Hold on. This is more "factoid" than "fact": recall that income is PAID by people as well as EARNED by people. Most payers have easily detectible physical presence and assets that can easily be attached by regulators. It will be a cold day before, e.g., my employer agrees not to report my earnings. And the same is true for most employers in most industries.
Unfortunately, this is true, at least for people whose employers are subject to income tax somewhere. Taxing businesses doesn't make sense economically - you could collect almost as much money with far less disruption to the underlying economy by taxing it as wages for workers and
Why unfortunately? I happen to consider that our modern social ecconomy is a high point of civilisation. It is certainly a tremendous achievement. We can educate the entire population, provide them with health care, prevent famine and provide protection against crime and agression by other states. All in all rather a good deal. While one might wish to personally avoid paying taxes there are no benefits if everyone avoids paying taxes. There are significant areas of the ecconomy which can only be funded through social mandates, roads for example. While there are fringe political elements who put forward alternative models I find them no more convincing than the claims of the Marxists who made similarly ideologically based assertions not so long ago. There have at least been examples of Marxist states, even though they were not particularly successful and rapidly degenerated into dictatorships. I find the libertopian obsession with government oppression and complete indifference towards coporate exploitation unsatisfactory. The truth is that both are inevitablty interlinked. For the "libertarian" it is unsatisfactory for the government to exploit consumers of utilities but entirely satisfactory for corporations to do so should they have the chance. The theoretical possiblity of competition making this acceptable even where there is no actual competition and hence no choice. This corprativist model accepts supression of freedom provided it is to commercial goals. Consider the linkage between direct mail advertising and surveilance. It is unecconomic for a government to trace the movements of every citizen. The communist countries were brought down as much by the cost of the huge surveilace administrations they constructed as anything else. In the West we do not have government surveilance, we have direct mail marketers do the job for government. Surveilance is made ecconomic by getting the citizen to subsidise it. It is naturally open for the government to apply information collected by these people for their own purposes. It is a salable commodity and the government is a willing buyer. Furthermore there is a sophisticated infrastructure in place to achieve these ends. The extent of corporate surveillance goes unnoticed by most citizens. Few people realise that when they use their credit card in a supermarket they are supplying a direct mail marketing company with a profile of their spending paterns. They are also providing a statement of where they are, and indirectly their income, residence etc. What is needed is stringent data protection laws which enforce the confidentiality of personal information. Note that both the SEPP and STT payments systems conceal the credit card number from the merchant. Cryptographic locks on individual parts of the picture are insufficient however. What is needed is laws which make the financing of the underlying architecture unecconomic. Phill