> You can't argue that taxes on natural resources are arbitrary.
We can swap the Income Tax for an Air Tax if that helps, air is a resource. Charge by lung capacity. Big fellas do tend to make more money so it'd probably be a rough proxy for wealth and class I expect.
Resource taxes:
* Disincentive producing resources.
* Are still arbitrary.
Fundamentally what a tax is recognising is that Entity A did the work, but Entity B should decide who gets the fruit of that work. There is no acknowledgement that Entity A might be better than B at deciding what to do, or mechanism to test it, or even really a jury to decide it in practice (in theory the legislators could, but frankly I don't think any of the legislative bodies I'm aware of could tackle that sort of micromanagement). We don't even have consensus on what value system we should use to decide which entity was going to make a better decision even if we have perfect information about both hypothetical resource allocations. It is all ultimately arbitrary.
Even the no-tax pure free market solution is arbitrary, the argument in favour of it is it has the incentive structure that results in the most production, and big picture history suggests that maximising production will get best overall living standards. But it is clearly arbitrary, people love to point out the wild wealth differences between people who seem pretty similar except for minor differences.
These are not academic or theoretical concerns, this stuff is the meat of most of the big political debates that rage on.
We can swap the Income Tax for an Air Tax if that helps, air is a resource. Charge by lung capacity. Big fellas do tend to make more money so it'd probably be a rough proxy for wealth and class I expect.
Resource taxes:
* Disincentive producing resources.
* Are still arbitrary.
Fundamentally what a tax is recognising is that Entity A did the work, but Entity B should decide who gets the fruit of that work. There is no acknowledgement that Entity A might be better than B at deciding what to do, or mechanism to test it, or even really a jury to decide it in practice (in theory the legislators could, but frankly I don't think any of the legislative bodies I'm aware of could tackle that sort of micromanagement). We don't even have consensus on what value system we should use to decide which entity was going to make a better decision even if we have perfect information about both hypothetical resource allocations. It is all ultimately arbitrary.
Even the no-tax pure free market solution is arbitrary, the argument in favour of it is it has the incentive structure that results in the most production, and big picture history suggests that maximising production will get best overall living standards. But it is clearly arbitrary, people love to point out the wild wealth differences between people who seem pretty similar except for minor differences.
These are not academic or theoretical concerns, this stuff is the meat of most of the big political debates that rage on.