'Could'? Why do media outlets persist in tiptoeing around these issues? A tiny, tiny minority of cashless systems are private and censorship-resistant.
Almost all of the solutions that are actually currently on the table already do help mass surveillance, already does give more control to the government.
If we can get the general public to use open hardware without backdoors and a cryptocurrency or similar, we might be able to come close to the privacy of cash. But is that a realistic goal? Anyone knows how to use cash in a reasonably private way. Barely anyone knows how to use digital technology in a reasonably private way. It may not even be possible (are our systems backdoored? is x86 secure?)
Taxation is always the problem hailed here. I think that fundamentally people should have the power to withhold information from the government. That action may result in negative consequences, but it should be possible nonetheless.
There is a huge distinction between choosing to disobey the law and potentially being punished for it (civil disobedience), and having literally no choice because all other avenues have become impossible.
That is what people are fighting for, that is what freedom is all about. Perfect enforcement is not desirable.
Imagine a world in which homosexuality is impossible. Not illegal, but impossible. That's what perfect enforcement would have looked like in the 50s.
That is what people are fighting for, that is what freedom is all about. Perfect enforcement is not desirable.
If you think about it, neither is perfect security --- since that's how perfect enforcement can be carried out. Imagine using a locked-down, unjailbreakable ("provably secure"), DRM'd device under the control of the corporations which the government obliges to design such that it behaves in a particular manner, and you can't do anything about it. That's why the whole encryption debate worries me, and not exactly in the "governments can spy on you" sort of way. "Unbreakable" perfect crypto is good only if you're the only one in control of it, and even then it's not completely awesome --- imagine accidentally locking yourself out of your car/house/etc. and having to get a locksmith to essentially hack their way in for you. That's not possible with perfect crypto. More ironically, if government systems were more secure, Snowden could not have happened...
Maybe a little insecurity, a little imperfection, is a good thing after all, because it enables freedom.
Our legislators have lost - if they ever had - the wisdom to see the effects of unintended consequences. "Something must be done, this is something, this must be done."
Devil's advocate: Imagine a world in which theft, rape, slavery, and child abuse are impossible (more than once / for any meaningful period of time). Have you read any of Iain Banks's Culture series?
I think the peace of mind that you and everyone you'll ever know will never get disappeared into someone's rape dungeon doesn't seem so bad. Or that you can go into business and actually win because you're doing it better, because your competitors aren't in bed with government, corruptly and systematically destroying the possibility of competition. Just also don't do stupid shit like control the expression of two consenting persons just because what they're doing is not your cup of tea. Is this really so hard to differentiate between? And does perfect enforcement really mean minds can't changed, that the law can't be changed after it's created if it's understood that actions X, Y, or Z actually aren't against the universal bill of rights for living entities?
Sure, freedom is about being able to do what you want with your life, but it also means being able to do it safely, without the fear of getting pwned. People who want to pwn will always have the upper hand if we just all agree we'd rather keep letting people do whatever the fuck they want so long as they can get away with it. "Perfect enforcement" sounds only as horrible as the culture behind it is, to me. Turning away from that is to embrace and make a home for the devil we know---corruption, physical and sexual domination of the weak by the powerful, environmental devastation, rampant species genocide, etc etc etc.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Everyone realizes perfect enforcement of crimes related to rape or murder would be "great" in the sense no one wants that. However, the risks of those crimes happening to you are very minimal today and dropping every year in the U.S. Most victims of those crimes are placed or place themselves in situations that bad things can occur, think drug violence.
In order to combat the stuff you mentioned we would essentially lose the liberty to make mistakes as a society. For example, if I want to smoke weed, and do. I'll go to prison. Today, I get a ticket.
Or let's take an even more exterem case, say I am a 16 year old male and my 16 year old girlfriend texts me a picture of her breasts. We both would be labeled paedophiles for life, and got to prison.
There are literally millions of laws, to the point no one can keep track. If we made "Perfect Enforcement" we would all be jailed, for crossing the street without a sidewalk, for texting a friend a picture of a statue (copy right violation), potentially for being gay, etc.
We don't live in a society where people want to protect your freedom to not be physically hurt. We live in a society which tries to ensure people don't get physically, economically, socially, emotionally, hurt. This leads to many contradicting laws, and makes it impossible to both be free and secure at the same time. If we enforced "Perfect Enforcement" there would only be a totalitarian Enforcement force that doesn't follow laws, and the imprisoned populace who at least tries to follow the laws.
That's why the founding fathers added the bill of rights. They understood this, and sadly 200+ years later it appears our society is still incapable of understanding it.
What Benjamin Franklin said, and what you (and many people) believe he meant, are complete opposites[0]. The "essential liberty" he was referring to was the right of the government to form a collective defense against Native Americans, and the purchase of "temporary safety" refers to state assemblies and private landowners refusing to fund that defense.
What was intended to be a pro-statist argument has been turned into an anti-statist warning, which it was never intended to be. I'm not saying the "revised" interpretation isn't valuable - it just shouldn't be argued from the authority of Benjamin Franklin (or, by extent, the intent of the founding fathers) when he was complaining that people weren't sufficiently funding the military industrial complex of the time.
"Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety will deserve neither and lose both." -Unknown
That version of the quote is one Franklin never actually said, so it can't accurately be attributed to him and we can avoid having to care about what he actually meant. Because the thing in the linked post clearly isn't what anybody else means when they use that quote.
You don't deserve the downvotes, this is quite interesting. Reminds me of "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre", in that its historical context in misinterpreted in light of modern sensibilities.
Benjamin Franklin's world is so utterly different from ours because of where they were on the technology curve then, he may as well be talking about a different universe.
Maybe if you live in a suburb in the Netherlands and are part of a privileged socioeconomic class, these risks are low to non-existent. How about the billion plus people who don't even have electricity today? How about those who have nothing to give to the global economy because they're unemployable, cast aside, and lack technology, do they not live in risky environments and engage in risky behaviors as a matter of course through no fault of their own? Are there not entire countries of people getting pwned in every sense of the word by more powerful entities, right now, as we speak? Used up and then left to perish? No matter what the statistics, these poor victims are somebody. They're real people. "Oh, but that crime is so rare (for someone like me)"
What about slave trade? Our "low crime" existence in first world countries isn't made possible by rampant crime and resource domination on the other side of borders? From where I'm standing, it looks to me like a lot of assholes are not only getting away with murder and ecological destruction, they're getting rich off of it, despite any and all laws to the contrary.
How does making law less enforceable by embracing shadows (lack of transparency) in our age of accelerating technological change make life better for the majority (all living things)? Unfortunately the American Bill of Rights doesn't mean shit unless it applies to everyone. American business and government as a matter of course commit atrocities that are against it and nothing happens merely because those atrocities aren't (directly / provably) against Americans.
As a response to all the other children posts of this thread, I'm not saying let's maintain the status quo, plus perfect enforcement of the law. I'm saying we're entering a new age and shit needs to get revamped badly. Transparency in all things public would be a big step towards ridding our world of many evils that happen right now because powerful actors always have and will continue to act in the shadows while humanity, as a group, agrees to put up with it, er because e.g. preteens are sexting each other and as a result, the current utterly draconian and provably corrupt & massively inefficient law system has destroyed their first world lives. That really, really sucks. You know what sucks even worse? Being born or sold into sex slavery.
Simplify the law, make a universal bill of rights for all living things. Make it global. Automate and enforce it. For everyone. Obsolete the time when you could kill disenfranchised people and get away with it 'because high-priced lawyers'. It's hard for me to see how that could possibly be worse than what we have today, where the few get a nice life and all the rest are grist for the mill, to be used up.
>How does making law less enforceable by embracing shadows (lack of transparency) in our age of accelerating technological change make life better for the majority (all living things)?
The people you mention (the billions of global poor) get by, and live somewhat free, because of the law being less enforceable.
All of them break this or that law in order to make ends meet and survive. And those laws are compiled and passed by people who'd rather get rid of those poor altogether.
Again, to quote Anatole France: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread".
More enforceability of the law will mean more people at the mercy of the law -- and more people in jail, undeservingly so.
Not to mention that this whole discussion presumes "ethical laws" -- which is far from the truth in most of the world, include the BS us "three strikes laws" (which can put a man, usually a poor and/or black one, in jail for life for stealing a loaf of bread if they've done 2 equally BS offences in the past), marijuana laws, sodomy laws (until recently), etc.
> it looks to me like a lot of assholes are not only getting away with murder and ecological destruction, they're getting rich off of it, despite any and all laws to the contrary
(1) You are comparing murder to ecological destruction. To me that seems like you're ethical code compares the two, which I have to question. Ethically, to me, creating a dam to give water and food to millions is better than murder....
I realize that's probably not the case, you were thinking of, but you should consider what you think of as right or wrong, then imagine the exact opposite. Do you want those perfectly enforced?
(2) Usually, the people you don't like are using laws to get away with ecological destruction. Perfect enforcement would only make it worse.
>I think the peace of mind that you and everyone you'll ever know will never get disappeared into someone's rape dungeon doesn't seem so bad. Or that you can go into business and actually win because you're doing it better, because your competitors aren't in bed with government, corruptly and systematically destroying the possibility of competition.
A society in which law enforcement will be perfect (from a technical perspective) is not the same as a society in which the law is perfect.
Nor is a police having "100% capability of catching thieves, etc" the same as a police catching "100% of thieves".
The police could have all the tools on their disposal to catch anyone, but the political leaders of the police, and those influencing policy, law and enforcement, will still be the same higher-ups with self interests.
And of course any bevelonce in the use of such powers is just a regime change away from being lost -- not to mention that such powers would make it more tempting for the elite get dictatorial powers, and more difficult for the people to get rid of them.
Among other things, to quote Anatole France: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread".
Without much turbulent political history to draw upon (compared to a place like Germany or Italy) Americans are quite naive on such matters, especially white ones (even though McCarthyism, or J.E Hoover, or Nixon are there as examples, along with many others, like the recent SWATization of police forces, ridiculous 3-strikes laws etc). Black Americans on the other hand, of who people between 60 - 80 still lived in legal segregation, and who still get show for "walking while black" among tons of similar injustices, know better.
Too true. 100% enforcement of the law is only as good or as bad as the law itself.
I am absolutely not trying to espouse 100% given the current state of law / government in most countries, where the expression of the few, the powerful, expression which is contrary to the interest of the many, and quite frankly, contrary to the law as most people know it (e.g. current blatant human rights violations in America), somehow is always permitted by law and any counter-measures are preemptively disabled.
In other words, any government susceptible to corruption plus 100% law enforcement is a dead end.
In The Culture series, the achieved a paradise by virtue of infinite resources, but still respected the right of the individual to privacy, even though they easily had the ability to spy very invasively. Plus, it relies on perfectly benevolent supercomputers.
In the real world though, power corrupts, and those with power have much more ability to harm then those without.
To reduce harm the disenfranchised, we need to raise them from poverty. To reduce harm from the powerful, we need to strictly curtail their ability to enforce their whims.
Not only is the Culture series post-scarcity, it is post-singularity as well. It is so different from our current world that I'm surprised someone brought it up seriously in a policy debate.
We say that power corrupts but we don't really know what we mean by that. By this I mean it may be incredibly difficult; perhaps beyond us. The examples we have - the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution - lead us to Burke.
In creating such a society we are placing ourselves in chains and handing the key to some trusted third party. Maybe we wont be abused at first but given a hundred year time scale the probability of abuse approaches 1. How many of the US presidents over the last 100 years would you be comfortable giving this power to?
>"Perfect enforcement" sounds only as horrible as the culture behind it is, to me.
But we know how terrible the culture behind it is. We have thousands of years of history. "The strong do as they please and the weak suffer as they must."
>And does perfect enforcement really mean minds can't changed, that the law can't be changed after it's created if it's understood that actions X, Y, or Z actually aren't against the universal bill of rights for living entities?
Whoever holds the reins of power can make of the law as they see fit. At this level of power imbalance laws don't really exist, "L'etat c'est moi".
> "Perfect enforcement" sounds only as horrible as the culture behind it is
Historically, the "culture behind it" has looked pretty damn awful once time or distance give us some perspective.
> Turning away from that is to embrace and make a home for the devil we know---corruption, physical and sexual domination of the weak by the powerful, environmental devastation, rampant species genocide, etc etc etc.
Culture frequently and reliably endorses these things and worse. Corruption, cheating, and coercion are fetishized in today's business environment -- just look at the arguments over Ben Affleck's boiler room speech on youtube -- and historically it has been worse. It's not uncommon for entire countries to get behind genocide or slavery.
If you assume, in direct contrast to extensive historical and contemporary evidence, that culture is easy to get right, to fix, or to keep fixed, then your conclusion about perfect enforcement might follow. But that assumption is so utterly absurd that I don't think even the dullest lawyer Satan could get his hands on would make it the core of their argument.
Classical slavery was an answer to "what do we do with the people left over after conquest?"Of course, the transition to kings from judges in the Old Testament ( which I use because it's one of the few written artifacts left from then ) led to various prophets decrying the hubris of conquest. This hubris led to things like the Temple falling
American Peculiar Institution slavery was a widening of the scope of Iron Triangle trade in the Carribean by rapacious Mercantilists.
And to your last point, there's the line from "A Man For All Seasons" - "It'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake."
How do you decide what is right and what is wrong? I don't think a world where you can only act with 'permission' from a certain group pf people is sustainable or enviable. It's surprising how little people agree on with regards to the fundamentals of virtue.
That is such a rare situation. But we have so much evidence the other way. E.g. automated toll collection systems could have been designed as cash but instead are tied to a vehicle and user. And thus their collected data are subpoenaed for other uses from speed tickets to divorce evidence.
It's not even a slippery slope: as the systems are deployed those use cases are built in.
I think that you are vastly overestimating the risk of crime. My guess is that your risk perception, like that of many people, has been warped by watching too many tv shows where dramatic things are always happening.
>I think the peace of mind that you and everyone you'll ever know will never get disappeared into someone's rape dungeon doesn't seem so bad.
Unfortunately total government control means that you'd always be at the risk of being disappeared into the government's rape dungeon.
>universal bill of rights for living entities?
Who decides what's in that universal bill of rights? What happens to those who inevitably disagree with whats in that bill?
>Just also don't do stupid shit like control the expression of two consenting persons just because what they're doing is not your cup of tea. Is this really so hard to differentiate between?
Yes, unfortunately it is. Many, if not most people (and virtually every government), on the planet earth not only have no problem controlling the expression of two consenting persons, they are happy to do so with the threat of force. Who decides what a government with absolute power should or shouldn't do. Is it you? Is it the mullah in Pakistan? Is it the point heads in Washington DC?
>Sure, freedom is about being able to do what you want with your life, but it also means being able to do it safely, without the fear of getting pwned.
No, that's the opposite of freedom. In a free society, you have a risk of getting pwned. In a Totalintarian society (like the one you describe), your lack of freedom makes you pwned by definition. In a free society, people are free to make bad choices. Any sort of society that is oppressive enough to preemptively prevent behavior must have total control over all behavior - the very antithesis of freedom.
A world where crime is not possible might be psychologically devastating for a large amount of people.
Assuming a somewhat symmetrical distribution of competence, about 50% of people will be less competent than average. Many of these people will need someone to blame for their failure, and usually it's "these guys over there don't play fair!!!". Imagine a world where these people are faced with conclusive proof that they just suck at what they're doing.
Generally I agree with the (mountain of) historical evidence people are putting forth for why transparency in public interactions is a bad idea, won't be a positive net change. Personally, I'm pretty cynical about the possibility of new systems of government via technology-enabled change / new methods of control & automation. It's very concerning though when a group like HN is predominated by the cynical "it can't be helped", "it's just the way it's always been, always will be" notion.
I also have healthy respect for the idea that with new technology, new highs / quality levels are attainable. Obviously mankind needs a new system of government (or correctly implement an instance of "capitalism"). Why can't complete transparency in public communications be a feature? (that includes anything with a $ sign attached to it.)
Imagine you're cleaning / renovating your house and there's this black box in the corner of a room, you can't get inside it by any of your normal means, and the black box is dumping shit onto the floor. It doesn't care about house rules or respond to any communications you try to make. Now imagine you could, through technology, enable a way of looking inside the black box, being able to find the proof you need to be able to say with complete ethical certainty that it needs to fuck right off, and evict it. What do you do? Do you turn away from that technology, hold onto the dream that maybe the black box should be allowed to dump shit onto the floor for perfectly valid reasons that we don't know about inside? Only because that technology means other things in the house that are allowable would have to get that same lens?
I can't help but think that all this utter shit we're now getting proof of via the Panama Papers, human nature at work, selfish actions that are demonstrably "evil", it's going to continue, and worse is happening merely concealed by darker shadows. And it'll get worse as the powerful's influence expands as they get more and more tech savvy and more and more rich.
Humanity (and most life on Earth) is in a ridiculously challenging long-term pickle concerning the sustainability of life as we know it, and there's a rampant group of wealthy, powerful people that are making it harder and harder for us to get to the other side due to their selfish behavior. That shit needs to stop because humanity needs to get it together if we're even to stand a chance.
As you mention "perfect enforcement" I think The culture novels are a poor example, yes the AI's had near-perfect information which made crime a thing of the past but they also had a massively broad idea of what was legal (pretty much "do no harm to anyone else").
The people running society are far less likely to benign than the culture AI's (I think I have just about all of recorded history to back that one up).
It's the parable of the scorpion and the frog and we (meaning the general electorate) would be the frog.
>Imagine a world in which theft, rape, slavery, and child abuse are impossible
If you think this is possible through any technical means, you're not reading the right science fiction. I suggest you give Watchbird by Robert Sheckley a read.[0] It will disabuse you of any notion that we can improve society through any system of "perfect enforcement."
> Is this really so hard to differentiate between?
Yes it is. Otherwise why haven't we done it already?
Even if we could clearly distinguish just and unjust laws in a way that everyone agreed, how would that make a system capable of perfect enforcement any less dangerous when it's used to enforce unjust laws regardless?
Perfect enforcement is just a synonym for absolute power.
Some forms of safety - the industrial kind - can be "science" based. Others cannot. Safety and control are illusions unless you're prepared to do a great deal of work to understand the risks. And control can easily be too expensive.
> It never used to be that way, but government overreach and control is, well, out of control.
It always was that way. Look up William Randolph Hearst. He is sometime portrayed as a crusader. But the reality is messier, Hearst would look for dirt on people who were not doing what he wanted. Teapot Dome Scandal is just such an example.
A solution to the tax problem is to change methods of taxation so that far less information and monitoring is needed. While we're at it, we could also make taxation less regressive, more efficient, and simpler to comply with.
As much as possible, we should be taxing consumption, not income, savings, and growth. Where it is necessary to tax income and growth, we should be looking specifically at the largest, wealthiest corporations and their major beneficiaries, not average individuals.
They're fundamentally the same thing. Your spending is somebody else's income.
But a consumption tax which is collected by the merchants provides the government with the least information. All they learn is that Walmart reported selling $8,500,000 worth of auto parts this quarter, not who your employer is or what specific customers bought what specific products.
One of the advantages of taxing land rents is that most if not all the information needed is inherently part of the process of protecting property rights.
Since most intellectual and "brand" property must also be registered, I am sure the same can apply to that.
> While we're at it, we could also make taxation less regressive
> As much as possible, we should be taxing consumption, not income, savings, and growth.
These two desires are in complete opposition to each other, because the poor by necessity spend a much larger proportion of their income than the rich. What you are proposing is impossible.
> These two desires are in complete opposition to each other, because the poor by necessity spend a much larger proportion of their income than the rich. What you are proposing is impossible.
It's actually very simple. You collect a fixed percentage as a consumption tax (e.g. 33%) and then send everyone a tax refund in a fixed dollar amount (e.g. $10,000/year). Then everybody who spends less than $30K/year pays no or negative tax and for everyone spending more than that their effective tax rate starts at 0% at $30K/year and increases progressively to 33% the more they spend.
This also has the useful consequence of not requiring minimum wage laws or social assistance programs because the refund exceeding the tax paid takes care of that at the low end.
I'm not the CBO, but that tax plan would have at least a one trillion dollar larger annual deficit than the current one, maybe closer to two. You would need massive, massive budget cuts.
Plus now you're relying on businesses to collect your revenue instead of the IRS, and so you're going to see rampant sales tax evasion.
> I'm not the CBO, but that tax plan would have at least a one trillion dollar larger annual deficit than the current one, maybe closer to two. You would need massive, massive budget cuts.
You mean like all the social assistance programs that sending everyone a $10,000 check every year would make redundant?
Your argument seems to be that if the government wants to spend more money then they have to set a higher tax rate. Of course they do. How does that in any way dispute that a system of flat consumption tax + fixed refund is inherently progressive?
> Plus now you're relying on businesses to collect your revenue instead of the IRS, and so you're going to see rampant sales tax evasion.
Businesses already collect income tax. Waitresses reporting their tips is basically on the honor system. Contractors get paid under the table all the time.
Moreover, VAT solves this easily because each component of the supply chain will insist that its supplier has paid the appropriate VAT, otherwise it won't be deductible from the VAT owed by the purchasing business.
It's not impossible, it just requires an intelligent weighting approach. Tax rates on yachts, private jets, estates, and luxury goods can safely be made much, much higher than taxes on groceries and other staples, for example.
The taxing of mobile luxury good hasn't played out well in the past, specifically on yachts. The rich just buy their boats elsewhere and domestic boat builders lose their work
Those are just targeting the 0.1% though. The average $250,000/year earner isn't buying any of that except for maybe "luxury goods", however you define those.
I don't see any tenable path towards implementing this kind of taxation scheme. Consumer spending is the driving force of the US economy, and higher taxes on spending would cause serious reductions in spending in favor of saving (which goes untaxed). So you'd see huge collapses in goods and services industries, with people putting off big purchases until after the inevitable collapse of the new taxation scheme. Meanwhile entire companies are dying and millions becoming unemployed.
My effective total taxation rate under your proposed scheme would go from ~45% to under 10%. I save most of my income, and housing is more than half of the money I do save. I don't live in luxury housing or anything, and since you're discounting income, you thus couldn't charge me any more in taxes on my housing than my neighbors who earn significantly less (and couldn't afford to pay huge taxes on expensive housing).
In California, where we have those kinds of balances (no sales tax on groceries, for example), it ends up hitting the middle class disproportionately.
Since the poor spend most of their income, and the rich don't spend most of it, you are in any case taxing a higher portion of the income of poor people (with consumption taxes).
Historically, when there is no cash, barter or something that plays the role of wampum in Amerind society takes its place.
In a way, isn't this the drug trade in rural Massachusetts? Or in Baltimore in "The Wire"? It's a jury-rigged cash substitute.
I suspect that not only is cashlessness impossible, but that some sort of scrip money will be needed to meet unfunded liability.
I don't live in a high-marginal rate system, but in the US, taxes aren't high enough to be a real problem except in a very few cases.
It still confuses me that any normal person believes that any sort of prohibitionism is good policy. In fact, I
don't think they do - I think that prohibitionism is pernicious snake oil sold to those in search of a Utopia.
One need only look and it's obvious that it can never work.
Ignorance is the largest point of failure regarding anything to do with issues of security and understanding the pitfalls of electronic commerce. I don't know what percentage of people fully understand how these system can be used against them, but I'm sure the majority don't understand.
We are at the mercy of corporations which push much of the technology to their financial benefit and also the large policing agencies which want the easy route to surveillance of the general population. All of this together with the main-stream-media are an enormous barrier to to cross in order to inform people of what could become if things continue on the current path.
Perhaps my upbringing is coming through, but I was surprised to see no mention of the fact that Christian apocalypse predictors have been raving about the implications of a "cashless society" and the control that would give government over our lives for decades. http://endtimestruth.com/mark-of-the-beast/cashless-society/
Old-school Christian conservatism has a lot in common with modern libertarianism, such as its emphasis on self-sufficiency and distrust of big government.
Unfortunately, they got co-opted by savvy politicians who promised to catch sinners and wage war on other religions in exchange for a little more power.
How is money = free speech only when the recipient is a politician?
For the record, money is just an idea shared between people, and the communication of said idea. For strong demonstrations of this, consider hawala or consensus-based cryptocurrencies.
Humans have been assigning value to tokens and trading on the tokens since the dawn of civilization. Outlawing this activity is dangerous to free society. It will also make the beggar class and the poor generally even more beholden to the state.
Money is protected speech when that money is a campaign contribution or expenditure.[0] Money is also protected speech when you want to (buy an advertisements to) express your opinions about a candidate.[1] This is not nearly as narrow as "money = free speech only when the recipient is a politician."
Wouldn't this just cause the top 1% (who own the majority of the land in most countries) to charge higher ground rents to cover their land taxes, and make it increasingly difficult for anybody else to own land and buy out their freeholds, entrenching the wealthy elite even further?
If you added an LVT on top of current taxation systems, probably. One way to make it more revenue-neutral would be to reduce some other tax, like sales taxes.
But now consider idle land that's being held speculatively. The landowner expected to sell it at a profit in the future, but now those profits are impacted by the LVT. To maintain their profits they would need to find tenants for the land in order to pay the LVT. (Or settle with less profit! :P)
>To maintain their profits they would need to find tenants for the land in order to pay the LVT.
Can you expand on this point please? Why would it be necessary to earn rent from idle land in order to pay the LVT? Wouldn't unused land have a low value under a LVT system, much like it does now?
Good catch! I didn't mean to say the landowners would be forced to earn rent on their idle land. I meant that if they didn't want to pay the tax themselves (equivalent of charging the tax to their tenants), they would have to do something economically productive with the land. This is the theorized win-win with LVT: there is encouragement to develop otherwise-idle land.
I think you're right that introducing LVT could lower the already low values of unused land. Perhaps its introduction would mean a glut of sales of land: fire sale! (Win-win again, according to my armchair-economics analysis. :P)
I guess I still don't grasp how this aspect of LVT is any different or better than property taxes, as currently designed. If you own undeveloped land, you still have to pay the standard property tax rate on that land, according to its assessed value.
LVT implicitly incentivizes density. Assessors can determine your $1mm single family home close to a very dense business & housing district could potentially represent 12 $250k condos, which is $3mm of value and tax you as such. LVT would also not be based on the actual structures on the land, so it all about what the potential value of the usage of the land would be.
Not necessarily, although that is certainly how it works in many residential situations.
The general idea is removing the marginal disincentive for high-value _use_ of the land. Property taxes mean for every dollar you spend making something more awesome, you get taxed more. Instead, we should encourage awesomeness on the margin, and discourage people who use land that could be awesome in the least awesome ways.
> This is the theorized win-win with LVT: there is encouragement to develop otherwise-idle land.
That's only a win-win if you don't value nature very highly. LVT sounds like it would force even faster destruction of invaluable biospheres like rainforests.
In that case you could easily institute a progressive tax system whereby each additional property you own faces a higher tax rate, effectively preventing the wealthy elite from holding on to land indefinitely.
We already do this a little bit in some states of the US with homestead taxing
Oops, I was wrong! There are arguments that landlords already charge as much as they can, and as the supply of land can't be changed by LVT, they can't easily pass on the tax to their tenants. http://www.landvaluetax.org/frequently-asked-questions/why-l...
This is incorrect because demand for land is inelastic, or at least mostly so. Yes you can choose to rent in areas that are lower-value/more affordable but in many cases that's less practical than it's worth. For the most part you have to pay the market rate for where you want or need to be located.
If we assume that all rents are at their market maximum (e.g. landlords are making minimal but still positive profit) then adding a tax to all will simply raise that equilibrium.
Do you not have property tax where you live? I thought it was ubiquitous as it's the ultimate way the government prevents an individual from really owning land.
Cash is the only payment method available today that is both distributed and truly censorship-resistant. Anyone can pay cash to anyone else in exchange for anything, without having to report to, or obtain permission from, any third party. If nobody knows what you bought in the back alley last night, nobody will ever find out.
You don't need fancy chunks of metal and plastic to use cash. You don't even need electricity, much less an internet connection, to use it. A three-year-old kid can use it just as well as one-hundred-and-three-year-old great-grandma.
A lot of the time, you can't even tell whether the bills are genuine or not. But that doesn't prevent billions of people around the world from exchanging cash every day. And if dollars suddenly became untrustworthy, people will just switch to another currency or fall back to crates of fish and shiny stones.
Compare that to cryptocurrencies that are being touted as the future of distributed, "censorship-resistant" cash. Sure, they're distributed, but censorship is as easy as cutting off the target's internet connection (or even blocking some ports). If you're a dictator in North Africa, just flip the switch and all the rebels are suddenly broke! Cryptocurrencies also require everyone to broadcast every transaction to the whole world, and all it takes is one mistake to connect a set of addresses to a real identity. Geeks can mix their coins and hope there's no trail left, but good luck getting grandma to use it correctly.
Programmers love to talk about elaborate ways to prevent double-spending and whatnot. But in order to be a plausible replacement for cash, I think virtual currencies need to solve some of these usability problems first. Spending a few satoshis needs to become just as easy as pulling some quarters out of your pocket.
In a sufficiently trusted circle, you could probably just as well use a notion of debt instead of money or barter. Debt would be completely immaterial and virtual. This would work for villages or for groups with "multiple rounds" of encounter, in game-theory speak.
Exactly. Taking away cash and replacing it with debt again would basically just mean to replace the general trustee (the issuer of currency) with trust inside the group. Probably depends on the type of group and only works in relatively equal, non-competitive environments.
>Cash is the only payment method available today that is both distributed and truly censorship-resistant.
The only widely-accepted currency with those properties.
People are free to exchange anything for anything. You want to pay for something in blueberry scones? Go right ahead. The problem is finding someone to accept that payment. We use cash because it's convenient and has inherent value due to its ability to pay taxes.
>but censorship is as easy as cutting off the target's internet connection
Couldn't agree more. Cut off the internet, or refuse the sale of a cell phone or similar device and people will be forced to exchange their Bitcoins via pieces of paper. What a breakthrough.
This is wrong. Cryptocurrencies can be freely exchanged with anyone, anywhere unlike Cash which is only censorship-resistant for the transactions done in person. Cryptocurrencies are more distributed in the sense that exchange rates are set by market not central banks. This means cryptocurrencies can have more permanent stability than cash. Though at the moment none of the cryptocurrencies do. But as the adoption increases so will stability.
Cryptocurrencies are only censorship-resistant for people who can afford a secure and well-maintained computing device and whose internet connection cannot be arbitrarily blocked or filtered by governments and corporations.
On today's Earth, this group of people is vastly smaller than the number of people who can carry out cash transactions in person, not just because of poor adoption, but because of a fundamental UX problem.
Does it matter who sets the exchange rate when the more pressing concern is who controls your ability to participate in the network in the first place? You can set your own exchange rates, too, if you're really serious about it. It will be $10 for this wad of marijuana, not $15 like this other guy says, thank you very much.
> and whose internet connection cannot be arbitrarily blocked or filtered by governments and corporations.
I am not aware of even one instance where bitcoin or anyother protocol has been successfully blocked.
> On today's Earth, this group of people is vastly smaller than the number of people who can carry out cash transactions in person, not just because of poor adoption, but because of a fundamental UX problem.
Yet. There is no reason why cant UX be n00b-friendly or may be it already is. Low adaption is probably due to either people are unaware or there is lot mis-information. Anycase, adoption is steadly increasing.
> Does it matter who sets the exchange rate when the more pressing concern is who controls your ability to participate in the network in the first place?
Its not. None can control participation. Thats why dark markets deal in bitcoin.
> You can set your own exchange rates, too, if you're really serious about it. It will be $10 for this wad of marijuana, not $15 like this other guy says, thank you very much.
Considering there are zillion laws regulating money flow between any given two parties, I doubt it would look as appealing as a widely-accepted crytocurrency.
Cash is censorship resistant through intermediaries or bagmen (or women). E.g., at a cost. Various arrangements are possible to allow reliable remote transactions without identification.
What about barter? It's way less convenient than cash, but it is a distributed payment method that can at least be used in a way that is censorship resistant (many times the thing up for barter might make the transaction hard to hide, other times not).
The whole point of money is it abstracts value from what is valued. Barter is laden with whether you want the thing, what you perceive as its value, and it's durability & transportability. A crate of raw tuna is quite valuable, but very hard to barter with. Some may be surprised to find ammunition & guns make for excellent cash substitutes, having a wide range of value in compact, durable, and self-protective form.
The Fed automatically tracks serial numbers of $100s cycling through its system. Most 100s never see the inside of a bank a again unless they are spent at a merchant. Nothing prohibits other denominations, but they are less significant.
For those of you who have parents/grand-parents who lived in Europe during WW2, you should ask them what they think about the value of have some money somewhere the government doesn't know anything about (whether it is cash or in a foreign country). This is not a theoretical argument. Germany was a democracy before the war. France too. Italy too.
If you're going to do that, better be sure it's in something with hard value, e.g. gold or silver because government can simply do something like declare that the current currency is invalid and must be exchanged for new, thus forcing everyone with hidden stashes to come forward or take the loss.
GOV absolutely knew what the consequences / ripples of Choke Point would be.
They knew that it would generate support amongst the Vice Hating Crowd, allowing GOV to address the two things they need most:
/ An easier way to issue debt with less scrutiny (Federal Reserve Notes are quite specific debt instruments that we circulate, while GOV's debt load is approaching untenable).
/ A more comprehensive way to track gun sales.
Many people do not trust various levels / types of government, and see gun ownership as a necessary... hedge. Thankfully, the US has the option of The Four Boxes of Governance: Soap, Jury, Ballot, Ammo.
Ultimately, laws and freedoms are maintained at the point of a gun. And it is the Ammo Box, in the hands of The People, that allows the other three boxes to be used.
I agree with the sentiment of the title, but does the article really support it?
Operation Choke Point (which, in the end, was just the gov't saying "hey, these industries are dangerous") helped stopped Alexander's donations. But it's not like it's easy to collect online payments in a cash-only society, right? This is like saying "how the internet can embolden wiretapping". The gov't action only increased through the technicality of increased technology.
The fact that Visa and MC responded to Sheriff Dart's letter is disturbing, to say the least, though. Though saying the circuit decision is a first amendment decision might be a stretch: It reads to me more like a mix of that and one about abuse of public office.
So.... this article brings up issues that I think are extremely important though. Visa and MC as payment processors basically reserve the right to not service people. Is there a legitimate case for forcing them not to discriminate? Do we need net neutrality for payments?
Someone will say "Bitcoin solves this!" but it doesn't, at least not until the US government accepts tax payments in USD.
The biggest issue with "payment processor purity" would be the question of how does that work with money laundering laws? There might not be a conflict: if payment processors know who you are, that might be enough.
But seriously, Choke Point would have failed any first ammendment challenge if banks wanted to challenge it. But they didn't, because banks believed what the gov't was telling them, and also don't like high-risk, low-reward businesses. Private enterprise is at the source of these issues!
Instead of worrying about Big Brother, I'd say this article is more about how the government _should_ intervene to ensure 1st amendment rights in a cashless society.
A side note that I feel is lost in these discussions: cashless societies (or mixed cash/cashless, if you will) enable lots of people (like adult entertainers, but also everyone on Patreon, for example) to live a life they couldn't with cash-only universes. Even if cash is always there, we should work to make cashless better than ever if possible.
The Atlantic almost used an euphemism for what the effects of a cashless society would be like. I guess they didn't want to use the term "Big Government". That might upset the "When I say Big Business, I mean bad" crowd.
The government is already using this to punish its enemies (political and otherwise). You'll be a slave if this ever comes to pass.
But the real problem is that you have 40% of Democrats (or more) identify as being socialists now. If you're a socialist then you just accept this, because Big Brother/Big Government is what you want. You want Bernie Sanders to bring in Big Government to punish.
The Republicans and Libertarians are spineless. They should be attacking people like Cass Sunstein on a daily basis. Everyday the collectivists like him should be called out and exposed for the totalitarian wannabes that they really are.
Physical currency is privacy, it is freedom of commerce, it is property rights. Giving up physical currency means giving up all your freedoms at once. Simply because government can tell you what your money is worth at any instant, where you can spend it, and if you can spend it or are required to do so to not lose it
Nah... they just ask the Fed to p00f money ( debt ) into existence so they can pay the bills with the no limit credit card. A little drama about the debt ceiling and everything is all better.
No, you still need taxes. The fundamental reason the US dollar has value in the global economy is that hundreds of millions of very wealthy people are forced to pay taxes in that currency.
And in 1913 the Rothschild backed consortium gained control of the US's money supply.
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning" -Henry Ford
Cash still rules, it requires no electricity, you have to physically take it away from me compared to exploiting a bug in some system.
Bitcoin is not bad, but it's still in the hands of a few privileged people, who control the source code. Privacy only truly happens if you leave out middle man, like Coinbase. Now, managing bitcion 100% yourself is a pain that the general public simply won't do. Yes, you can do it, but you will find yourself at the edge of a long tail.
It's fun to see how the most expensive social experiment will unfold.
Tendermint. It has different security characteristics, but the nice thing is, it doesn't rely on extrinsic factors for security. It's not just BFT, it's actually antifragile.
Bitcoin is probably less private (in common use) than credit cards. Instead of having to ask the credit card companies what you're up to, anyone can just check.
Ues but not everyone can link Bitcoin addresses to individuals. Bitcoin has poor privacy in theory, but the practice of actually deanonymizing is non-trivial. Also since it is an open system, improvements are possible.
It depends on how exactly you use Bitcoin. If a user performs an in-person anonymous Bitcoins-for-cash swap to fund an address and never uses that address, then it is as private as that initial funding transaction. If you pay for things with Bitcoin, even with the use of tumblers, deanonymization is trivial for governments and corporations.
Bitcoin is the transparent currency, not the anonymous currency.
While the ability to censor people has increased tremendously, our government's perverted interest in puritan idiocy seems unchanged for hundreds of years. I just can't believe that who someone decides to have sex with is still something the government insists on controlling. What a sick society we live in and then have the audacity to call everyday natural actions "vice". No, vice is that sheriff's sick obsession with other people's sexual activities and his insistence on controlling them for his own sick pleasure. Vice is indeed the public's willingness to accept and get pleasure based on other people's pain. It's just amazing how much Americans love hurting each other simply for the sake of suffering.
Look at China, where WeChat Wallet and Alipay dominate cashless payments. It's very good for the Chinese government that there are 2 large cashless payment platforms that they can monitor/control.
Every digital transaction is trackable throughout it's lifecycle. Every transaction can be traced back to the origin even it changes hands several times. An ideal government can make a good use of this feature to enforce law for greater good, while a practical government, in reality, enforces whatever suits the powerful ones the best.
Almost all of the solutions that are actually currently on the table already do help mass surveillance, already does give more control to the government.
If we can get the general public to use open hardware without backdoors and a cryptocurrency or similar, we might be able to come close to the privacy of cash. But is that a realistic goal? Anyone knows how to use cash in a reasonably private way. Barely anyone knows how to use digital technology in a reasonably private way. It may not even be possible (are our systems backdoored? is x86 secure?)
Taxation is always the problem hailed here. I think that fundamentally people should have the power to withhold information from the government. That action may result in negative consequences, but it should be possible nonetheless.
There is a huge distinction between choosing to disobey the law and potentially being punished for it (civil disobedience), and having literally no choice because all other avenues have become impossible.
That is what people are fighting for, that is what freedom is all about. Perfect enforcement is not desirable.
Imagine a world in which homosexuality is impossible. Not illegal, but impossible. That's what perfect enforcement would have looked like in the 50s.