument is diffetent - feudalism gives you multiple warring rackets, its even worse and more expensive

If there is something of higher value to steal, thieves are willing to take larger risks to get it, so you have to expend more effort if you want to prevent that.

Plus supervillains. They're notoriously expensive to arrest.

>Do you think it costs the government more to protect a person with a house, or a person with a mansion?

These are the same. If someone were to trespass onto your property it's going to be up to you to defend it. The police are too far away to come save you. There's no difference from the police's perspective since the size of your property doesn't matter to them. Whatever work they do upstream to protect you does not depend on the size of your property.

If the police were close to you, the value of that plot would be higher, or at least its associated costs would be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com