Pseudo-demand, Pseudo-supply

[surly74]

Furthermore it would not be in the best interest of the 'government agency' to advertise for early taxpayment. It would be in their interest to maximise taxes allocated to them, and in your system that would mean that they would want to appear/be underfunded for as long as possible. Until the day of the deadline to be precise. In the morning you put out a pressrelease: "The police in your county is going to dissapear if you don't pay up".

or the police having a list of who put taxes towards the police force...call 911, did you pay to the police force? Yes, we'll be right there. No? We'll get around to it.

same with fire, ambulance. any public service.

[zarus tathra]

Without the government, labor would eat capital ALIVE. You people are all waiting for "the government" to save you and protect you, even though it's obvious that "the government" is made up of people like you. It's the same psychology that underpins "consumerism."

[Colanth]

In a tax choice system, if you valued how the Fed was using society's limited resources, then you'd give them some of your taxes.  What percentage of taxpayers would give the Fed their taxes?  

The correct answer is...that you don't know.

Actually we do.  Greece has a voluntary tax system.  Guess what?  IT DOESN'T WORK, which is why Greece went bankrupt.

So it seems as if you have to come up with something else.

[Colanth]

Most people don't know that tax choice is a clearly superior system.

Allow me to correct that for you:

People who understand what happened in Greece know that tax choice is a very inferior system, and just doesn't work.

[Colanth]

There's a difference between understanding economics and knowing your priorities.  People know their priorities, and in a pragmatarian system, would be able to allocate their tax dollars accordingly.  This would determine how much funding each government agency received.  

As such, it would be nonsensical to say that important government organizations would be underfunded.  That's because the only measure of "importance" is how much people are willing to sacrifice for something.  If public healthcare received a lot of funding, then, and only then, could we say that public healthcare is important to society.

Well, no.  That's NOT what "important to society" means.  What you're talking about is what's important to certain members of society.

Remember, a large percentage of society doesn't earn enough to pay ANY tax, and what's important to THEM isn't very important to those who pay the most tax.

So all your "tax choice" would do is allow the 1% to OPENLY decide what gets funded, rather than doing it by stealth the way it's done now.

At least, the way it's done now affords SOME protection for the plebs.  Your way provides none, and we'd either have a revolution (in which the wealthy, good or bad, would be strung up from the lamp posts) or the stench of unburied bodies (of the dead ex-poor) would drive everyone left alive to the wilderness.

Anyone who remembers Watts doesn't want a pleb revolution.

[Colanth]

If people didn't know what their priorities were then they'd never make any decisions regarding how to allocate their resources...

Most people don't.  They buy what they want NOW.  Then, when they run out of money but they actually NEED something, they put it on plastic.

So when the government has put most of its bills "on plastic", the vast majority (a LOT more than now) will be the interest on the national debt.  And how many people, given free choice, will send one thin dime of tax to pay that?  It's not a need of theirs, it's not a want of theirs, so they won't allocate any money to it.

Then, when the government declares bankruptcy ...

Have you spend even 5 minutes thinking this plan of yours through to its end?  I doubt it.

[Colanth]

If the first 10K you made wasn't taxed at all, at both the state or federal level that would help things.

It wouldn't help the guy making $1/hour in the slightest, since $2,000/year isn't even enough to starve to death in a Western country.

I'm in favour of raising any minimum wage if personal exemptions aren't going to be increased. Either way purchasing power needs to increase. There is no reason to work when you are losing so much in tax if you are at a minimum wage job.

But you can't raise the purchasing power of a man making less than the minimum tax cutoff by raising it. And you can't increase purchasing power by giving everyone a minimum annual income.  (Prices will just rise to account for the increase in the money supply.)  And if the minimum wage is raised enough that one person earning it can support a family, prices will rise so much that he'll no longer be able to.

IOW, the first clause of Matthew 26:11 will always apply, no matter what we do.

[Colanth]

Large corporations have a board of directors.  This board decides on the course of the company.  This board also wants money this quarter because next quarter they are going to sell their stocks and buy stock in another company.  So, they run the company into the ground for the short term profit and split.  How is that maximizing the use of our limited resources?

What you described was insider trading...probably the one financial crime people get prosecuted for.

It's not.  If they sell the stock short, knowing that they're going to run the company into the ground, it is.  But if the profit comes from running the company into the ground, it's not trading at all.  (They can raise their salaries, then sell off capital goods to pay for it.  They can lay off workers and add those salaries to their own.  Etc., etc.)  They then sell the stocks (not at a loss, because they never paid anything for them) for less than they were worth when they received them, so they wouldn't be prosecuted even if it WERE insider trading.  (You don't usually get prosecuted for insider trading if you take a bath.)

[LikelyToBreak]

surly74 see what Colanth wrote.  I think it is a pretty good explanation.  

Also note:

In the years 1997 through 1999, white-collar crime accounted for less than 4.0 percent of the incidents reported to the FBI. The majority of those offenses were frauds, counterfeiting, and forgery. Currently, one in three American families is a victim of white-collar crime, yet very few are actually reported. Of those reported only 21% made it into the hands of a law enforcement agency. This translates into less than eight percent of all white-collar crimes reaching the proper authorities.
//http://ezinearticles.com/?White-Collar-Crime-and-Prosecution&id=2085528

So, although there maybe 700 cases being prosecuted, there are about 7,000 cases of it going on.   And maybe even more which are never even detected.  Also prosecutors don't like trying white collar crime, they say it is because it is hard to get a jury to understand what actually happened and what laws were broken.  Anyway pragmatarianism doesn't seem to take cases like this into account.  Or then maybe I missed something, which is highly likely considering the confusion of this topic.

[Colanth]

//http://libertariananarchy.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/hello-world/ may interest you.  It's an economic breakdown (and total destruction of the feasibility of the idea of) pragmatarianism.  Unlike pragmatarianists, the author actually looks at consequences.

[Xerographica]

//http://libertariananarchy.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/hello-world/ may interest you.  It's an economic breakdown (and total destruction of the feasibility of the idea of) pragmatarianism.  Unlike pragmatarianists, the author actually looks at consequences.

Heh, those two anarcho-capitalists couldn't quite explain how, exactly, we would end up at a 100% tax rate.  There are far better critiques...just Google "critique of pragmatarianism".

It's nice to see though that you're actually researching the topic.

[Xerographica]

Give the job to someone who can write the memo with brevity and without arrogance and condecension. You're the worst salesman for tax choice I've ever encountered.

How many tax choice salesmen have you encountered?

[Xerographica]

In this case, what we are shopping for is provision for the less-advantaged. Maybe more people would be better-off if the government had stayed out of charity work in the first place, but we don't live in that alternate universe and can't know that for certain. We agree that minimum wages distort the labor market and increase unemployment. We disagree on it being the right of the citizenry to choose to do that. I propose a solution (just one of many possible ones) that mitigates the market distortion while still accomplishing the aim of the citizenry. You want to change the aim of the citizenry. If you want to do that, you'll have to show your way is better, not just proclaim it.

We clearly disagree on how we can truly know exactly where the citizenry is aiming.  You seem to have great confidence in voting...but voting is a contingent valuation technique.  It's people simply stating what they want/value/believe.  That's why "contingent valuation" is also known as "stated preference".  

Shopping, on the other hand, is demonstrated preference.  So when we say that actions speak louder than words...we're saying that demonstrated preference is more accurate than stated preference.  

There's often a disparity between what people say, and what people do.  As such, you're giving way too much weight to people's words and not nearly enough weight to their actions.  

This is something that we disagree on...but it's not really something that experts disagree on....

Furthermore, social scientists know that there is often a big gulf between consumers' answers to surveys questions and what they actually do when confronted with real choices involving real prices and the immediate circumstances of consumption. - Richard B. McKenzie, Bound to Be Free

There are, however, several other considerations that are sometimes mentioned in the context of revealed preference that do suggest a systematic and predictable bias in the divergence between actions and words (and by extrapolation between market and electoral preference), and these considerations are of more interest in the current setting. - Geoffrey Brennan, Loren Lomasky , Democracy and Decision

You seem to think that I have some issue with society choosing to help the poor.  But this is ridiculously far from the mark.  I'm a pragmatarian...this means that I believe that taxpayers should be free to choose where their taxes go.  If taxpayers want to spend their taxes on the poor...then so be it.  If they want to spend all their taxes on the poor...then I'll probably disagree but that doesn't mean that I'd want to limit their freedom.  If they don't want to spend any of their taxes on the poor...then I'll probably disagree as well...but it would be proof positive that there is a often a huge disparity between words (voting) and actions (spending).

But given that you believe 1. that voters are taxpayers and 2. voters are truly willing to make significant sacrifices for the poor...then you should have confidence that, given the choice, they would choose to give a good portion of their taxes to the poor.

[Plu]

Why do you keep saying "society wants"? Under you system it's irrelevant what "the people" want. It's only relevant what "the rich" want. They have the money, they pay the taxes, they make the decisions.

If you'd start replacing "the people" with "the rich" in your stories, at least you'd be honest about you're advocating.

[Xerographica]

Why do you keep saying "society wants"? Under you system it's irrelevant what "the people" want. It's only relevant what "the rich" want. They have the money, they pay the taxes, they make the decisions.

If you'd start replacing "the people" with "the rich" in your stories, at least you'd be honest about you're advocating.

Let me, ummm, kill two birds with one stone here...

From the xkcd thread...

That has virtually nothing to do with what I was asking. So lets rephrase. You have the option of living in two societies:
#1 The US as it is now.
#2 InequalityLand. Here, 1% of the population is incredibly wealthy, another 2% are comfortably middle class, and 97% live in abject poverty. But the overall level of production and wealth is 10% higher than in #1.

It's clear that the InequalityLand ranks higher on efficiency (must be all those socialist redistributive policies in the US, holding their efficiency down). Now, if you can pick which society you'd prefer to live in, but you don't know where in the wealth distribution you'll end up (we'll assign you at random), which would you pick?

Personally, I would pick #1. Would you? And if you would as well, why in the world would we approach economic policy caring only about efficiency and consumer sovereignty. So, what's your true preference? The more efficient society? Or the less efficient but more equitable one?

My reply...

This reminds me of a terrible critique of pragmatarianism written by two anarcho-capitalists...Pragmatarianism Disproved.  It made me laugh because they attempted to demonstrate how a pragmatarian system with a 100% tax rate wouldn't work.  But when I asked them to explain how we would end up at a 100% tax rate...they were unable to do so.

How does consumer sovereignty lead to the second option?  

Here in Southern California it's kind of the coolest thing.  We have flocks of wild parrots that have completely naturalized.  Have you ever heard a flock of wild parrots?  It's pretty much the noisiest thing.  Especially at the butt crack of dawn right outside my open bedroom window when they are swarming the large fig tree that's weighed down with a ton of ripe fruit.  

There the parrots are...happy as can be...squawking and squawking and chowing down on fig after fig.  Then, in a flash of green, they fly off to who knows where.  Maybe to another fig tree?  Surely my fig tree can't be the only fig tree that they visit.  I wonder how many fig trees they visit?  But wherever they go, they deposit fig seeds.  During fig season...what's the average amount of seeds that each parrot poops out?  What percentage of seeds actually germinate and make it to maturity?

I wonder if you can already see my point here.  I'm talking about parrot sovereignty.  With this process at work...how could we end up with fig trees that did not match the preferences of the parrots?  Why would the parrots eat figs that didn't match their preferences?  How could uneaten seeds possibly be dispersed?  Given that no two seed grown fig trees are exactly alike, wouldn't the parrots prioritize and eat the figs that provided them with the most bang for their buck?  

I'm sure you've heard the expression..."as happy as a kid in a candy store".  That expression is applicable to the parrots during fig season.  Why is the kid in the candy store so happy?  Because there are so many items that match his preferences.  Why are their so many items that match his preferences?  Because he has the freedom to choose whichever candies match his preferences and candy makers are free to innovate and offer newer types of candies.  Less wonderful candies are replaced by more wonderful candies...it's creative destruction that results in more and more value.

Basically, consumer sovereignty will lead us to heaven on earth.  Except, not in your scenario.  What gives?  The next time you're at the mall...step back, sit down and pay attention to the throngs of consumers picking x or y.  You won't be the only one doing so.  If producers want consumers' money...then they are going to have to produce items that are closer matches to the preferences of consumers.  

Am I wrong?  Perhaps.  If so, then please walk me through a step by step process showing exactly how consumer sovereignty leads us to society #2.