Oddbean new post about login | logout President Elect Donald J. Trump has promised to eliminate the Income Tax and move government revenue on to Tariffs as Taft did. The Federal Reserve Dollar is dying since it is being printed into oblivion (the definition of inflation). If Lummis was thinking correctly, the answer to several of these difficult problems at once is obvious. When the Income Tax is abolished and Tariffs are the source of income, it should be mandated that those Tariffs be paid in Bitcoin. This would have several immediate side effects. 1/ There would be a very large increase in demand for bitcoin globally 2/ The Federal Government would legitimately start to amass bitcoin 3/ No American Citizen would suffer theft to achieve this end 4/ The U.S. bitcoin ecosystem would be turbo kick started On the final point, these “monies” coming in to the coffers would be spent inside America, creating multiple cascading opportunities for innovation and learning in bitcoin handling. The “Bitcoin Coffer” would be dispersing and disseminating bitcoin into the economy, triggering the de facto “Legal Tender” status of bitcoin, which I note with appropriate disdain, this bill of pure fail fails to address as part of the overall strategy. https://medium.com/@beautyon_/pandering-as-policy-d125d002dcb3
That would be amazing but I worry it would be too much too fast. The government need experience with hard money so they don’t fuck it up. These people aren’t used to spending limits.
Why are tariffs better than income tax? Either way, you’re taxing your citizens to fund the government. Seems too me that with income tax, the tax is more evenly distributed across all citizens whereas tariffs tax some citizens much more than others. Happy to be corrected if I’m missing something.
“Fairness”: Equal Slavery One dramatic way of looking at our tax system in relation to the question of subsidy or fairness is to assume for a moment that this is 1850, and that the question arises in the North as to what should be done with slaves who had managed to escape from the South. Let us assume that both sides of a growing debate are ardently in favor of freedom and are opposed to slavery. Group A hails the slaves’ escape and advocates setting them free. But Group B argues as follows: We are, of course, just as ardent a champion of slave freedom as the people of Group A. But we believe it is unfair for one group of slaves to escape, while the remainder of their brothers and sisters remain in slavery. Therefore, we hold that these escapees should be shipped back into slavery until such time as all the slaves can be freed together and simultaneously. What would we think of such an argument? To call it specious would be a kindly understatement. But I submit that believers in the free market are arguing in precisely the same way when they say that all taxes must be uniform, and that all specific tax deductions or exemptions must be canceled until such time as everyone’s taxes can be reduced uniformly. In both cases, the egalitarians are arguing not for equal freedom but for equal slavery or equal robbery in the name of “fairness.” In both cases, the rebuttal holds that the enslavement or plunder of one group can in no way justify the enslavement or plunder of another, be it in the name of fairness, equity, or whatever. https://www.google.com/search?q=rothbard+income+tax&rlz=1C9BKJA_enGB1010GB1011&oq=rothbard+income+tax&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigAdIBCDc2MzZqMGo3qAIKsAIB4gMEGAEgXw&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Why do we want government empowered with Bitcoin?
