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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Taxing things makes them less likely to exist. That’s the fundamental nature of taxes, and why I am opposed to every single tax. Whatever we like in this world, the government imposes a tax, and then we get less of it, and more of the government. A shameful result caused by a shameful society

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If not taxes, how do you suggest public infrastructure is funded? That road you drive on for example?

What about public service workers? Teachers, Firemen, Police etc?

What about external costs? If I'm dumping rubbish in the local stream who cleans that up? Who incentivises me to stop doing that?

I agree that unbounded taxes, and unbounded govt are a drag, but I'm genuinely curious as to how you see the alternatives playing out.

How much tax revenue do we need for roads, fireman, and police?

A shocking amount, and it’s well spent, because it literally underpins everything else. The stability it provides (or rather, provided in the past) is what made America so appealing to build and invest in in the first place.

According to ChatGPT. < 4% of federal budgets goes to these things and about 16% of state budgets.

That was also generous and includes all transportation - not just roads.

So yeah, I’m thinking defending current tax level or tax increases using these examples is not in good faith. You’re picking only The most popular programs (do we like police now?) and ignoring the other 85%.

The largest 3 blocks of the budget are military, social security and Medicare.

Personally I'd happily decimate the military budget. Social security however is very popular. As is Medicare.

Ok, so the current level of taxation is definitely not for the police, fire, and roads which is what you led with.

If you want to convince people taxes are important honestly you need to do it with Medicare. Social security, and military.

Aside from the quibbles over how much of government activity is useful and won't get done otherwise so we have to have less of something to have more of that stuff, there are also a good number of taxable things that most people don't like, or otherwise consider prosocial to have less of. Extreme wealth / income, pollution, alcohol/tobacco/gambling, etc.

Someone must like them though.

Are you not ashamed denying them more of that thing that they like in exchange for frivolities like roads, sanitation, etc.?

We live in a democracy, and when you have conditioned society to assume everything is taxed, then yes, taxing vices like alcohol and tobacco are easier to stomach. I would be less opposed to it if every single dollar extracted from the vice was put to whatever society decided to do about the vice (police, treatment, etc.). But taxing the vice is a source of revenue for the ever-expanding state, and therefore society doesn’t actually want the vice to stop, rather they want it to grow in order to expand their revenue.

I don’t want the government to fund anything a citizen wouldn’t fund themselves. If it’s useful, then someone will make a business to provide it. If it’s desirable without the profit motive, then allow a charity to develop. I see charity funded by free citizens as a form of market solution.

What drives me crazy are giant government bureaucracies that are totally removed from the democratic process that fund things no one voted for, that we can never seem to defund.

> Taxing things makes them less likely to exist. That’s the fundamental nature of taxes, and why I am opposed to every single tax.

And government spending makes things more likely to exist in exactly the same proportion (on the margin) and for exactly the same reason.

And government spending without balanced (taxation + borrowing) leads to inflation, which is functionally a tax on holding cash.

(Thanks to the dollar being a reserve currency, the USA gets to cheat a bit with borrowing, compared to everyone else — but even that's not unlimited).

That's why we should tax things we dislike. Taxing death should be universally apprechiated.

isn’t that just an estate tax?

No, that's just the conservative marketing, me dying and how much of my stuff my relatives get are not the same things.

I'm interestingly in agreement with you. A learned understanding of our monetary system [1] makes it clear that taxes are primarily about freeing resources that the state can use to provision itself, not raising money. In such a system it is much easier to point out unintended consequences as well as understand what makes a tax effective or not, assuming one chooses to understand it.

The question then is only how much government you want, which is a political question.

[1] relevant to the UK, but equivalent systems exist in any monetarily sovereign country: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4890683

Governments exist as a response to the tragedy of the commons.

Pragmatically, if you don't pay taxes to a government that has a military, then your neighbor will invade you and impose whatever taxes they deem fit or outright exterminate you, or historically directly enslave you.

I am happy to fund a military, and that’s basically it, and it could certainly be done without income, capital gains, or corporate taxes

How about Social Security? Or Medicare? Do you think you'll be able to buy an insurance once you're old?

But wait, there's more! Without government, what stops me from dumping a couple of tons of cadmium in your water supply?

I would find it near impossible that someone dumping a truckload of cadmium down a sewer or into the river is caught today, even with our insane taxes and panopticon state. In fact I know someone who makes a shitload of money in “waste disposal” who is regularly dumping illegally!

However if a factory was doing it as a matter of regular business, a law could ban this practice, and then citizens could sue just like they do now.

> I would find it near impossible that someone dumping a truckload of cadmium down a sewer or into the river is caught today

Oh, I won't do it covertly. I'll just build my solar panel producing factory and dump the waste stream in your water supply.

> However if a factory was doing it as a matter of regular business, a law could ban this practice, and then citizens could sue just like they do now.

How quaint. Now you need laws? That's a big-government talk right here.

And how would you find out that I'm dumping cadmium? Do you have proof? Of course, we won't let you just visit our property. And without an injury, you have no standing in a civil court.

Ok, but then you have some kind of state intelligence, because you need intelligence for a military to operate on, and then military capability is a function of technology. Then you need some form of law, and law implies police, and conflict implies a justice system, a justice system implies a prison system.

As your society suffers due to poor social programs, the one next door that believes in public education will have a better military due to better technology, maybe they decide they need breathing space...

Your position is one you can only hold due to privilege.

No the city I live in pays $35,000 per student and 80% of them graduate illiterate. Hard for me to imagine a worse situation of misused tax dollars than public education

Surely though in this example the issue us not taxation but rather spending?

I would suggest it until the revenue collection that is the issue, but the outcomes of revenue spent.

If 100% of the students graduated, went on to college, and grew the local economy, would you still be against the tax?

I’d rather you never take my money in the first place, given the government’s track record of using money inefficiently

> and 80% of them graduate illiterate

That sounds less like misused tax dollars, and more like a major humanitarian crisis. Which country do you live in?

The USA of course!

This is not my city, but a perfect example of how this happens https://x.com/mericamemed/status/1909531665250034171?s=46

How did they even run government so "efficiently" before computers?

The government barely existed in the US before the 20th century. When a war happened, yes. But otherwise it was mostly inconsequential

Hasn't it generally grown with the rest of the population? I think it existed in roughly the same proportion as the rest of society.

Most of the federal budget is wealth transfers from income earners to the poor and elderly; these were not federal functions until the 20th century. The US federal government spends didn’t have a standing army until well after the founding.

Running organizations is more about people making decisions than it is rows in a database. Tasks just take longer. Leaders respond by doing fewer of them (high impact focus), or do more planning, etc.

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