Tax the rich? Hire the poor? Or ?, by Jeffery J. Smith

Aspiring reformers rave about the lack of taxes on the rich and rave about spending on job creation. Both propositions mean a lot to normal people. Ah, normal people, my heart sinks. How does it make sense to try to take back from the rich the very money that the normal ones gave them? Or demand work when labor-saving inventions are on the shelves?

Tax the rich?

Taxing the rich is an instinctive policy inherited from peons today. A comprehensive policy, more appropriate for egalitarians, is to stop creation the rich. Adhering to our role, we would see that our subsidy to the rich is what creates them.

How does the unconscious (or indifferent) public endow the elite?

Seven ways the nanny state lavishes public money on the rich:
1 Direct cash gifts; after the US Treasury gave MacDonald free money to open a restaurant in Paris.
2 Paying too much for a product or service, like how the military gets along with contractors to pay $ 400 for a toilet seat.
3 Underpricing privileges like low interest loans or low cost corporate charters that limit liability.
4 Lenient application of laws when companies violate pollution standards or refuse to remit the royalties.
5 Overcharging competitors, such as take labor more than capital, which makes it more difficult to negotiate higher wages.
6 Financing programs that promote the assets of the richsuch as infrastructure that increases the value of land or debt financing that inflates stocks.
7 Underfunding of competitors, such as workers and consumers, by not spending a social surplus, making people more dependent on employment.
Examples like these are repeated over and over again involving huge amounts of money. Stop these state favors and watch the unduly rich wither away.

If it’s not taxing the rich, why tax at all? By requiring bureaucracy and distorting prices, taxation makes economies less efficient. The government can use other fiscal tools, those that act more like prices. The government can charge fees, contributions, leases, etc. As…
* the tax for a patent monopolizing a part in the field of knowledge.
* land rights for the movement of everyone from one place in a community.
* a lease to extract minerals from our common natural heritage or to use a band in the EM spectrum.

Cost of using

How much do applicants for government favors charge? Do not let politics fix the amounts, but the economy. Run government like a business. No longer charging a tiny flat fee, but charging a “rent” – the full annual market value of the land or oil or sector in the knowledge realm – the raw material of most huge fortunes.

While the government charges a pittance for a corporate charter, this piece of paper is worth a lot more factors. By limiting liability, the charter grants a huge competitive advantage to companies that impose risk on workers, consumers and nature while reducing the market share of companies that are not dangerous to other living things.

Instead of these near zero filing fees, the government would adjust the fees according to the risk imposed by the company, making polluters pay. Since insurance companies can determine how much to charge, so can public bureaucrats. And if not, abolish the charters granted by the government and let the insurance companies take care of it.

For patents that lock up valuable knowledge, again, the government only charges a nominal fee. Tech-corps get thousands of patents every year, and trolls get hundreds. Analysts estimate that 80% of the value of US stocks are patents. The lion’s share of these patents is the rent, the monopoly value, the value of excluding others from exploring this part of the field of knowledge. This is another socially generated value.

The US Congress abandoned its constitutional mandate to issue new money and gave that monopoly to the central consortium of big banks, domestic and foreign; the so-called US Federal Reserve is in fact a corporation. This “bankers’ seigniorage” is also worth trillions each year. Either charge for the privilege of creating money or claim this responsibility, or let private currencies compete for legal tender, or all of the above.

Hire the poor?

Whatever amount an absent landlord may charge is rent. Natural rents are remunerations for sites in town, or above an oil field, or in the electromagnetic spectrum, or in the domain of knowledge. Social rents are lien payments. Rent constitutes the greater half of GDP, the lesser being the returns to labor and capital. This is how efficient economies are, how many surpluses they generate.

Consider those huge rent mounds, then consider the call for more jobs, regardless of whether the job would be productive or just conformist. Normal people, indifferent to the quality jobs, applaud the amount jobs. But not all jobs are worth doing, those that are bad for the person or the environment. We had better automate such work.

Normal people blame employers for low wages. Still, low entry-level wages are fair. Some jobs that no one should do their whole life. These jobs should be left to new entrants to the labor market. Nonetheless, conventional people happily bring the unhappy together into a working life, whether or not they affirm the life.

Of course, some jobs are underpaid. Yet when jobs are looking for people rather than the other way around, wages go up. What Makes Jobs Abundant? Well, taxing them doesn’t. Debt doesn’t. Vacant lots in prime locations are not. The poor who under-consume don’t.

Let wages be determined by the market. This prevents economies from misaligning prices and values. But make sure the markets are fair, on a level playing field. It is an economy where people get what they earn and earn what they earn, made possible by the elimination of taxes and subsidies.

Or provide a basic income?

Normal people also assume that the only form of income for the masses is wages. It doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to pay additional income to each other apart from their contribution in labor or capital.

A growing number of calls for a “Basic Income Grant” (BIG). To alleviate the resistance of the jobistes, these extra-comers are also demanding more jobs, which somehow defeats the objective of additional income, but there is no end to it. fun of politicians.

If people got the extra money, the jobs that were left would be jobs that people would choose to do rather than have to do it to survive. Additional income also allows people to employ themselves. And it gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to start businesses that would need staff.

Focusing on jobs, however, weakens the argument for free money. Demanding jobs not only decrease a person’s intrinsic worth, it also reinforces Protestant guilt towards the work ethic and delays the acceptance of Polynesian gambling ethics happiness. Instead, talk about recreation, time spent with family, rebuilding the community, communing with nature. All that.

Benefactors also plead for BIG because people are poor. This approach reinforces the belief in scarcity and that it is not possible to make everyone comfortable. To win, the beneficent would have to drop the famine and proclaim the surplus. The rental values ​​of natural resources and government privileges are ours. What are we waiting for?

Or share the rent?

BIG is a pipe dream of people who have no experience in business or creating value that others willingly pay for (most come close to academia). BIG only exists in minor partial experiments. What exists, not even as an experiment but as a policy, is the sharing of rents. Alaska shares the oil rent, the rent for the Aspen CO site, the value of the Singapore location – reforms legislated by pragmatic politicians.

Some BIGists have started to increase the visibility of what is already ours. They tend to be great company; some even talk about football football! They went from calling for another federal budget expenditure (BIG) to promoting this citizen dividend.

It is ironical. The public has no right to private property but sees no alternative to taking it through taxes. Meanwhile, the public is blind to their own abundance and therefore fail to reclaim it, whether through familiar taxes or more ethical fees, dues and leases. For the normal person, a rental cornucopia is “too good to be true”. For the 1% who get it, they know it’s true.

The intermediary role of the annuitant is that a government should play on behalf of all citizens. Collect this social surplus and pay it out as a citizen dividend. Because the rent is in the trillions per year, each share would be in the thousands per month.

As long as we do not collect the rents, we raise the hierarchy so that those at the top no longer belong to any society but are a nation in its own right. We leave the means to command and control the government to the elite. We let donors run higher education and old family cliques swallow up new technologies. And we are exaggerating the reward for exploiting nature and humanity. We allow the fundamental problem to persist and never forge a better world for all.

Once we share the surplus, taxis will never have to envy the rich again; there will no longer be extravagant fortunes to impose. So don’t demand taxes, demand contributions. Don’t ask for jobs, demand dividends. For more detailed information, see my book, Count the premium.