Adolf: Is there an alternative to taxation?
Something less invasive than ‘”give me some of the money you make or you go to prison”.
Answers and Views:
Answer by Robert D
The alternative is printing money which means that the money you earn becomes worth less.
Tried by many governments but it ends up with people using wheelbarrows full of money to buy a box of matches.
Answer by Jason
in a functional modern society your only alternate would be philanthropy
of course then you end up with a status quo built on haves and have not and all the associated power games one would expect
which is why an emotionally devoid taxation system makes more sense methinks
if on the other hand .. you might prefer a non functional modern society or else the end of modern society theres plenty of different directions
Answer by micheal
Fees for everything.
Want to go to school, pay a fee
want to drive on a road, pay a fee
In the end, as long as governments exist, so will taxes.
Answer by 78Paris
The purpose of taxation is twofold:
1) To sustain the government and it’s activities including infrastructure development, social investments. warfare and providing economic safeguards (like recently to bail out the banks) and so on.
2) The second main purpose is to prevent the concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few by way of monopolies and to redistribute. The underlying reasons for this are that such concentrations result in poverty and the undermining of the nation / country as a whole and ultimately the failure of the State / government itself.
The State / government simultaneously protects peoples’ property rights through policing, enforcing various legal rights and providing tax incentives to certain investors.
This all sounds good in theory but in recent times has in the US, UK and various other OECD countries become heavily subject to what is known as “regulatory capture”. This is a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.
The results have been that the tax burden has moved from multinationals, various monopolists and the very wealthy, who dominate government to the ordinary citizens, with perversely the government unable to compete with the multinationals, various monopolists and the very wealthy who live beyond the ambit of the government.
The implications are twofold. Firstly you can assume that governance is meaningless and its every man for himself with the sole competence of government being rent-seeking from those who cannot defend themselves and warfare. This is widely the US/UK/OECD position where all government is fully captured by the multinationals, various monopolists and the very wealthy.
In the alternative perhaps as in modern Russia, China and India to an extent as well as various oil states….is heavy regulation with some degree of State ownership of certain industries to allow the government to generate its own revenues without being taxation dependent.
The downside is that taxation dependent governments (in non-captured economies) are usually answerable to the taxpayer. In Saudi Arabia for instance (an extreme example) the government monopolizes the oil industry and has no relationship with the taxpayer at all thus does not need to have elections or taxes as such. Bizarrely in many ways this is similar to the US/UK/OECD position where the taxpayer cannot compete with the multinationals, various monopolists and the very wealthy who own the government and thus have to bear the fullest burden of taxation irrespective of the outcome of any elections.
One solution might be a wider implementation of the Scandinavian model of very high taxes for all including the rich… alongside very high levels of public services and social security in tandem with heavy regulation and zero tolerance of monopolies. The idea being that although you pay high taxes .. you get a lot of stuff for your taxes as opposed to your taxes only being used as further income for the multinationals, various monopolists and the very wealthy as in the US and the UK etc.
This however would be nearly impossible to achieve in the UK or the US without a full scale revolution.
The other solution may be that the State owns some of the main monopolies thus reducing the need for high taxes (like in Saudi Arabia) as well as the possibility of regulatory capture..
This is a very huge and complex issue…
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