Anything can be used as currency, I wasn’t talking about fiat currency, I was talking about taxation. I don’t want to go back to gold coins or barter days, that would be idiotic.
Taxation had nothing to do with whatever currency system you have. Currency is just a medium of exchange of value, a common denominator that allows direct trade of values made. Again, taxation has nothing to do with any of that. You can have a currency exchange system like that where someone else comes in between you and the other party with whom you’re trading, and take a cut of the currency that is exchanged between you, or that cannot happen. If I buy something from a dude in his garage sale and give him cash, no one is coming in between that transaction to tax it. There is literally no reason why all transactions could not be like that, except that we need a way to generate funds for social services and government functions. I’m open to ideas other than taxation, because as I already said, when someone else comes in between me and the other person with whom I’m freely transacting, pulls out a gun and demands I give them a percentage of the transaction, that is theft. And that is exactly what taxation is. The gun might be deferred, but if you don’t pay taxes you either literally cannot buy/sell in the market or down the road you will get arrested for tax evasion.
Taxation is regressive, this means that taxes negatively impact poorer people more than richer people. Take a 10% tax rate on someone making $20k a year versus someone making $200k a year; the $2000 you take from the poorer person has a lot more immediate, important and desperate value to him than does the $20,000 you take from the richer person, because at the end of the day the poorer person has $18,000 and the richer person has $180,000. Same tax rate. I’m sure that rich guy could have found great use for that extra $20,000, but the poor guy really needed it because on $18,000 you can barely survive.
This is why we have progressive tax rates. But even these are still regressive, and to the point the progressive tax rates become steep enough to arguably stop being regressive they also approach the point of absurdity; for example, poor guy from above gets a 5% tax rate while the rich guy gets 50% tax rate, so the poor guy has to pay $1000 out of his income and ends up with $19,000, rich guy has to pay $100,000 and ends up with $100,000. You can see how this is still regressive in nature, the poor guy could do a lot with an extra grand in his pocket, out of sheer immediate need, while the rich guy obviously would want that extra $100k but after paying his taxes he still had $100k left over.
Increase even further: poor guy pays no tax, rich guy pays 75% like under some kind of Bernie Sanders plan. Now poor guy is happier getting all his money he really does need, while rich guy has to pay $150k in taxes and has $50k left over. Maybe this seems more balanced to some people, but it’s absurd, because you have a guy creating value in the economy on par with a $200k salary who only actually makes 1/4 of that, and he is totally funding someone else to pay no taxes at all. It becomes irrational at the point you have a small number of people at the top basically funding the entire government.
Also it’s basically irrational to have different tax rates for different people. If you earn more salary that means you’re freely being paid by an employer or customers commensurate with the overall value you are creating in the economy. So it’s already “balanced out”: poor guy creates net value in the economy commensurate with a $20k salary, rich guy creates net value in the economy commensurate with a $200k salary. Once you divide out their salaries by the net value they are generating for the economy as a whole, it cancels out. So the idea of progressive tax rates is irrational at face value, because you’re actually taking more real value out of the upper tiers of the economy where more net value is being generated into and as the economy as a whole. There is no reason why someone making $200k “needs to pay more” as a percentage of income to taxes than someone making $20k, because both of those people are working to create value in the economy at exactly commensurate ratios, assuming a broadly free market system where employment and economic transactions are freely engaged in or not.
On the issue you raise of money supply, the money supply does naturally expand over time, even if you have gold coins. People find more gold, and exchange gold with other countries and economies. The total supply of gold is always going to be larger than the value-producing nexuses centered within economic spheres, so there is a flow of gold to these nexuses and which naturally distributes around each nexus in rings emanating from the center. That’s just how it works. But the question is moot anyway since we don’t use gold coins, we can just print more money as needed to reflect the increase of value which the economy is producing; this is about increase of value, not physical money supply. If you didn’t print more money, or if you only printed more money on par with however much money was destroyed or lost ever year, so that the money supply remains the same from year to year, there would still be growth in the economy because there is growth in value created, and the result would be that the relative value of each unit of money would go up. To try and keep the value of each unit more or less the same over time you have to slowly inflate the money supply over time, to keep pace with all of the new value being created. Obviously our politicians are printing way more money than needed to achieve this balance, because the relative value of each unit of money is going down over time.
Money is just a symbolic representation of realvalue created. That’s all it is. Money is not value, it is a symbol of value and a common means of transacting and trading values.
And you are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of work. The employer does not “steal” money or profit from the worker, rather the worker rents the employer’s capital and means of production in order to be able to work to produce more net value than the worker could do on his own, and the employer pays the worker a salary for that. The salary has to be agreed upon by both parties, in a free (non-communist, non-socialist, non-authoritarian) economy. In a free economy the worker is free to leave employment if he doesn’t think his salary is good enough. In reality, Marx is deeply wrong about the nature of work as surplus-value: Marx said that the employer steals surplus-value from the worker and this is the source of profit, when in fact people want to give their surplus-value to a meaningful enterprise and the source of profit is three-fold: 1) free giving of surplus-value by human beings either in work or in their daily lives, 2) refinement of existing processes of production (increase in technology, etc), or 3) discovery of more resources able to be fed as inputs into existing processes of production thus creating more products, more values.
People want to give their energy and surplus-value. That is how we are. We freely give our surplus-value and work-effort, our “poeisis” as Parodites said, in many different ways. People want to work, they want to generate value in the world and they want to get paid for doing that because “getting paid” is symbolic of that value of made. If you want to get paid more money then you need to start making more value in the world.