Bitcoin Forum

What if all taxes were distributed to all citizens equally, that would then be free to fund governamental endeavours as they wished.
I think such an anarco-capitalist model could be interesting. It is very different from communism because it would completly allow free market. The great difference would be that all money collected from taxes would be put directly in the hands of citizens, which seems much better than voting...

What you're proposing sounds like a flat tax rate, I wouldn't distribute it equally though, I'd just have it across the board at about 5% or 10% and then that's it, I think I'm right in thinking that Switzerland has a flat tax rate, not sure about other countries though.

How about people just get to keep the fruits of their labor instead, and fund any government entirely through voluntary donation?

I have thought of such a process as well.

The whole "tax" thing is always the thing that gets in the way. Requiring someone to give up their money with no choice is akin to slavery.

I believe the best system would be for any new citizens to be required to "buy into" their citizenship. This money could then be distributed in the way that you are speaking of.

Each citizen would then have the option of supporting whichever projects they wish to support using their money.

I would also contend that the citizen would actually have the option of just taking the money and leaving, but they would still be on the hook for spending that much money if they were wanting to return to citizenship.

I am getting ahead of myself though...baby steps.

Coming soon.

This argument has been made before, and unfortunately I don't share your optimism for humanity in this aspect. People tend to only care about things that directly influence them so - why donate to hospitals if you're not sick? Why donate to schools if you don't have kids? Why donate to libraries if you don't read that much? etc.

Sure there will be generous people backing important projects, but their donations would have to be continuous and substantial to cover all the people who aren't donating anything.

Btw, how long has the current Wikipedia fundraiser been going on?

So basically people must be forced to contribute to things they should contribute to but refuse to willingly.

Why gets to decide the "shoulds", and why do they get to make that decision for other people?

Sound a little like the 'fair tax.'   Under which there would be one high rate sales tax on everything.  The government would then calculated a purchase level that every one needs to "get by."  For example you need to buy $20,000 of food, gas, clothes, etc per year.  The government then refunds the taxes on that 20K of purchases to you as a "pre-bate" so that your basic necessities are untaxed.

I have no problems with that. My problem is really with the concentration of wealth that corporations achieve with increasing displacement of people and with more and more exploitation of them.

Yeah but many would argue that the wealth concentrates because of government privileges, particularly allowing family sized businesses grow into mega corporations.  If you ban corporations, people could only become as wealthy as much as they and their immediate family could manage in their own name.  The rise of the mega-wealthy around the turn of the century was no accident.  In the 1870s a state supreme court ruled that corporations could be formed to act as an independent entity.  Up till then people were only allow to form a corporation for specific large public projects, like building a single bridge or road, and then only for a limited number of years b4 it would have to be sold to a natural person or municipality.

I agree with the no-tax thing.  If you want a hospital in your area, you're gonna have to fund it out of pocket.  If not, the hospital goes away.  People aren't going to live in an area without a hospital, so they're also going to go away--either due to lack of hospital, or lack of hospital.  I believe people are smart enough to know that if there's no hospital, it makes it really, really hard to live, and if an accident were to occur, it would be much more likely to be fatal.

In other words, those who want to live without a hospital, are going to find a neighborhood like that.  Everyone else is going to live in a neighborhood which does want a hospital, and there will be likely a group of people who run tiny neighborhood-sized governments to make sure you help pay for that hospital to be there.

Whoops, I'm getting into Anarchism ;D  Sorry!  But to be frank, there is no America without taxes.  For a democracy to work, you need to pay someone's salary to keep the democracy going.  Obama isn't selling anything.  He is paid through taxation.  Or, we could automate congress through machines and the internet, which I am 100% in favor of, at least until people realize governments don't need to be this big.

What if taxes were based loosely on the bitcoin distribution model?

First of all no one cares for taxes, no one loves taxes, but even the most anarchist creature is still  socially wired to behave. So we need something to take care of "stuff": road, military, transport etc, etc.

The thing is we need to reinvent taxes so it creates a "positive flaw" instead of a negative one. the analogy with bitcoin would be a crypto open book were you can follow your contribution from end to end. No one has to know who you are but "investing" in your community would make sense as everyone would have access to a "blockchain of general needs" with different levels based on the size of your commune. A NASDAQ like entity would show to everyone were money is lacking and how you would want to help the tribe (local level). It would show where obvious waste are and a need for that "tribe" to move of join a better/bigger tribe if they have what you are. As soon as a "level" is reached, a new tribe has to be created.

250 years ago this kind of concept was a dream, but now the information highway is old news and big data will move faster and faster so a powerful centralized system would become unnecessary. The same way currency is moving toward decentralization with bitcoin (or something even better) that's is the way government should be and so is taxing.

disconnect right there

Services would be paid for by the people who use the services.  Let's say we need to repair a road we all use in a specific part of town.  We need to raise enough money to pay some people who specialize in road repair to do the job.  In our current system of taxation, you not only need to collect the money (an automatic process, which you must comply with to survive,) but then you have to convince the mayor (or whoever's in charge) to spend that cash that you've given him on the road you'd like to be repaired.  Instead, in my case anyway, he spends it on another fucking stadium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys_Stadium), in a completely different part of town.  And the road is still fucked up.  (It doesn't even have a sidewalk.)

If taxes were not there, one might assume the road would never get fixed.  However, if enough people got together and decided they'd like the road they drive on to be nice, they'll cough up the cash and pay someone to do it.  At least in this way, if instead of the road getting fixed, they decided to build another fucking stadium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys_Stadium), we know it's nobody's fault but ours.  And besides that, you have complete control over where your money goes; since the folk living on the north side of town want another fucking stadium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys_Stadium), they can pay for it (which they can't, as most people in that area are poor, as all jobs in that area are apart of entertainment and pay minimum or close to it, not to mention most of the housing is apartments and hotels.)  Those who live in the south part of town will want to invest in the road closest to them a lot more, as they'll be using it more than anyone in the north side of town.

The down side is, areas with more rich folk are going to appear much, much nicer, and areas with more poor folk are going to look as such.  But that's assuming America actually ever drops taxation, which means a lot more will be dropped before that happens.  If that occurs, I can only hope these fictional class distinctions will pull much closer to one another, where rich people aren't filthy stinking rich, and poor people aren't filthy stinking poor.

I agree, but for some reason people do not support the free market and thus perpetuate the lower class.

What kind of overhead does this system include? I mean in total including spend time by individuals, collecting payments and how long it would take to reach agreement on sharing the cost and reaching sufficient amount of investors for one project.

My guess would still be that 80% of the people would just assume that somebody else is going to pay for the road and they'll get to use it for free. Or they might chip in a couple of dollars just in principle, but that's not nearly enough to get the job done.

A free market allows for innovations.  Perhaps some roads are funded by toll boothes, perhaps some electronically scan your license plate and bill you later if you agree to drive on the road, and perhaps someone finds a way to make advertisements cover the cost of the road and everyone gets to drive on it for free.

Beats the piss outta me ;D  It could be as simple as a community joining together and figuring out how they'll go about it, to an automated system, perhaps a website, which collects funds to be distributed by a trusted member of society (LOL) for the contractors who auctioned for the job.

What about a two-way auction; workers decide on prices they'd like to work for, and people decide how much they're willing to spend for the projects--people as in, entities, groups of people, or maybe one charitable rich individual (LOL)


That's what gets me the most.  It'd be hard for America to ever see this day because Americans are trained to be Americans, and Americans pay for their room and board out of pocket, and everything else is taken from them automatically--fixing a road would be considered another expense they don't want, despite no longer having to pay taxes.

Two way auctions is interesting system. Still, would need some sort of common platform. First get group of people agreeing on what will be bid on at on what terms including placing a seed bid in, then people can bid into their part into system and at same time other side provides bids to provide the service. At some point these two would be met and possibly after certain time the lowest bid for providing service would win and the bids for service would be moved to trusted party possibly.

Not really good explanation, but I think this kind of system might be needed at some point. It's not perfect as there needs to be one or two third parties or trust in service providers.

Still, the question remains is this efficient use of resources, mainly would people bidding to get service use their time to produce something. While some party could be much more efficient in using taxed resources.

The problem is, we're assuming fiat will still be a thing and the only thing we're replacing here is taxation.  Given the current state of America, this will run into a problem of the poor being unable to fund their own projects, while the rich live away from the poor in their mansions and beautiful cities for rich-onlies.  In order for a no-taxation system to work, you've first gotta get rid of government, which keeps the circle of rich-being-rich and poor-being-poor going.  Let's assume, instead, that we're in a capitalistic society in which Bitcoin is the popular currency, and due to it being deflationary, people earn wealth, rather than releasing debts.  Thus, those who save will cease to be quite as poor, so long as they don't let go of their digital gold to some hooker with a referral to a ponzi scheme, and those who are rich will have actual wealth, as opposed to the silliness of what we have now.  At this point, when regulation and patents are nixed, all that can be done is to educate the masses (and I mean real education,) and pray they don't allow themselves to slip into another scheme like the one we're in right now.  Used to be, you were poor because you made poor decisions.  Today, unless you're born into wealth, you're poor by default, and will likely remain poor.  Workers will need to feel they're worth MUCH more than their time is currently worth, which can be accomplished by first abolishing the minimum wage.  Minimum wage assumes that $7.25 is actually a living wage.  Obama wants to increase this to $9, and I still don't call this a living wage, especially when considering wages are not competing with inflation.  Without minimum wage, people would (hopefully) fight for better wages (since there's no substandard invisible bar that $7.25 is better than nothing.)  In the end, people fund the rich.  Without the poor, the rich cannot be rich, yet very few seem to acknowledge this to its fullest extent: it's as if you could scream it at the top of your lungs and it still wouldn't ring as true.  The poor must stand up for themselves, and demand higher wages from those with extreme wealth.  Without a government to protect the rich, it will actually be possible.  As it stands, it is not, and the poor continue to be exploited for they spend too much time working to ever know the difference of their circumstance and how swiftly it can change.

Forgive me, for I don't mean to come off as hypocritical; I'm speaking in hypotheticals, mostly for fun :P

You'd want to use a trusted service.  Trust requires many people.  People should be more inclined to vote for the most qualified professional, at the best price offered.  Heck, even the guy with the great handshake might get more jobs than the guy who does the job extremely well, but that's a matter of society, a matter of people acting like people.  Just look at who we decide for our president, anyhow :P  Those who do a poor job are likely to be pushed off the job, or never hired again.  I have full confidence in a free, unregulated market, where the best service goes for the best price; but, of course, there are several drawbacks of capitalism, inherent in the system whether government is involved or not.  People can figure it out, that's what they live for.  Not to work, work comes second, always second to thought.  Once the thinking's all done and through, then it's time for work.

Wasn't there some part of this going on in different ways in different parts in 20th century...

I always worry about the actual power of poor people. They do need to eat and might need some heating source... And these aren't trivial needs for large population.  And then there is power... Everything is complicated...

Any way I'm cynical pessimist... ;D

Very little overhead, the largest cost would be the intermediary between individuals forking over their money and the job getting done. Probably about the percentage you would pay a contractor to arrange subcontractors to build your house bringing together electricians, plumbers, etc.

The time spent by individuals could vary. You could pop in whenever there is a vote and submit your vote or not even vote, handing your voting authority over to a proxy like in stockholder votes. The nitty gritty would be handled by people who are more passionate about such things, which there are usually plenty when it comes to something that will affect them.

As for reaching sufficient amount of investors, that all depends on how much people want to get done and how much it will affect them. It would likely lead to a lot more small projects while large projects would take a long time (like a football stadium).

Compared to the amount of paid staff that gets paid in government whether or not a job gets done or not, the overhead is a lot smaller.

lol i laugh at these posts about making everything tax related voluntary.

you do realise that everyone is using bitcoin clients that were provided to them for free. but how many of them that want a voluntary tax system have donated a days wage to the creators of:

this very forum you enjoy using
the programmers behind the bitcoin clients you use.
the free charting services such as clarkmoody/bitcoinity.org
IRC
(if mtgox, bitpay, bitinstant, and all other exchanges did not have fee's would they voluntarily pay a 0.5% donation on every transaction... honestly)

while saying 'if you want something you'll pay it'. many people are against DRM technologies that ensure fair payment to the workers who offer the service/product.

so i ask this, how many of you can with deep honesty say that you have paid your fair share towards the creation of EVERY product which have been provided for you.

don't reply to me saying you have, just to look like your a hero. as i know many will just reply saying they have just for free fame, without actually doing any donating. i do not need to know the answers, it is a question you should ask yourself and to think about with yourself.

to think deeply and honestly about your own actions while being in the bitcoin community. have you paid a voluntary donation for EVERYTHING that you have used which has been provided to you for free?

now imagine your actions were repeated in the real world.

Man, anarcho-capitalism (anarcho-anything, in fact) cannot have taxes, because taxation implies that some entity would have authority over people. Anarchy means no rulers.

Including politicians, right? That is one of the arguments against government.

I don't hear anybody bitching that they didn't get paid enough.

MTGox fees are voluntary... you don't have to pay them... you just can't use Gox if you don't. There are other services. And you only pay the fee if and when you use Gox. And it only goes to Gox. The same cannot be said of taxes.

Things like roads and the like can be monetized in many ways, tolls, ads, or kickstarter-like donation drives, to name a few. As long as the service is provided, and the providers get what they think is fair, who gives a shit about a few free riders?

In some countries governments give people vouchers to spend on private schools, instead of spending the money on public schools.  It seems to work quite well.

In a decentralised nation where states/councils/counties were free to set their own taxes and wages and compete with each other (I imagine that states that set wages most in line with taxes would attract most people), then yes, I can see it happening.

Such ideas and a scheme I reckon is possible and do'able. It is done now, constantly, around the globe, by corporations. What is needed to remove the monopoly that governments have and move the existing 'market competition' style into each nations states/councils/counties, allowing each that takes part to compete and grow.

Ye, anyway, I think it would work under conditions,

1. You must have at least 2 'areas' willing to take part in this new 'wages/taxes heaven scheme' (so they can compete).
2. Allow each area to set its own taxes/wages/laws/education/health system/sciences/etc
3. Must abide by basic human rights.

How is this different from current situation apart from scale? And how you enforce human rights, and what are they considered to be?

I have paid the bitcoin client programmers through my investment in Bitcoin and thus the added value to their early obtained coins.

I pay for this forum whenever I see a Bitcoin business advertised that eventually leads me to use that service.

I pay for mtgoxlive through my transaction fees.

Even if the developers did not have Bitcoin, the very fact that they are willing to work on the code for free shows that they are getting something out of it. If they were not, they would not be developing.

The key in all of this is that it is all voluntary.

To justify taxes you must justify the use of force against humans. I leave that to the tax supporters.

i dont support government taxes 85% of the time coz i know 85% of it is wasted on non public serving services. i do prefer a system where by every single penny of my money goes towards helping the public, and not to make board room/government members rich.

i would prefer a system where the local town mayor each month shows OPENLY the cost of road maintenance, the local hospital, police, fire, library, schools, disability services costs. and divided that money up between the population of the towns income statement.

and have it so for instance (one of many examples) a blind mans "local services payment" was equally the same as someone else with the same income. but where obviously he would not need a library card, the small amount that would have gone to the library for him is used on the disability services to provide him brail and walking aids/trained support dog.

having a slightly high amount if your a parent. to cover local schools, extra hospital costs. would also help reduce/discourage all those teen pregnancies where they get pregnant currently to have free access to welfare housing. so that in the future people would think more deeply about starting a family.

i did consider things like toll roads, but then i thought if one town only had a small population but was on a major road network, and there was a larger town population 10 miles away that did not have a toll road. then tourists would start to avoid the small town and go to the free access town instead, turning the small town into a ghost town. used purely by commuters passing through that cant avoid bypassing the small town.

but i would say using the money from carparking for road repair would work.

most people think they only pay 20ish% of their income on tax. but once you look at your wage. deduct off the income tax, then when you go shopping look at the sales tax, the hidden tax duty on car fuel, cigarettes etc you will see you probably find close to half your money ends up in government pockets in one way or another. so id be happy paying over 30% knowing i can clearly see the exact local things it was being spent on.


but untill someone owns an entire town and has the ability to avoid government tax to allow voluntary or "local services payment" this is all hypothetical anyways.

Or bill-boards. Or voluntary contributions to a kick-starter-like system, where, once there's enough money, the road will get fixed. Or local businesses could sponsor sections of road, knowing that without a road, people can't get to their business. Or any combination of any or all of these systems.

There are plenty of ways to get things done besides stealing the money and giving it to the lowest bidder.

Difference,

For example, if I ran (voted in charge or something), then I would lower taxes on everything (as I wouldn't be sending loads to the government for support corrupting politicians, as I would have 0 politicians in government). And then I would raise wages all across the board, and I would introduce a law (putting as part of my campaign whilst getting voted in) that would raise minimum wage by add a chunk to be a better representative of a % of the PROFIT of the company. So that the average person gets better wages, but it's still in the individuals best interest to do a good job.

It would be in MY best interest to please the people that are paying taxes to my state, as that would also reflect on my job, and my own wages, and everyone's wages, and the state as a whole for growth, socially and scientifically. It would be in my interest to keep these people and do better than the state next door in case they change allegiance to him/her and start sending their taxes there.

What we have at the moment is a 'government monopoly', where you are born into a 'social contract' with your nation of birth. Stating you will abide by those laws or be punished by them.

Decentralization is the end of monopolies. Monopolies are NEVER good, they always become stale and are very prone to corruption as a method of keeping their power. Every government in the world IS a monopoly (google monopoly, or illegal monopoly if you want more information).

-------

As to your other questions,

Expulsion from states to enforce human rights, imprisonment of civil leaders (by the 'government administration' that I believe would be left). Basic human rights should be as they are now (again, google is your friend), with additions of allowing anyone living in such a decentralized state to change their 'allegiance' to another state at whim (though processes would probably take a few weeks), whilst staying at their current address. They would not be forced to move, and any attempt to force someone of a different allegiance to move would be against their basic human rights.

It's just an idea, a dream maybe

I've considered this as well. If there is a tax in any given society, the very least we could do is have control over what goes where. It's a tax when we all chip in to make our lives better. It's robbery when it gets sucked into war and social security and government paychecks. Though I do believe a no-taxation system is plausible and preferable (nay sayers are the free loaders to begin with as they attest nobody will voluntarily invest in their own surroundings--the average mindset of one who would only pay their taxes if they had to, and would only clean their home if their mother/wife threatened to make life hell) a system where taxes are reimbursed to the public in the form of notes which pay for the services they choose to use would still be leagues better than allowing the guy getting the tax money to pass tax law. Of course he's going to pay himself, and he's going to route that money wherever he's pressured to. Long story short, it's not for us.

You need to make that GROSS PROFIT, otherwise companies will start using Hollywood accounting to claim they are loosing money while still getting richer.

If this was the case, there would be no incentive to produce anything, because producers seek profits, and this system will most likely reduce significantly any profit made. The incentive will also be reduced as one can simply attempt to live on the money distributed to them. However, what will come will be a downward spiral, as one is able to buy less and less with their distributed money because less and less people are making anything, causing supply to go down and the price to go up. Eventually, the economy may balance itself out, as people attempt to work for their money instead of relying on the money distributed to them, meaning prices go down and people are able to buy things more readily with their distributed sum.

Right on target. First the shortages, then the poverty... Just like every other time this has been tried.