Is a fair flat tax possible?

[D H]

Why the paranoid hostility?

 

And for that matter, why haven't you (or anyone else) defined what "fairness" means? Without a definition of fairness all we have is people talking past one another and people dragging goalposts all over the place.

[swansont]

Well sure, and in further historical discovery we see 5 private and 3 government entities forming the original AESC in 1918. But what's the point?

 

Again, I keep getting the goal posts moved. They are private, non-government (for redundancy's sake) non-profit and they do not use force to make people use their standards. They rely on voluntary inclusion. And at the current level of government intrusion, no private standards committee can be effective without rubbing shoulders with government on some level. That is hardly, even remotely an argument that government is needed for standards, rather that is an observation of present straits.

 

And that's just one. Mankind didn't measure stuff until government was invented? Please. All government did was speed up the process of standardizing by being the prick and naming the winner in an industrial competition. Instead of the market deciding who's standards will be adopted, the government chose for the market. Instead of convincing the private consumers of products and services, the winner just had to convince a handful of bureaucrats - just one of many, many channels of collusion we can be proud of.

 

Any other one liners?

 

 

If volumes and weights (and that was my original point, not voluntary protocols) were not standardized people would scream bloody murder that they were being ripped off. And to whom do you complain about fraud — a nonprofit organization? Fixing the Standard of Weights and Measures is a power of congress as given in the Constitution (article I , section 8)

 

Except it's not a "view" but an observation that has yet to be falsified. My "view" is that your tax bill is *not* tied directly to your individual usage of government services. And that's it. That's been it for a long damn time now.

 

 

But it never has been. So what exactly is your point?

[ParanoiA]

Why the paranoid hostility?

 

And for that matter, why haven't you (or anyone else) defined what "fairness" means? Without a definition of fairness all we have is people talking past one another and people dragging goalposts all over the place.

 

To your first question, you replied back with a one liner as if that invalidates my entire post and position. And we're here in this thread because of your initial question to me about accounting for goods and services, which Swansont keeps forgetting. Just look up...there he goes again, lost in the conversation but still doing battle anyway.

 

To your second question, I declined fairness and actually agreed with you, but not entirely. That fairness is merely evenness, and that implies some sort of subjective notion of equal pain. Everyone names it differently, but it's still the same.

 

So, yeah, I don't know what it means and I'm not terribly concerned. I opt for equal investment in the republic. Everyone should have something to lose and it should be proportionally the same, consistent with republic and democratic philosophy, one-man, one-vote, power from the people, all equal - otherwise the public treasury becomes the public troth that it is today. Since we allow disproportion - inequality - we get agents sent by the people to "get their cut" and we have businesses and lobbyists colluding instead of businesses and consumers trading.

 

It's kind of a big deal, actually.

 

But it never has been. So what exactly is your point?

 

This is the second time I've had to remind you how we got here...this is from page 3, I think: And I'll remind you also, that you took his question differently than I did, so let's not re-argue that one too, ok?

 

Have you done a full accounting of the goods and services you receive, including the roads you drive on, the education you have received, the roads others drive on and the education that others have received to make your job possible?

 

I see this lack of accounting to be a huge part of the problem. I would love to see such an accounting.

 

So, I said that accounting doesn't exist because taxes are *not* tied to your direct usage. I was really turning the observation around by pointing out that tax forms are all about my income, with some select expenditures, and nothing about my family's detailed usage of government goods and services with pricing for each thing.

 

From that simple exchange came pages of subjective stabbing in the dark about how much I benefit from government, without a reference to what I actually said.

 

If volumes and weights (and that was my original point, not voluntary protocols) were not standardized people would scream bloody murder that they were being ripped off. And to whom do you complain about fraud — a nonprofit organization? Fixing the Standard of Weights and Measures is a power of congress as given in the Constitution (article I , section 8)

 

Lost my damn post again and this time it was after I submitted. I received an error that I must enter a post first...real cute. Sometimes software is just glitchy, but frustrating nonetheless.

 

Anyway, I said something to the effect that telecommunications standards are far more complex than volumes and weights and yet no one is bitching that their 64kBps bandwidth is a ripoff because Joe Shmoe ISP defines kBps as killer bits per second.

 

But then, I also have to admit that I can't be sure some of these standards haven't found their way into telecomm legislation either. So I'll concede that much. But it ain't necessary either way, IMO.

Edited February 17, 2011 by ParanoiA

[John Cuthber]

Choose your government I guess.

The kilogram (and there is only one) is in France. I know someone who knows someone who has seen it.

It is looked after by the French on behalf of an international organisation

http://www.bipm.org/

So, no single government is in charge of it.

It was based on the metre which required an international collaboration to realise it. That happened even though the countries concerned were at war.

It surpasses governments, even though they fund it.

 

 

I gave up on this thread because nobody responded to my request for a definition of "fair" posted on the 8th of Feb.

[lemur]

Can I just check on the definition of "fair" please?

For example someone born to poor parents who attends a poor school is unlikely to do as well as someone whose parents can afford a better school.

Is it fair that, no matter how hard he works, he is likely to be disadvantaged?

 

If so, is a progressive tax more likely, or less likely, than a flat tax to address this particular variety of unfairness?

Educational stratification primarily serves the purpose of maintaining class distinctions insofar as economic activities are divided and classified according to such distinctions. Unless a particular form of taxation directly addresses class distinctions, it will not address the unfairness of social-economic class. The best some tax systems seem to do is try to somewhat equalize income and benefits for jobs with different class status. They cannot address status attribution to one field relative to another or the economic tradition of relegating certain work to certain people and other work to others. Likewise, taxation can't address the cultural belief that individuals specialized in one form of labor shouldn't perform other types of labor (or that it makes the economy less efficient for them to do so). As such, equalizing compensation ultimately amounts to a payoff for accepting forms of work that aren't desirable to middle/upper class people. When middle/upper class people support "fairer" taxation that promotes more equal compensation for "lower class" work, they often seem to do so with the basic assumption that they (or their children) will never be socially demoted to lower-class economic positions and status. So is it "more fair" that they at least want to pay their subordinates more for their subordination, or would true fairness only come with the eradication of social class and the implementation of economies where all individuals perform all classes/statuses of labor activities?

 

This post is in reference to the recent post citing it where it was stated that no response was ever given. Hopefully, this sufficiently addresses the issue of the intended function of progressive taxation and its relationship to fairness in class differentiation.

Edited February 17, 2011 by lemur

[Mr Skeptic]

Yes, fairness... Once you define fairness, then you can get about to designing a fair tax. I alluded to my view of what would be fair all the way back to post 4. My view was that of equal pain, which would necessitate a progressive tax system. However I stated that all as my opinion, since understandably people would disagree with me.

 

However, we have had some mathematicians worried about fairness and maybe they have some idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_division

Fair division, also known as the cake cutting problem, is the problem of dividing a resource in such a way that all recipients believe that they have received a fair amount. The problem is easier when recipients have different measures of value of the parts of the resource: in the "cake cutting" version, one recipient may like marzipan, another prefers cherries, and so on—then, and only then, the n recipients may get even more than what would be one n-th of the value of the "cake" for each of them. On the other hand, the presence of different measures opens a vast potential for many challenging questions and directions of further research. There are a number of variants of the problem. The definition of 'fair' may simply mean that they get at least their fair proportion, or harder requirements like envy-freeness may also need to be satisfied. The theoretical algorithms mainly deal with goods that can be divided without losing value. The division of indivisible goods, as in for instance a divorce, is a major practical problem. Chore division is a variant where the goods are undesirable.

 

I'm sure something there would be applicable. But note that even the mathematicians have not decided what exactly "fair" means.

 

 

---

 

As for "getting what you paid for", the government does give a fair accounting of what you (the people) have received with the money you gave them. Since they are not buying things for your personal benefit but rather for everyone's benefit, of course the accounting is of what was bought and not of how it relates to you. Although people often complain that taxes are unfair they really do agree that the taxes they're paying are fair, since they don't choose to leave the country for a better bargain.

 

 

 

[lemur]

The issue of distributive fairness in economics obscures the issue that after money is divided, there remains the manner in which the money-spent gets distributed. So, you could redistribute all the money equally among all recipients, but as soon as the recipients spend the money, it gets unequally redistributed according to the pricing/cost structure of existing industries. So the question is whether it is possible or even desirable to restructure industries to collect and distribute revenues in equal portions. I.e. does anyone expect for all the money they spend to be returned to them in full no matter how they choose to spend it? Should each consumer receive the same budget at the beginning of each year and have that amount replenished at the beginning of the next year, without the possibility of saving? If so, would taxation be 100% for unexpended revenues at the end of each year and, if so, how would that affect spending and resource utilization/waste?