At 07:05 AM 5/3/96 -0400, Michael Loomis wrote:
No tax system will ever been perfect, but income taxation is a good system of taxation. Income taxation inevitably requires some accounting costs, but these costs should be going down with advances in computing technology and other technology.
The income tax necessarily violates privacy in ways that were thought outrageous a few when it was first introduced. There were numerous cartoons on the subject, but people accepted it because only the rights of a tiny handful of very rich people were going to to be violated. (I hear the same argument all the time on the privacy list, where lots of people want the government to have root access to the computers of the evil capitalist overlords in order that the government can protect their privacy.) As our capacity to protect our privacy and still engage in complex extended transactions improves, I expect that once again the income tax will come to be seen as an intolerable and utterly unacceptable violation of peoples rights and future generations will be amazed at our ignorant barbarity. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com