gavinfielder
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2012
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- Sacramento, CA, USA
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- Political Leaning
- Libertarian - Left
Ah, now we're back to this. I foresee another math problem, probably one more robust and applicable. But first: Which do you think will have a greater growth rate: PGOs or taxpaying population? PGOs or gross tax revenue?My response was that the quantity of PGOs would determine the tax rate...
If the private sector only ends up supplying A...while the public sector ends up supplying B to Z...then it wouldn't make sense for the tax rate to only be 50%. If the tax rate was 50% then yes...the tax revenue would be thinly spread among many PGOs. But the job of congress would be to set the tax rate so that it accurately reflected the balance of labor between the private and public sectors. That's why I said before...the more things the public sector does...the higher the tax rate should be. We definitely should not put the cart before the horse. What the government does should determine the tax rate...not the other way around.
Let me also hear your thoughts on:
- What determines the relative minimum tax obligation of an individual? In other words, what form of tax (income, wealth, property, capital gains, hell, even sales) would be applied to the individual?
- Would it be a progressive tax or a flat rate tax? If progressive, in what way?
- How are PGOs determined to be no longer needed and scrapped?
- Is there any control for PGOs not achieving overhead?
- Do you have any thoughts on what the formula for determining the tax rate might look like?
- What do you think the maximum viable tax rate should look like? E.g., Is an 80% tax on income actually viable for society?
We established previously that it wasn't. Or at least, we established that it is not necessarily:But liberating taxpayers and reducing waste are the same exact thing.
One person's trash is another person's treasure. It's really not easy to try and step outside yourself...but it's really necessary if you're going to embrace enough tolerance to allow people to go down the "wrong" path. Because you might actually be the one on the "wrong" path. That's why it's absolutely essential to give people the freedom to spend their own taxes on what they perceive to be substantive. Worst comes to worst...they end up wasting their taxes...but at least they did not waste yours as well.
That ignores the desaturation of resources in the public sector; which we're arguing about too, so I'll put this aside for now.The fundamental rule of economics is that everybody wants more for less. In our society...we all use our dollars to figuratively vote for the people who give us more for less. Taxpayers are the people who give us more for less. They are the most resourceful / least wasteful people in our society. Because it surely, absolutely and fundamentally wouldn't be logical to give our money to the least resourceful / most wasteful people in our society...which is exactly why we never intentionally do so.
Again, consider how Henry David Thoreau described it..."The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." Why buy the same exact product for more of your life when you could buy it for less of your life? Why needlessly waste your life? If one person produces a product for $100 and another person produces the same exact product for $80...then all things being equal...who do you purchase the product from? Of course you're going to purchase the product from the person who produced the product using less resources...and by doing so...requires less of your life.
Liberating taxpayers would allow our most resourceful / least wasteful citizens to choose which public goods were worth exchanging a portion of their lives for. This would reduce waste far greater than any other option we currently have available to us.
There's more than one way to skin a cat, but all the ways combined have to be truncated and allocated into a finite public reception.Honestly, a couple times I very very very very unseriously considered sacrificing my own life on Youtube to indicate how strongly I felt about pragmatarianism. Would that cause pragmatarianism to go viral without throwing disposable income at it? Consider the case of Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself on fire to protest how government officials were treating him. Why did I only unseriously contemplate such an extreme measure? Because there's always more than one way to skin a cat. And neither Jesus nor Gandhi nor Socrates nor Buddha got their messages out there by throwing disposable income at it. They certainly threw their lives at their messages though.
In acquiescence, though, if you set yourself on fire in defense of pragmatarianism, I'm quite sure it would be on the evening news.
All marketing must be truncated and allocated into a finite public reception. That means that there's only so much marketing companies can do with the payment they receive.If I can't persuade you to invest your time promoting my idea...then...what? Would it help if I threw my disposable income at you? Heh...it depends how much...right? But then how would that be any different from paying you to promote pragmatarianism? Why would I pay you to promote pragmatarianism if you were a lousy salesman? Doing so would be wasteful.
The answer to the question, of course, is that society is no longer economically free, but a plutocracy in which representation is dependent on disposable income.