by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-02 21:50:33+00:00
> Where do Taxes come from? Business and profit.

Funny you should say that: business and profit are actually way undertaxed in the US, compared to (for instance) salaries and pensions. But, you're still talking about the on-paper accounting (and choosing an arbitrary point in a cyclic economy as the "original source", but let's ignore that for now).

Let's consider how progress actually occurs, on the ground. People learn how things work, whether through study, experience, original thought, or (more often) a mix of the three. They then attempt to find improvements: new methods, new machines, new buildings. They then verify these improvements, through experiment, theory, or a mix of the three. We call this "innovation". They then put these into practice: building, manufacturing, distributing, teaching, or performing; which improves the efficiency of some resource manipulation activity, or enables people to accomplish or experience things they couldn't otherwise. We call this "progress".

Individuals cannot efficiently acquire all resources (respectively: accomplish all tasks, experience all experiences, etc) alone. Specialised tools and skillsets allow certain people to accomplish certain tasks more efficiently than others: we call this "expertise" and "economies of scale" and "virtuoso", among other names. Working together, people can accomplish more than they can apart: we call this "collaboration" when it is direct, and "trade" when it is indirect. To make trade (locally) more efficient in large groups, we abstract large trade networks by valuing more-or-less everything along one axis, which we call "currency", or "money". Money represents resources, because it can be exchanged for goods and services. (Therefore, money is fungible.) Money also represents debt, for much the same reason. (Therefore, money is not fungible.) What money represents depends quite a lot on your metaphysics, because it is an abstract concept.

A trade where each party to the trade receives more value than they spend (according to the "money's worth" metric) is considered a "profitable trade": the "more value" is called the "profit", and trades can be profitable for all parties despite a variety of different choices of profit allocation. (Various factors constrain profit allocation in practice; we will not discuss them here.) Some trades are mediated by intermediaries (traders, employers), who take some portion of the profit: in some cases, these intermediaries are providing value (e.g. by transporting goods, or organising a team); but in other cases, they are not. One example of an intermediary that does not provide any value is a corporate person qua employer: by virtue of not actually existing, a corporation cannot by any clever argument be said to actually contribute to boots-on-the-ground labour activity.

So we see that profit is, except on the balance sheets of a sole trader / worker-owned coöp, actually the removal of resources from the people doing the actual work, making the actual progress. If the removed resources are pooled and used for R&D – as in the cases you describe as "side quests" – and we further propose that this R&D would not have been performed by those the resources were removed from, we can say that profit contributes towards progress. (Certain investment schemes provide another example.) However, in many cases, profit goes towards things like "build us a moat to keep the competitors out!" or "bribe the regulators" or "outspend our competitors' advertising budget" or "buy the C-suite even bigger yachts": we cannot say this contributes towards progress, unless we define the ultimate end of human progress narrowly: in the field of yacht manufacturing, or perhaps the field of cheating at sports.

Business, likewise, is sometimes related to progress, but sometimes unrelated to it, and in any case not in any way essential to progress (except in the field of business studies). Saying the word "actuality" doesn't make what you say true.

I notice you didn't address the example of Wikipedia.