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I have my own ranking of taxing styles, but the most important takeaway is that the size and scope of the government needs to be severely downsized so that a low tax rate of whatever chosen style will be enough to provide for legitimate government functions such as law and order and the management of natural resources and natural monopolies. Individually consumed abstract service industries such as education, health care, and charity should be voluntarily traded for on the free market and should have nothing to do with taxing and government spending. The force of law is potentially violent and should not be applied frivolously to personal economic decisions. Leftists are far too cavalier with enforcing their economic and social engineering schemes by abusing the severe force of law and by arbitrarily choosing winners and losers in what should’ve been politically neutral markets.

Anyway: my tax rankings:

The nationalist’s escape from impolitely taxing his countrymen is to shift the burden to foreigners, in the form of tariffs, import taxes, and trade protections. The downside is that it can inspire some inefficiencies in the market such as making inferior domestic goods unnaturally competitive, but that’s a relatively small problem compared to the great boon of liberating the labor of all of one’s countrymen.

If you don’t want to go the route of taxing foreigners, the form of taxing one’s own countrymen that I find least offensive is taxes on exclusive access to natural resources. These might be thought of more as fees for using nature. To exclude others from using a part of nature that I didn’t create, I should compensate the public fund that goes to serving the common good. If I want to take fuel or minerals out of the ground, I should pay a fee per unit. If I want to build a structure that would prevent other people from using the ground it’s built on, I should pay a land value tax. It’s different from property tax because it only counts the land value, not the building value, because the building value includes the labor that went into building it, and taxes on labor are immoral. I’ve brainstormed a way to spread natural resource value to many different citizens by progressively increasing the tax on additional land units: make an individual’s first unit of land very affordable, but the second more onerous and the third even more so, etc. That way, hoarders such as Ted Turner and Bill Gates would have to pay outrageous rates for their one hundred thousandth acre of farmland that would be very cheap to a person who just wanted it as his first and only acre of land. This would incentivize the hoarder barons to divest and spread the wealth. There could be established group trusts where in return for using your name on the land contract and your first-property low price benefit, the barons using economies of scale would pay you for your land as if you were subletting it to them. It would be like a corporate sponsored citizens’ dividend. There’s more to be said about natural resource taxation, but that’s enough for now.

Next least offensive are consumption taxes/ sales taxes. Keynesians like Paul Krugman are overly obsessed with certain econometrics such as aggregate demand and they point out that consumption taxes stifle demand. I concede their point to some extent but I’m not as beholden to maximizing aggregate demand. Letting demand shrink a little bit is more acceptable than taxing people’s labor.

The most offensive are the various back-end taxes on profitability and labor. Unlike paying up front for natural resources and then using them as efficiently as possible for the optimal combination of conservationism and profitability, I call these other taxes “back-end” because they want to see how profitable you are first before financially punishing you for being efficient. Just the concept of paying to work, paying for your own labor, and paying more for earning more, is absurd. The income tax legislation of 1913 must’ve been accompanied by a mass formation psychosis of its time.