Oddbean new post about login | logout This is different. Property tax is a tax on production. The flow of money in the case of welfare is in completely the opposite direction.
Taxing production is idiotic. It disincentives precisely the thing a society needs to prosper.
I disagree. Either have a democracy or don’t but selecting who can vote on what would lead to more bureaucracy and social tension. Doesn’t sound like a recipe for fun imo.
I'm not convinced democracy as we have today is the best political system. You need some way of representing the needs of the citizenry, but democracy is easily captured by interests that are skilled at influencing public opinion.
We need something where people are not punished for regular and non-harmful activities. Considering the gruesome behavior of governments over the history of humanity, democracy broadly certainly seems the least worst, but with obvious space for improvement. The best governments from a liberty perspective today, is possibly Switzerland in the West or Singapore in the Far East.
Doesn’t Singapore have a rather authoritarian vibe going on? I’m only going on what a Malaysian was telling me..
Yes, Singapore is rather authoritarian by Western standards, but they gave low taxes and are very orderly.
i remeber turning 18 in Geneva, Switzerland and getting to vote for the first time. There was an initiative to regulate whether villa owners could dump their sewers in the closest river or not. As usual the city got covered in posters to help people make up their mind on what to vote. Some posters were saying "save the water, vote NO" and the other posters were saying "Do not sacrifice the water, vote YES"
What was the outcome?
i don't remember 🙈 probably villa owners had to connect to the sewers. I want to believe that anyways... My point is, if the people aren't equiped to read legal jargon, then the loudest voices are governing opinions. Direct democracy is great, and a swiss can vote nearly every sunday on communal issues, cantonal or federal. Beautiful. But it is not the silver bullet that it seems without education.
more democracy may be an improvement. Easier access to initiative and referendum and recall. especially at the local level. Minnesota Viking's stadium, for example, would probably not have received public funding if had been put up to a public vote... that is why the politicians manipulated things to avoid such a vote.
Taxing anything is immoral.
I think some taxes are necessary to fulfill the basic roles of government, such as national defence, but we ought to be very careful about how much taxation is levied, and on what.
I’m not in the US so forgive me for not fully understanding but surely it’s a production tax or a property tax? For example, if you own land on which all that happens is rabbits enjoying themselves, do you pay tax on that?