https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815811

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 07:36:53PM +0000, jim bell wrote:

On Thursday, November 30, 2017, 11:12:03 AM PST, grarpamp wrote:

;  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815811 In that cite, somebody foolishly claimed: "Case 2: taxes. BTC is an asset. If you buy at price X and sell at price Y, guess what, you owe taxes on Y-X. I don't understand how this is news to anyone." The person writing this apparently does not "get" that the rule for currencies  (Euro, Yen, Pound, etc) is that there are no "gains":  A person can change dollars into Euros; If the relative value between Euros and dollars increases, and the person changes his asset back to dollars, he then has more dollars, but this isn't called a "gain", or a "capital gain".  That transaction simply isn't taxable, and the IRS doesn't dispute that.   What happened?  As I recall, a few years ago the IRS decided that they would treat Bitcoin as an asset, not a currency.  Why?  That was a hugely self-serving decision!  They knew that give the extreme deflationary arc of bitcoins, taking that position would render most such increases taxable.  Had they treated bitcoin as the currency it clearly was and is, the Federal government would not be able to rob its claimed share. My proposed solution is obvious.  Consider the following scenario:  Suppose the Federal Government collects 3 trillion dollars in taxes each year.  Suppose each person who paid such taxes, paid 1% of that same value into an AP-type fund, aimed at tax collectors and other major government employees.  That's a fund of $30 billion.  If it costs $100,000 to "predict" a death, that's 300,000 such deaths.   According to Google, the IRS has about 80,000 employees.  The Federal government has about 1.4 million civilian employees.  Might there be 100,000 managers?  80,000 + 100,000 = 180,000.   It would be a vastly better deal for taxpayers to contribute to such a fund, because the Federal government's ability to collect taxes the next year would be drastically reduced...if the number of employees remaining to collect such taxes is drastically reduced. jimbellproject.org              Jim Bell

Here's a very interesting line of inquiry (for values of "interesting" including "I live under the 'authority' of a government"): Find which section of your income tax act actually applies to you, personally. Because many/ most(/ all?) sections only apply to corporations and government "bodies". To find such a section as applies to you personally, one place to start is at the very beginning of the act, it's header, definitions, preamble and "applicability". Then stepping back from that, the act itself requires parliamentary authority (to be valid at all, e.g., in Australia that means duly debated by both houses of parliament and later "Gazetted"). And stepping back again, there must be constitutional authority. Why this is interesting is really in the exercise itself and the thoughts arising from comprehension of the specific meanings of the various terms used (what is "income" for example?) and how it may be seen as exceedingly difficult to create any income tax act which actually applies to you, an individual human (you can imagine trying to create such an act that does indeed apply to you). Finally, the historic/ instigation of the relevant tax act(s) - e.g. I've heard it rumoured that "personal income tax" did not exist prior to World War 2, and that the government then relied on import duties, company registration fees and company taxes, and: that when personal income tax was first introduced, it was clearly legislated as an entirely voluntary affair - just to help out with the war, which patriotic [Americans| Australians| Brazicuadorians| etc] entirely voluntarily paid any income tax that they were asked to pay, and that at some point, the voluntary nature of personal income tax changed or was otherwise forgotten. But this is all just rumours and conspiracies for me - I have not personally done such historical research and so I cannot speak directly to such rumours. I have had a little cursory lookie here and there (Australia), and the rumours do seem to be well founded, but anything remotely approaching rigorous would require quite a bit more time than I spent when I did take a look about 8 years ago. Many ways to skin a cat, and no matter which path, the fundamental is the requirement that enough individual humans actually value certain (any, for that matter) principles enough to hold themselves as an existence above and beyond mere "vegetable" or "animal" (that is, a slave or "goyim" or what have you). Without that base of humans who actually value their freedom (instead either clamouring, or acquiescing, to any claptrap the government feeds them about "safety" or any other rubbish), one might posit that any change will be difficult, be it AP, a new kingdom or "free" state, etc. Good luck,