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I have some ideas, Abgrund. I’m still feeling them out and I invite any criticism and/or comments. There could be holes in this theory which I am not yet aware of. You are far ahead of me in political theory, I admit. Your first question:
“Is it possible for government to function without taxation?”
If you remove the distinction between public and private resources, yes. Taxes are collected from the private to sponsor public facilites which in turn support, provide and care for the private. For example: a public hospital pays its staff with tax money so that they may provide medical services for the private. But let’s say that rather than having every family pay an extra seven cents on the dollar for every product they purchase, so that the accumulation of these public taxes is enough to pay the wages of the staff at the hospital for their services to the private, they outright pay the bill upon each visit and can do so because- 1. They have more money since they are not taxed- 2. medical services don’t cost so much because the staff themselves aren’t taxed and are in need of less money. This stops the vicious cycle and creates an equalibrium.
Now go a step further. Reduce costs of commodities by eliminating private ownership of businesses: the possibility for private franchises to evolve from accumulated personal capital (tax breaks, earned interest), i.e., “I have more money than you so I can make products and decide what they will cost.” Regulate all material production and resources publically so that no labor produces higher wages than another which would allow one to ‘get ahead’ and have the potential to claim a private business and start the vicious cycle over again.
Extend this theory throughout all possible public services ( schools, roadways, military, etc.) and you eliminate the necessity of taxes and equalize wages among private and public occupation. There is no more distinction between public and private, resources are regulated, and there is no more scarcity.
My question is: who does the regulating?
Everybody wants to party. Pleasure starts in the nucleus accumbus(sp?), the ‘pleasure center’ of the brain.
Reduce the tolerance for pleasure and everyone becomes happy more easily. It is precisely because our material consumption doesn’t please us anymore that we become excessive in our use of it.
We could still be living in straw huts and be perfectly content had we not aquired this tolerance.
You mention the genome, Abgrund. Bingo. Modify it so that the human race doesn’t evolve beyond its capacity to experience physical pleasure at the costs of enviromental evolution (technology and destruction of resources). Psychological pleasure is a derivative of physiological conditions. Fix those and everyone stays happy.
Another idea comes to mind involving ‘money.’
Destroy it. Destroy the credit system: buy now, pay later through installments. No more deficit.
Create trade castes which govern all material goods production through trading. Agriculture, construction, education and medicine: that’s all we need to survive.
The earth is divided into sections which are complimentary to their efficiency in creating these goods. For example: fertile land will be used for agriculture and will focus on ‘feeding the world’ as well as producing the necessary textiles for building: wood, rock, metal ore, fiberous plants for clothing, etc. No plastic or styrofoam(sp?) needed. Burn it. No, don’t do that. Put it all into a shuttle and launch it toward the sun. Solved.
Medical and educational institutions will be evenly distributed throughout all populated areas.
We need a space program. Eventually we will have to move off this planet and populate the solar system. But we got plenty of time if we do this thing right. By the time we need to move, physicists will have developed the means to travel great distances with the expenditure of minimal amounts of energy.
Water, my friend. One drop can power a city.
(I’m on a roll and just throwing these ideas out)
Am I too far ahead? Probably so.
I am from the future.
[laughing]
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Nor am I. I guess you could consider my thoughts to be an improvisation. Thankfully you are walking this thing through with me and helping me to consider what I might have missed. I understand that there are implications to every theory and I don’t claim to know them all, however I don’t feel like that should stop me from trying to create these ideas and work them into existence.
I think I can avoid this issue altogether if I can provide a way to eliminate the need of national defense, namely, by uniting all countries under one political system so that there are no opposing ideals which would cause wars. I know, this sounds ridiculous, so don’t call me a moron.
Another matter I do not understand, probably because I don’t know what you mean by ‘privatization.’ I thought that was what I was trying to avoid here by altering the conditions in which the possibility for one person to ‘afford’ services, and another person not, and change them so that this was not a problem. I think this could happen if medical costs weren’t so expensive, which, in turn and again, would not be a problem in the setting I am attempting to create here.
Well wait a minute. Isn’t public health care provided for those who cannot afford the costs of services provided by a privately owned medical facility? Had there never been the possibility for free enterprise to allow such a private practice to take place, there would have never been the need to create public facilities for those who cannot afford them. I see the same techniques for defending these conditions displayed by zenofeller: using apparant dilemmas to defend a system that creates those dilemmas in the first place.
Is that what my theory sounds like so far? I wouldn’t know.
I don’t feel like ‘incentive’ should be a personal agenda at the cost of public relations and homogeneity. I’m trying to unite the public into one body that isn’t threatened by individual pursuits in a competitive element. It is precisely the desire to make a profit which would elevate one individual over another and cause the mentality of ‘freedom’ to exceed the boundaries of human equality and material economy. ‘Incentive’ in your case seems to me to mean the desire to consume products as if they were expendable and unlimited, which indeed they are not. Capitalism has created an ideal of ‘incentive’ which jeopardizes the very real materialistic and economical circumstances at hand. I don’t think it should be a ‘free for all’ in a case where liberal ideologies would threaten the very basis on which they are possible: the distribution and material consumption of limited resources. That is, pretending as if consumption doesn’t have to be regulated and exercised as a principle of fatalism, but instead as if material circumstances and resources were not determined and unlimited. They are very limited.
This problem only occurs if people believe that their value as a human being is determined by their ability to compete among other individuals for class supremacy. If you set up a system where people believe that moral and ethical values are determined by the respect they gain from inferior classes and the acknowledgement of their own fellows (your cool because you gotta fat ride and a gold watch), then they will operate within a competative field to maintain that distinction between classes and remain at the ‘top.’ Get rid of these class distinctions and you no longer have this vice. This can be done by equalizing wages, educating the world to understand that material consumption must be conservative, or eliminating money altogether. So far I see democracy/capitalism as being responsible for creating this misunderstanding that people are ‘free’ to exceed their fellows in a competition for material values in a reality where no man requires more sustenance than another. It is a perversion of what is necessary. A failure to understand the basic needs of human survival and harmony within a civilized context.
I admit that my ‘straw hut’ example was a little extreme, as well as this radical idea about genetic and neurological intervention (an idea I got from a web-site called ‘the hedonistic imperative,’ which approaches the possibility of using nanotechnologies to change human brain compositions). However I wouldn’t mind a little ‘devolution.’
No problem. Thank you for taking the time to reply to what you did.
Hello again, abgrund. As you know from previous exchanges with me on the topic Minimum Wage I have to vote a big “yes†to numbers 2 and 3, and for the moral reasons I cited there. I don’t see any reason to rehash those reasons here. They’re available if anybody wants to take the time. As for number 1…I don’t really know. I mentioned some ideas over there that I think might help a government raise the necessary funds, keeping in mind of course my idea that a government as limited in its scope as I feel a government should be, certainly won’t have the scale of funding required nowadays by the socialist governments that populate the planet. Still, I’m the first to admit it’s not an easy task. I trust that a solution could be found, though.
I’m more interested in this, unless you feel it’s too far off-topic. (Just give me a shot in the ribs if it is):
For a long time I’ve been wondering something. I have always proceeded with a capitalist viewpoint (as you know) operating under the assumption that freedom is a natural and desirable state of man. I have always assumed that people want to be free, unfettered by the chains of authoritarian government. And yet, as one contemplates the history of mankind, just the opposite seems to be true. People throughout history seem to want to be led. “Say what you will about Mussolini,†so the saying went, “But at least the trains ran on time.†People seem genuinely eager to give their freedoms away for the security that you mention. The closest any significantly-sized country came to real freedom was the U.S. But how long did it really last? Not very.
I understand the typical argument about wanting to be “free from hunger†or “free from job loss,†etc., but it seems like we’re just trading away real freedom for ostensible freedom, since somebody somewhere is paying for these “freedoms.â€
I don’t know. Just an observation. Kind of disheartening to me but I’d be interested in your thoughts.
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Well I think the scale might change. I mean we don’t really know how people would donate, do we? But I’m thinking that if the government isn’t extorting money from everybody, there may just be a greater sense of civic duty.
A system of checks and balances like that of the U.S. would help. Frankly, I can’t imagine this new system being any more corrupt than any other we’ve seen.
Meanwhile I like your comments about freedom and I think you’re onto something with the correlation to power. You’re right I fear that people are probably only concerned about their own freedom. That would explain the slow erosion of freedoms overall. Nobody sees it happening until it’s their own ox that’s gored (for the “good of all†no doubt) and by that time it’s way, way too late.
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My Utopian society would require very little in the way of taxes because the government would provide very little in the way of services. Virtually all of the functions that our govt now performs are not things that the Constitution intended it to do. In my view, 90-95% of the government could be eliminated. I’d like to see some “new” agencies continue to exist (eg some form of an agency like the FDA, some agencies similar to the current EPA & FAA, etc). And the government should maintain a standing military to protect the country as well as maintain a national infrastructure.
I’d like to see the government provide the referees, and possibly help maintain the stadium. But we should create the game, do the coaching and play all the positions. I’m a Libertarian- I love the idea of limited government. “The government governs best that governs least” and “Government, like fire, is a dangerous tool and a fearsome master” are thoughts near and dear to my heart. 
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Well I know of no evidence or theory suggesting a conclusion one way or the other. Unfortunately it’ll always remain a hypothetical because the toothpaste is out of the tube now and it’s impossible to put it back in. I do think, however, that it’s in a person’s self-interest in many cases to have a sense of charity and civic duty. Either way, I think you’ve rightly named the topic here, abgrund. Unlike many you seem to understand the choice and that there’s only one or the other.
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Not to dismiss the balance of your post but I think I’m going to need you to elaborate on this a bit. Are you saying that a sense of duty I may feel for my country - let’s hypothesize my desire to enlist in the army in a time of war where my country is threatened from the outside - wouldn’t be based at some level on my own interests in keeping my country free from that threat?
I think people tend to get carried away a bit where altruism and duty are concerned. Perhaps everyone would act only in their best interest, if everyone had an IQ over 150 and was well trained in logic. But the fact is humans can be an irrational lot, and you can’t overestimate our ability to 'cut off our nose to spite our face." Many of our decisions are made not by our logic but our emotions, and not all of them benefit us.
Take anger, for instance. I’m sure anger has a useful biological function, but in a modern civilization acting upon our anger often harms us much mroe than it helps us. Look at a football game, for example. In the heat of the contest, it’s not unusual for a player to get angry and hit someone well after a play, resulting in a 15 yard penalty on the personal foul. Now a great majority of those athletes are college graduates (okay, maybe with some special treatment on occasion 
) that can probably reason adequately. What’s better for that person? The late hit may give momentary satisfaction, but often a single penalty like that can lose a game. Often this can result in fines, disciplinary action, and occasionally even that player being cut from the team. You can bet that most of us have done something or said something in the heat of passion that we profoundly wish we could take back.
All I’m saying is that, yes, it may be in your self interest to enlist in the military to protect your nation from invasion, if it’s really necessary. But many such decisions to enlist are made for other reasons. As much capability as we have for reason, we’re just as often blinded by emotion.
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Now wait a minute, guys. It sounds like both of you are defining what’s in a person’s interest for that person. Unless I’m misreading you. How can you have that knowledge? There may be many reasons why I might wish to enlist. Maybe some rational, maybe some irrational. But at the end of the day, they’re my reasons, defined by my definition of what’s in my interest. Aren’t they?
Well, yeah. We all have our reasons. Rational or irrational. Our actions sometimes serve our self interest and sometimes not. We humans are funny that way. 