At 11:47 AM -0400 7/30/96, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
If I were the government, I'd tax realty as my primary or only source of income. It *appears* "progressive" so it appeals to the lower class, but it is passed along to everyone in the form of higher commodity prices and rents. Realty can't be picked up and moved to another jurisdiction like personal property or people, so it is easier to hold as a tax hostage by government.
Sometimes, in my wilder moments, I think about it this way: Agriculture created cities, where the "government", actually large landowners, relied on implicitly forcible payments-in-kind of agricultural produce. Industrialism (Maybe. Maybe printing did.) created nation states, which rely on forcibly obtained taxes on cash-flow and financial assets. Maybe, in a financial cryptography -enabled geodesic economy, cashflow and financial asset taxation become impossible as a revenue source for anything but the propigation and/or regulation (probably private) of cashflows and financial assets themselves ;-). The phrase "Government services" becomes exposed for the oxymoron that it really is under this scenario. There'll be no way to compel payment for these "services", so they'll be forced to prove their usefulness in a market of some kind. They'll have to earn their money the old fashioned way. I expect that large economic entities may exist, the way cities and nation-states do, but they won't be geographic in nature, because location ceases to be as economically important as it is in agriculturalism, where land is the source of all wealth, or as it is in industrialism, where actual physical positions in distribution and information heirarchies are so important. (The three laws of retail, and all that...) It's even hard for me to see large permanent entities as salient features of such an economy. That is, each entity will be more like an ad-hoc partnership of other smaller entities, which goes away after its specific financial purpose has been completed. We're experimenting with those "virtual" organizations now, and the word "syndicate" will probably reemerge as the dominant way of doing larger business projects. The financial and entertainment markets work this way a lot, and, even though large corporations exist in those markets, lately there's been a proliferation of smaller and smaller firms as information technology enables their creation. Permanence is a function of physical reality, and information, because it's not physical, is not permanent. It is always in the process of becoming something else. So, real estate taxes may be the only thing left, but they might be used for really trivial stuff, like very local roads, infrastructure (dark fiber maintenance? :-)), etc., and not much else. Kind of like local irragation committees in third world countries (or New Mexico ;-)) devolved from the water-monopoly "states" of places like ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt or China. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/