The solution to economics

people already voluntarily donate to charitable foundations and greenwash their businesses, for reputation

what am I missing?

I mean, quite a lot - but I find this kind of thinking and questioning really valuable, so thanks for pushing your point.

As in a previous post of yours, you mean to draw attention to the similarities between what we have already, and what I’m proposing - correct?
These similarities are entirely intentional, because it seems that if you propose to change too much, too many people balk and reject too easily. However the other side of the coin is that if too little changes, is the payoff worth the effort? No doubt this balance is the reason why so little ever does actually change, and it may even be the case that the two overlap with one another, making change only possible if it is forced through sufficiently stealthily. Let’s assume not for now.

The statement that “people already voluntarily donate to charitable foundations and greenwash their businesses, for reputation” is true, but owing to the breadth and simplicity of this abstraction, all the crucial detail that makes all the difference is glossed over and “missed”.
Which people, and how many of them voluntarily donate? How much do they donate, and to which charitable foundations? How much of their greenwashing is facade and how much is representative of their objective impact on wider society?

Using my solution, 9% of all people are donating to the entire 91% of everyone else. In return they earn an objective measure of exactly how much impact they’re having on wider society, that they have every incentive to maximise in order to compete with the rest of the 9% over how much revenue they can generate to maximise how much they can spend on their employees and capital investments, which is how they earn this incentivising measure. There is no cheating here, nor want nor desire to cheat, because the incentive is all in self-interest as well as altruistic - they even gain a very precise way to compete, which generates the kind of pressure that people at the very top thrive upon, which only motivates them further to generate more value than ever before. Where there’s incentive to hide tax records and overemphasise charity in our current system, there’s every incentive to show off for reputation using my solution, and an objective measure can’t be over or understated as to how much and how wide-reaching their charity really is. Everyone knows exactly where it’s going, which is directly towards the deficit incurred by the 91% that affords enhanced “equity of opportunity” for all of them by allowing them to pay less to enter into the competition themselves, and which rewards their frugality and cost-effectiveness in doing so. Lower spenders face less risk to be entrepreneurial, bolstering the Classical Liberal ideal of perfect competition, and the most successful voluntarily keep themselves in check, which naturally wards off monopoly and oligopoly. Market forces push material wealth towards the middle, from both ends, while still maintaining material inequality to aid in incentivising those who still want to succeed according to that measure, without impacting negatively on the pursuit of immaterial wealth that is now more free than ever before to reach now measurable and objectively comparable limits for all the most successful people to aim towards. Why do chess grandmasters still compete with each other to achieve ever higher Elo ratings?

Who would enforce this idea unless it were famous?

Democrats are controlled by the media.
People choose famous things.

Sil hold your horses there for a second - I spoke of something which has not been implemented yet, which I invented the idea of.
So no, no “devil you know”.Y ou correctly identify the (fertile, in my eyes) tension this idea produces tough.

And the grass had not been shown greener on the other side, thats the whole point. Your machine hasn’t been driven and I wasn’t thinking ‘around it’, I was honing in on application methods.

Thats not arguable, thats a fact.
So the amount is to set so that certain industries cant avoid it. The mathematics will be like, “large” but very straightforward.

The idea is that certain industries can not avoid growing beyond that market capitalization, such as car industries.
Its also thinkable to put a 10 percent tax on say, 2 million plus businesses and 10 percent on 20 million plus, divine the tension over two thresholds. Keep in mind my numbers are arbitrary estimates. Could turn out to be much lower or higher when calibrated to reality.

And, there has to be recognition for the services here great companies do the country, by paying taxes. They would essentially be heroes of the nation.

All this said, really do not wish to give the impression I have forgotten about your idea or dismiss it. Its a pretty fascinating idea and I want to see it developed. In absence of such development for now, I think my idea is, at this point, more pragmatic, and since I already had it, Ill work with it for now until you clarify your idea some more.

By the way at the philosophical and ontological backbone to my idea is the understanding that for people to owe money merely because they exist and provide for themselves is absolutely unjustifiable.
And that corporations such as those that employ massive manufacturing plants are entirely contingent upon a Society, so for them it is justified to have to contribute to that society.

To be born is not to be contingent upon society. Taxation by the state of a private persons existence is among the most grandiose idiocies humans are still working with.

This is part of the purpose of sharing my idea - things aren’t going to get famous without at first getting shared with a small number of people.
I’m starting cautiously in case someone can spot anything obvious that I’ve missed, and to expose me to the kinds of questions that people have when exposed to ideas like this. This better prepares me for sharing it to a larger number of people, in the hopes that it will go on to become famous “enough” to get chosen.

Yeah, of course the exact specifics of your default might not have been implemented yet (at least as far as we’re aware). I didn’t make it clear that I meant the general idea of “tax this and not that” is “the devil we know”, even if some different specific configuration of it hasn’t “been run” yet. The grass is greener without this devil, and my solution doesn’t show any signs of being anything but the greenest of greens. Fair enough that we need the practice to confirm the theory, and I am trying to withhold complacency - I’m just not trying that hard since there’s still no reason to.

By all means bring up your own ideas as a point of comparison - maybe even make your own thread to carry on discussion in more depth about it there, though I’m pretty sure if you did we’d just run into the usual right vs left impasses that we all know and love by now - I can think of several things to say about your last post. That’s just another reason why my solution here is so valuable - it transcends all that. No “large” mathematics required either, just an understanding of what an exponential function is, maybe how the specifical one I use works and why, but you don’t even really need to understand any of that except that it’s an 80-20 approximation - and that’s it.

Anyway, if I work out any of the few remaining details I’ll update things here and in the meanwhile answer questions and alleviate any concerns that anyone might have in the meantime.

In summary for those who haven’t understood your idea, which is everyone else:
Sils idea comes down to rich peoples money being worth relatively less, which despite everything means that is an implicit capital tax.
My idea simply means only corporations pay taxes, not humans.

Which naturally means less corporation forming and more medium sized businesses. It also means a lot for corporate culture, which will change from robber-baron instinct to world-building desires.
And it means a much smaller state.

S - its fine to just have these ideas out there, bots will harvest much of the semantics at all times. This is how AI is being developed, by developing algorithms that recognize operational concepts through syntactic density and “colouring” - so concepts are being recognized “from the outside” that is, without being understood. Much like animals are being selected by mates on outward characteristics and not based on understanding. The patience you put in your explanation as well as the postponing of explication, keeping the implications pure, is recognizable by such programs, just as such undisturbed and un-prodded unfolding behaviour is recognizable as representing value in the natural world.

Forgive me for my analysis here, no one has ever become better from my flattery (it seems quite lethal and perhaps thats why I do it) but yeah, it ties in with the evolution threads in a relevant way.

What is memetic fitness?
Which idea has the most of it?
Your idea may be the Neanderthal to my more pragmatic hominid of corporate tax; the Neanderthal had a brain which required lengthy operations to be completed before an action was taken.

Rich people’s money is worth the same as it always was to anyone selling to them. It’s also worth just as much to them when selling to others, if not more altogether, only it’s split between what’s exchangeable for surplus material things, and the immaterial and eternal measure of their life’s success, which is converted into better value for money for 10/11 of society who enabled them to become rich in the first place by being their “market” - perhaps on top of everything else lending to them a wholesome “altruistic” wealth if they’re not psychopaths.

Capital is not touched by tax or anything at all with my solution. The buying of further capital than what the already rich already have goes less far in the short term material sense, but due to the immaterial sense translating into a better reputation that they’re rewarded with for being more generous with their wealth, they attract ever more custom and revenue back to them, all the while accumulating immaterial “capital” that will never ever decrease or be compromised for all time regardless of any future market instability or other life changes. This affords them more security yet also rewards more spending and risk, and with material wealth paying off the deficit incurred by the 91% getting better value for money, small new businesses are enabled and the material wealth of people is attracted towards the middle where the medium sized businesses are - so my solution transforms any “robber-baron instinct” and “world-building desires” into the immaterial realm and away from having socially detrimental consequences on material wealth. No state required, except maybe for essential services for which the profit model isn’t suited, only with no tax required to fund it. For more of a surplus in price-paying than a deficit, to pay for such things, with my solution requires merely opening up the opportunity to accumulate an objective success score to more people. The 80-20 optimisation stays the same.

Corporations are cooperating humans - I reject this distinction.

Silhouette,

The ultra rich don’t give a shit about their reputations (because they’re ultra rich and don’t have to!) Most of them are autistic, narcissistic or sociopathic.

Even if they donate to charity, their businesses are sociopathic. And that’s being generous, because their donations are tax write offs or tax shelters. Most of them use that money to do non profits that act as think tanks or political activist corporations (lobbying for free) to support making more money.

Personally, I think your system is not viable.

I’ve already explained why this isn’t a problem.

But instead of repeating myself I’ll move things on to a detail that was bugging me: how exactly would the introduction of my solution play out for businesses?
Which successful business would voluntarily enter into a scenario where they might have to pay twice the price for everything by virtue of being the biggest spender?

The answer is that the solution doesn’t have to be adopted fully and wholeheartedly from the outset. The way it will start will be incredibly small - a petty insigificant purchase by an opportunistic up-coming company just to get pole position on the scoreboard for cheap publicity, maybe even to simply ironically display dominance, perhaps even mockingly. But this move won’t stand for long - another company could easily chip in a couple of extra dollars in a one-off purchase of a slightly more expensive item. Still pocket change at this point, but the competition to be the next leader will quickly snowball into elaborate displays of “Zahavian Signaling” that the biggest companies now have incentive to enter into. A company that is so successful, that it can afford to be the biggest spender, taking the material brunt of enduring the most costly position yet still remaining successful - is all the more impressive and objectively proves itself to be the best company to work for and to buy from. And all the while all this surplus spending goes towards new companies, and even medium-sized companies, being able to pay much less for what they need to enter into this race themselves. We tend towards perfect competition, monopolies are naturally curtailed, and all relying on the “worst” nature of companies that you can think of.

The same is just as plausible for individuals, with even the most impulsive of psychopaths playing chicken with each other to feed their narcissism by competing for the top spot. Again, relying on all the “worst” nature of humans that you can think of.

My solution is precisely the opposite of “not viable” - it’s all but guaranteed by Game Theory, even assuming the worst of people and companies - especially assuming this. It’s called the “Escalation of commitment”.

Silhouette,

Nobody in the top brackets gives a shit. Your theory is basically a scaled sales tax. Nobody who is calling the shots would go for that. They’re fine just how they are. This is why I stated to you that both of our systems would have to be forced, the question then becomes: which one works the best for everyone.

As in my last post, “going for that” won’t really be choice for them. In the same way that someone in the working class might not want to got for a job, the alternative is worse so they have to “consent”. The top brackets won’t give a shit to begin with, but after a while it will be out of their control no matter how fine they were before.

Force doesn’t work - you said it yourself: the ultra rich can just choose to get around paying some tax or other, and in the same way they’ll find a way to get around the maximum wage. There’s already so many loopholes in the law to be able to pull off stuff like that - no matter how hard you try to force, they’re already more than primed to quell any such overt attempts on their power.

The only thing left is to covertly plant unassuming seeds that people like you can write off so carelessly, and watch them grow - feeding off the very same mechanics that got us into this mess in the first place. “Which one works the best for everyone” clearly isn’t your system when it’s not best for the only people who matter for it to work at all - and who can brush it aside like they always have before anyway. By contrast, my solution will inevitably become what they will realise to be best for themselves, and also everyone else, as a result of the very same principles that made them ultra rich in the first place.

At this point it just seems like you simply don’t “want” my solution to be valid, and above all else it just seems like you desire revenge against the very people I’m going to win over - getting them to decide for themselves to be socially responsible. You’re not going to win by force, you gotta be cleverer than that. I know how, and the only way you’re going to get on the winning team is by dropping this mindset, before even going into the discussion, that my solution is invalid. The rational thing to do is not to assume I’m wrong from the outset and then try to rationalise some reasons why, but to first entertain the facts and theory objectively and impartially. Seek to understand what it is on its own merits without your own assumptions first and only THEN evaluate.

Silhouette,

The ultra rich are not altruistic people. They don’t even care about patents! Did you know the mouse that laptops use was invented by xerox? That windows DOS was created by people who are almost broke now?

Business (copywrites as well) have their own trajectories, bestowed upon them by the law. If we change the law, the system changes.

My system is better than yours because it requires more cooperation. Pure and simple. Want to build the world trade centers (build for 50 billion dollars) you need thousands and thousands of people to agree. That’s why I call it a co-op economy (better communication for better outcomes). Your system has no communication - it’s autocratic and dictatorial in a way that mine isn’t - my system honors capitalism and democracy more than yours does.

Sil… the reason I mentioned procreation, is because… wouldn’t the (all too) human factor have to be factored in, to the configuration, in order to achieve a more realistic resultant observational outcome, and other such human whims and woes that would cause an economy to fluctuate.

You have so far failed to convince in the second stage, Silhouette. How to enforce your idea? We just need to naturally trust that it will work, but what of the transition even if it does work, say over the course of a hundred or maybe a few thousand years (you anticipate on no criteria at all), to gather some momentum? Aren’t there still taxes to be paid then, yes? So how does that work, do the billionaires pay double? It cant function if implementation is impossible.

My idea (which I not really deliberately but consciously tricked you into disregarding - if there were some critics here they’d notice that you used the rhetorical opening I consciously left you to interpret “humans” not as “private persons” (as I had already defined it!!) but as the biological species which drive and design corporation) is very clear; no person owes money to the state personally. If he is the CEO of a company that does, he can just quit. If a tax paying corporation his property, that means he has consciously and form a position of great wealth decided to grow so large as to have to pay taxes. He would have been free to make a second company and a third, all below the tax limit. But he chose to go for the big leagues, the tax paying men, the aristocracy, The Good.

Thats what this leads to.

Is the problem that tax funds are overburdening and still insufficient or is the problem that they are misspent?

I kinda see what Sil’s idea accomplishes in getting the large sum donations or buy ins but if the people who manage the donations are corrupt, then what has been bettered?

I’d guess that 90% of today’s elected officials are not out to enact treaties for the greater good and betterment of all peoples, to improve their quality of life.

Taxing wages is unconstitutional because a wage is not a profit from the sale of a commercial product. A wage is an equal exchange that produces no profit. Only a sale produces a profit.

I do not support the taxation of the proletariat unless there is no other class. Only business owners should be taxed in a capitalist society.

It is doubly absurd to think a wage laborer should be burdened by two parasites profiting from his labor. X amount of the money he generates goes into the pocket of the useless parasite, and Y amount into the pocket of the local and federal government. Nah fuck that. Tax man come to my crib I got somethin for him.

…and yet we are still taxed the BLEEP out of… and then some.

Collecting tax is akin to that first taste of blood for wild animals, in that once experienced, things can never go back to the way they were. :laughing:

Erm, so in so many words, oughtn’t I/we to factor in a certain unpredictability into our predictions about my solution?

I’m sure plenty of weird shit will happen as a result of what I propose, but at least we’d have inbuilt mechanisms to contain the limits this time around, which will only work in the first place because we’re all human.

I’m not offering a perfect utopia, just a couple of extremely precisely targetted tweaks to improve what we already have by a great deal for everyone - despite things at the moment already having plenty of positive consequences.

Agreed that it can’t function if implementation is impossible. A couple of posts ago I anticipated a particular set of events based on some Game Theory, so maybe you missed that since you seem to feel I’ve anticipated no criteria at all? I’m not going to anticipate hundreds or thousands of years into the future though, at least not before I’ve ironed out the details I’m still in the process of thinking through, sorry. By all means, exercise your own skills in this department if you wish. But I can tell you that while my solution is in the process of filtering into the mainstream, it can and will coexist side by side with the current system.

How this will happen is quite simple: you choose which system you would like to pay according to. Pick the current system, and all the same rules apply that we already have. Pick my system and you pay no tax on your purchase, and the price you pay will be determined by the current data on everyone’s rates of expenditure while using my system (separately to expenditure using the current system) and adjusting what you pay in accordance with where you lie in relation to this current data.
It will begin extremely small scale with just a handful of people chipping in, making the highest rates of expenditure potentially just a few cents (per the time period decided upon when it all begins). Paying “x” times more or less on already cheap items will be nothing for most people, except it’ll be a quick and easy opportunity to gain the points that will put you on the scoreboard that my system keeps. There will never be an easier way to gain points than at the very start, to get you recognised forever more, especially for those who may struggle or find it impossible once the whole thing takes off. Such an opportunity will never come again, only incentivising the launch of my solution to the point where it quickly becomes actually difficult to get to the top.

You foresee that business owners will split up their companies into smaller and smaller subsidiaries to avoid paying surplus prices according to my system, just like they could to potentially avoid paying as much tax under the current system? Even if that’s not what you meant to imply, I’ll still address the thought as presenting no problem for my solution.
No matter how small businesses make themselves, the proportionality remains constant based solely on the data gathered from users of my system, such that even if every subsidiary only had 1 sale per day, there would still be companies paying more than others and getting the prices they pay adjusted accordingly. As a bonus, the more companies that exist, the more “perfect competition” we tend towards. But there will also be an incentive to not divide companies smaller and smaller - rewarded by the points you can earn using my system, which only the most lucrative/successful companies will be able to afford no matter what size all the companies are relative to one another. If a company doesn’t earn enough to spend enough, no points. This lends an objective measure to the personal glory of going “for the big leagues, the (surplus) paying ones, the aristocracy, The Good.”

Apologies if I missed your point, but if I did I’m glad it brought to mind the above scenario.

I had considered the problem of the “method” by which surplus prices paid are collected and directed towards paying off the deficit incurred by everyone paying lower than the asking price.
Are you familiar with the way in which Cryptocurrencies keep track of trades in a decentralised way?
At the moment, I’m in favour of setting up a similar system of ledgers to avoid the issue of potential (inevitable?) corruption by members of some centralised institution being in charge of this. Afterall, I’m proposing a taxless system, and a central managing body requires tax funds to keep everyone paid, right? I could actually adjust my solution with one very small change to fund this, but without a centralised managing body there will be no issue with any percentage of elected officials lining their own pockets instead of working “for the greater good and betterment of all peoples” - because there won’t be any need for a state to govern taxation.