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.
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?
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?
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.