Quote from: Febo on May 26, 2015, 02:00:54 PM

Thing is you need to get taxes from somewhere. So or tax capital or tax work. Both are bad. But you need to do something or just decrease spending. What was and is trying to do in most cases in Europe. Of course many countries failed so governments will get reelected.

In fact, that is an aristocratic point of view. But there are other ways to finance public spending, than to take from the productive.

In fact, I can think of two simple ways which would allow for taxing, without being compulsory.

The first idea is that land and natural resources are, and remain, always property of everybody, and that nobody can own land or own natural resources. The way to obtain them for private use, would be to rent them (to the highest bidder, over long periods - 100 years or so - if you want to put some real estate on it for instance), and to give concessions to natural resources to the highest bidder. The income from the rent on land, and the concessions for natural resources, could finance the state, without having to tax anything in a compulsory way.

Another way would be to require people to indicate those possessions for which they want to have state protection of ownership, and tax those items along an indicated scale. So you're not obliged to indicate a possession, it would not be fraud, but it would imply that no state service is going to protect your property rights on it, no police, no judge. If you don't want to indicate that you possess a house, then no problem, this is no fraud, but the day that you have a burglar in your house, police won't do anything. If you want to sell your house, no legal way to prove that you own that house will be available.

The same way for financial and other valuable assets. No way to coerce the counterparty in executing a contract you didn't declare. But no fraud either.