Why tax the rich when you can abolish taxes?
Tags: Progress, Future, Politics, Taxes, Economics

So as we all know, taxes have been a big problem. There’s always budget cuts, and streamlining and trimming the fat. Vital services including infrastructure, public welfare, social security and civil government have crumbled all over the western world in the last 40 years.

What’s worse is that politicians keep saying the same thing: Lower taxes and privatise the government. So you can either choose between old inefficiency, or new inefficiency.

So in order to rebuild our civil governments, we’re going to need lots and lots of money for new and modern infrastructure, public works, sustainable utilities, and so on. Taxes won’t be able to produce this in a million years.

Because obviously only a sucker would privatise things paid for by their taxes, you pay for something and some rich jerk gets to have it for free? I don’t think so. The rich get enough handouts as it is. Not once in the history of humanity have a rich person bought a nationalised service and then made every citizen equal part owners, because that would defeat the purpose of stealing it. So they just steal it from the people, since that’s the profit motive.

Taxation is a system of state revenue, simply put, it’s how the government makes its money. Sometimes through direct measures, and sometimes through modern monetary theory. I won’t go in on MMT too much since that’s a whole other tangent. But one way or another: The state produces the economic resources needed.

But why does it have to be based on donations? Do companies use donations? Is the Dow Jones managed by crowdfunding?

I mean technically speaking I guess it is, but you also get something in return. It’s a transactional crowdfund.

So why then is it that the government doesn’t perform transactions? What’s stopping it? Simply put: Rich people. Or, well, a certain kind of rich people. Obviously professional footballers or famous actors don’t have a lot to do with it, but I mean men like say, Rupert Murdoch or Jeffrey Epstein. Those kinds of rich people, the rich people who make money by owning things.

Because to own a part of the market is to profit from that part of the market. Steve Jobs didn’t know how to make computers, his employees did. He didn’t know how to program software, his engineers did. All he did was own the market they used.

But even though he owned it, the employees still had jobs, and they still made computers, all he ever did was to own it.

And that’s the state revenue of the future: Ownership of the market. For too long, corporations and private industry have monopolised the market, either you’re one of them, or you’re not allowed to participate. Ordinary citizens are functionally banned from this market unless they somehow win the lottery.

Corporate propaganda from media pundits say that the market is fair, that anyone can participate, that there’s just free money coming out of every nook and cranny. And yet, why do so many people live in debt? Why are so many people living on minimum wage? Do they just like that? Of course not, it’s a lie. If it wasn’t a lie then we’d all be rich, and that’s not how the world works. It’s just something rich people say in order to gaslight poor people.

But we don’t all have to be rich; It’s not how the world has to work. We don’t each need our own hospital, and our own ambulance, and our own railyard. We can in fact share these facilities since they can accommodate the needs of thousands.

And you know what else we can share? The market. The government, just like corporations, can own the market, and profit from the market. It creates jobs that are normal jobs, just like working at Apple. Salaries, benefits, employment contract, the works. Only difference is: Instead of Steve Jobs getting those billions, society does.

So the exact same money that fund yachts and horrible private islands can fund hospitals, railroads, social security, pensions, you name it.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And that’s absolutely right. Everything we do is produced by work, so why on Earth would be waste that work on the frivolities of the 1%?

Instead of taxation, we simply introduce a modern and more sustainable form of state revenue, which instead of controlling your personal bank account, simply controls the market. No more tax burdens on private citizens, instead the government becomes its own self-sufficient institution that provides good jobs and has all the revenue it could possibly need to help tackle the coming challenges of economic crisis, covid and climate change.

The world will be saved by civil engineers, who create renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, mass transit and public health services. And they are going to need enough money to build the future. Let the market do what it does best and fund them.

Because I think we can all sleep easier at night knowing that the market is working for us instead of the Epsteins of the world. The future is not taxation, it is nationalisation.