The solution to economics

[Silhouette]

Sil.. the reason I mentioned procreation, is because.. wouldn’t the (all too) human factor have to be factored in, to the configuration, in order to achieve a more realistic resultant observational outcome, and other such human whims and woes that would cause an economy to fluctuate.

Erm, so in so many words, oughtn't I/we to factor in a certain unpredictability into our predictions about my solution?

I'm sure plenty of weird shit will happen as a result of what I propose, but at least we'd have inbuilt mechanisms to contain the limits this time around, which will only work in the first place because we're all human.

I'm not offering a perfect utopia, just a couple of extremely precisely targetted tweaks to improve what we already have by a great deal for everyone - despite things at the moment already having plenty of positive consequences.

You have so far failed to convince in the second stage, Silhouette. How to enforce your idea? We just need to naturally trust that it will work, but what of the transition even if it does work, say over the course of a hundred or maybe a few thousand years (you anticipate on no criteria at all), to gather some momentum? Aren't there still taxes to be paid then, yes? So how does that work, do the billionaires pay double? It cant function if implementation is impossible.

Agreed that it can't function if implementation is impossible. A couple of posts ago I anticipated a particular set of events based on some Game Theory, so maybe you missed that since you seem to feel I've anticipated no criteria at all? I'm not going to anticipate hundreds or thousands of years into the future though, at least not before I've ironed out the details I'm still in the process of thinking through, sorry. By all means, exercise your own skills in this department if you wish. But I can tell you that while my solution is in the process of filtering into the mainstream, it can and will coexist side by side with the current system.

How this will happen is quite simple: you choose which system you would like to pay according to. Pick the current system, and all the same rules apply that we already have. Pick my system and you pay no tax on your purchase, and the price you pay will be determined by the current data on everyone's rates of expenditure while using my system (separately to expenditure using the current system) and adjusting what you pay in accordance with where you lie in relation to this current data.
It will begin extremely small scale with just a handful of people chipping in, making the highest rates of expenditure potentially just a few cents (per the time period decided upon when it all begins). Paying "x" times more or less on already cheap items will be nothing for most people, except it'll be a quick and easy opportunity to gain the points that will put you on the scoreboard that my system keeps. There will never be an easier way to gain points than at the very start, to get you recognised forever more, especially for those who may struggle or find it impossible once the whole thing takes off. Such an opportunity will never come again, only incentivising the launch of my solution to the point where it quickly becomes actually difficult to get to the top.

My idea (which I not really deliberately but consciously tricked you into disregarding - if there were some critics here they'd notice that you used the rhetorical opening I consciously left you to interpret "humans" not as "private persons" (as I had already defined it!!) but as the biological species which drive and design corporation) is very clear; no person owes money to the state personally. If he is the CEO of a company that does, he can just quit. If a tax paying corporation his property, that means he has consciously and form a position of great wealth decided to grow so large as to have to pay taxes. He would have been free to make a second company and a third, all below the tax limit. But he chose to go for the big leagues, the tax paying men, the aristocracy, The Good.

Thats what this leads to.

You foresee that business owners will split up their companies into smaller and smaller subsidiaries to avoid paying surplus prices according to my system, just like they could to potentially avoid paying as much tax under the current system? Even if that's not what you meant to imply, I'll still address the thought as presenting no problem for my solution.
No matter how small businesses make themselves, the proportionality remains constant based solely on the data gathered from users of my system, such that even if every subsidiary only had 1 sale per day, there would still be companies paying more than others and getting the prices they pay adjusted accordingly. As a bonus, the more companies that exist, the more "perfect competition" we tend towards. But there will also be an incentive to not divide companies smaller and smaller - rewarded by the points you can earn using my system, which only the most lucrative/successful companies will be able to afford no matter what size all the companies are relative to one another. If a company doesn't earn enough to spend enough, no points. This lends an objective measure to the personal glory of going "for the big leagues, the (surplus) paying ones, the aristocracy, The Good."

Apologies if I missed your point, but if I did I'm glad it brought to mind the above scenario.

Is the problem that tax funds are overburdening and still insufficient or is the problem that they are misspent?

I kinda see what Sil’s idea accomplishes in getting the large sum donations or buy ins but if the people who manage the donations are corrupt, then what has been bettered?

I’d guess that 90% of today’s elected officials are not out to enact treaties for the greater good and betterment of all peoples, to improve their quality of life.

I had considered the problem of the "method" by which surplus prices paid are collected and directed towards paying off the deficit incurred by everyone paying lower than the asking price.
Are you familiar with the way in which Cryptocurrencies keep track of trades in a decentralised way?
At the moment, I'm in favour of setting up a similar system of ledgers to avoid the issue of potential (inevitable?) corruption by members of some centralised institution being in charge of this. Afterall, I'm proposing a taxless system, and a central managing body requires tax funds to keep everyone paid, right? I could actually adjust my solution with one very small change to fund this, but without a centralised managing body there will be no issue with any percentage of elected officials lining their own pockets instead of working "for the greater good and betterment of all peoples" - because there won't be any need for a state to govern taxation.

[Ecmandu]

Silhouette,

It’s starting to become clear to other posters in this thread as well that I was correct.

Your system cannot compete with the current system.

The current system will always crush your system when implemented.

Like I stated before... a new system has to be forced (yours included).

[Urwrongx1000]

Taxing wages is unconstitutional because a wage is not a profit from the sale of a commercial product. A wage is an equal exchange that produces no profit. Only a sale produces a profit.

I do not support the taxation of the proletariat unless there is no other class. Only business owners should be taxed in a capitalist society.

It is doubly absurd to think a wage laborer should be burdened by two parasites profiting from his labor. X amount of the money he generates goes into the pocket of the useless parasite, and Y amount into the pocket of the local and federal government. Nah fuck that. Tax man come to my crib I got somethin for him.

I actually agree with this.

[Fixed Cross]

So basically you both would agree with my tax plan, Promethean and Urwrongx1000

Sil - good to see the wheels turning. interesting progress.

[MagsJ]

The only tax-free countries I know of are those who have oil bolstering their economies, so what would be the bolster for countries that don’t?

How will no/low tax be subsidised? How can we compete with the UAE/Dubai, in that regard?

I was at an event, and asked some attendees where they were from.. they said Bangladesh, but were now living and working in Dubai, as India was.. and still is, on the decline, and that the UAE was a much more attractive option to live and work in. How can the West compete with that?

Funnily enough.. my old temping agency were trying to send me to Portugal, Germany etc. for contract work, but were sending me no contracts for the U.K. Maybe they had an EU/UK deal, to Get Brits to add their flair/their vibe, to European media agencies, and vice versa.. I did find it odd though, that they were only pushing that option, to me.

[Fixed Cross]

Yeah and, how is Dubai going to finance itself when their oil runs out? Thats even more difficult to answer. How do you go from having the most desired resources to being just another very hot and dry country in a turbulent region?

Low slash no tax cant work.

Taxing people who have little is also stupid. It hurts these people and doesn't amount to much. It is clearly a violation of all humane ideals to tax a person for merely existing. Just, don't, we need to stop that.

What is left is to restrict taxation to occur only above a certain threshold of capital.

Whether this is corporate only capital or also big private capital is important to the extent only that big private capital is not invested in corporations.

[Fixed Cross]

How this will happen is quite simple: you choose which system you would like to pay according to. Pick the current system, and all the same rules apply that we already have. Pick my system and you pay no tax on your purchase, and the price you pay will be determined by the current data on everyone's rates of expenditure while using my system (separately to expenditure using the current system) and adjusting what you pay in accordance with where you lie in relation to this current data.
It will begin extremely small scale with just a handful of people chipping in, making the highest rates of expenditure potentially just a few cents (per the time period decided upon when it all begins). Paying "x" times more or less on already cheap items will be nothing for most people, except it'll be a quick and easy opportunity to gain the points that will put you on the scoreboard that my system keeps. There will never be an easier way to gain points than at the very start, to get you recognised forever more, especially for those who may struggle or find it impossible once the whole thing takes off. Such an opportunity will never come again, only incentivising the launch of my solution to the point where it quickly becomes actually difficult to get to the top.

Thats definitely a step in the direction of resolving this.
Immediately the next question comes up: it looks like in this first phase, people who choose the new form aren't paying a lot. Is it not a form of tax evasion at the outset, simply paying much less than one would pay in taxes?

[WendyDarling]

Sil wrote

Are you familiar with the way in which Cryptocurrencies keep track of trades in a decentralised way?

No. I don’t understand who will oversee any of this regarding how it gets where it needs to be.

[Fixed Cross]

Sil wrote

Are you familiar with the way in which Cryptocurrencies keep track of trades in a decentralised way?

No. I don’t understand who will oversee any of this regarding how it gets where it needs to be.

Roughly same way any digital instruction gets where it needs to be. There isn't a commission of bankers hiding out in your processor.

[WendyDarling]

Who is accountable for the supposed corruption free accounts where billions of dollars will end up? Who decides who gets an account? Who decides which accounts the money ends up in and how much? What about excess money? And from there, who can access these accounts? For a UBI, that would make sense that each citizen who’s living would have access to their own accounts but for community spending for road construction and fire department expenditures, who’s got gold card access and responsibility? Doesn’t it revert back to politicians having access and the final decision?

I don’t see this as any less corruption free.

[Silhouette]

Are you familiar with the way in which Cryptocurrencies keep track of trades in a decentralised way?

No. I don’t understand who will oversee any of this regarding how it gets where it needs to be.

Who is accountable for the supposed corruption free accounts where billions of dollars will end up? Who decides who gets an account? Who decides which accounts the money ends up in and how much? What about excess money? And from there, who can access these accounts? For a UBI, that would make sense that each citizen who’s living would have access to their own accounts but for community spending for road construction and fire department expenditures, who’s got gold card access and responsibility? Doesn’t it revert back to politicians having access and the final decision?

I don’t see this as any less corruption free.

Hmm. I kinda assumed you'd look it up if you weren't already familiar with it, using all the many free resources out there that can explain it far better than me e.g. here.

Suffice to say, cryptocurrencies have measures built into them to sufficiently prevent all the concerns you can think of - and to fully understand all the details of the cryptography behind it (some of the same methods used in modern computer and banking security systems) you'll probably need close to a university level understanding of mathematics... but to save going into all that I could just try to outline the concepts behind it if you want me to try?

So you might think there's obvious problems with the idea of just anyone keeping transaction histories, such as with privacy, accuracy and forgery.
With cryptocurrencies you can literally broadcast any new transaction you want, even ones that say some rich person just paid you all their money. The problem is that for a new transaction to be valid, it needs both signing and verifying - which is where the cryptography comes in. There's some cool mathematical tricks you can use to encrypt the transaction that you're broadcasting so that only the person who has to sign to accept it can decrypt it and see what it is. It involves "asymmetric encryption", where both parties can have a different private (digital) key, such that only they can decrypt information encrypted by public keys that are linked in a very specific way to these private keys. Everyone can have access to these public keys without being able to decrypt the transaction information or work out anyone else's private keys, unless they already have the associated private keys. This is due to a property of prime factorisation: that it's really easy to multiply two huge prime numbers together, but really hard to reverse the process (factor the resulting composite number into the primes that multiply together to equal it) - especially so the larger the numbers get. Modern banking systems use these same algorithms for their security measures (see the RSA cryptosystem, if you want to look into this kind of thing). But you don't actually need to understand the exact process of how and why the math works to simply use the software in the same way that you can conduct bank transactions today without knowing what's going on "under the hood". Just know that lottery odds don't even compare to the odds of guessing someone's private key or being able to fraudulently sign off a fake transaction - we're talking numbers of possible private keys that are similar to the number of atoms in the universe.

Basically, these measures allow you to securely broadcast private transactions that can't be forged. But how does everyone make sure everyone's secure transaction lists match up with each other?

You've probably come across the term "Blockchain" before - basically lots of random people record as many broadcasted encrypted transactions as they can/want, and then each performs a specific kind of operation on the latest set of data that even takes computers a huge amount of time and resources to do (but once they come to an answer, it's really easy to check the work in reverse - this relies on the same property of prime factorisation that I mentioned just above) to get to a desired result. There's even an element of luck here due to the scales involved, so that even the people with the most computational power are far from guaranteed to reliably get this desired result - especially so the more people they're competing with. Whoever gets this desired result can add a new "block" to the chain, which is counted as the latest and most up-to-date version of the encrypted transaction history, and they get a small currency reward for doing so - this is what "mining" involves. So potentially someone could get lucky enough to add a bunch of fraudulent blocks to the chain, but they would soon be overridden by a newer version of the blockchain with even more of this computational work done to it. So you don't necessarily trust the latest versions of the transaction history, but transactions that have endured far back enough in the chain can be trusted - and all without anyone trusting anyone else.

I don't know if any of that helped in any way, but none of your concerns over who has power over the system really apply. Everyone still makes their same private transactions, it's just the storing, verifying and management in general of the information that's spread out rather than delegated only to private or public "banks". In fact, the more people who are contributing to the system, the better, faster and more reliable it becomes.

As for "community spending", there's potentially a few ways that this could end up being funded. Firstly, spending is what's being rewarded using with my solution, so it may just become the case that charity increases so much that communal spaces, services and any production are funded just by this. But if necessary it'd be possible to simply stretch the 80-20 curve upwards such that more surplus is paid than deficits incurred. The difference could go to funding institutions that would currently be funded by taxation. It'd be interesting to find out how people would end up funding these kinds of things without the need for tax, but the cryptocurrency model can ensure there's not going to be any centralised corruption involved.