Aikido, Dune and Taxes

On some forum an anarcho-capitalist asked me how to get rid of taxes. This was my reply...

People say the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. Taxes have probably been around for a lot longer than 2000 years. By trying to fight taxes you're pretty much going up against an immortal. You are not going to defeat this opponent by tackling it head on.

Aikido is a pretty good martial art if you want to go up against an opponent that is far bigger than yourself. It teaches you how to use your opponent's size and strength against them.

Pragmatarianism is the political equivalent of Aikido. It's the only way that you're going to be able to defeat taxes.

The first move in pragmatarianism is by far the hardest. It is to completely embrace the tax rate. This will feel totally unnatural for conservatives, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. But you most not fear. Because fear is the little-death that will bring total obliteration. You must face your fear. You must permit it to pass over you and through you. And when it has gone past you will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only you will remain.*

If you don't face your fear then you'll never get close enough to your opponent in order to apply the invisible hand technique. This is the second move...taxpayers will directly allocate their taxes among the various government organizations at anytime throughout the year.

Once you apply the invisible hand to government then people's spending decisions in the private sector will determine their spending decisions in the public sector. This is the key concept. If the Red Cross is more effective and efficient than FEMA then people who value disaster relief might not allocate any of their taxes to FEMA. If FEMA loses all funding then the scope of government will narrow. As we already know, narrowing the scope of government will lower the tax rate.

At this point your opponent will be off balance. To utterly destroy your opponent you'll need to ensure that there are private organizations that make every single government organization completely redundant. Not only that but these private organizations must provide more bang for taxpayers' bucks than the government organizations.

The beauty of this concept is that, the more you try and defeat taxes the more we all benefit from the increased competition between the two sectors. Government organizations will either operate efficiently or they will be replaced by efficient private organizations. Either way we win.

Not only that but there's no logical reason for liberals to oppose this system. Everything is evidence based. No leap of faith is required.  The majority of taxpayers won't care whether an organization is public or private...they'll just spend their money on whatever organizations produce the best results at the lowest costs.

In reality though...I wonder which is more unlikely...libertarians accepting taxes or liberals accepting the invisible hand?

*Dune

Department of Redundancy Department

In a few days my "English" friend will be visiting from England.  He's actually Welsh so he shakes his fist at me when I refer to him as "English"...and I shake my fist at him for a few reasons as well.  He's "visited" (where does "visit" end and "stay" begin?) several times before and it usually takes a bit of time for my ears to adjust to his Welsh accent.  However, I've since learned most of the different words and expressions that they use over there.

For example, over there they euphemistically say, "you've been made redundant" while over here we say, "you're fired".  Fans of the UK Office*  will of course recall the poignant scene where David Brent is Made Redundant.  In that scene, when David is confronted with redundancy, he says the following line with utmost sincerity, "I will try twice as hard, I really will.  I've been complacent, I'll turn this place around..."

Pragmatarianism is the single most effective way to eliminate government complacency.  Each and every tax payer would have the power to use their taxes to decide whether congress or any other government organization was redundant or complacent.  The democratic process on its own is not sufficient.

Here's what a liberal friend wrote to me a while back...

My ex works for the state department. She debriefs Hillary on the 5 or 6 countries in Africa that she represents in the areas of human rights and labor. This job consists of reading articles on the internet, facebooking and taking a 2 hour daily nap in the vacant office behind her cubicle. She makes $97,000 a year. And I've met some of her friends / coworkers. She's not alone in these habits. She also has friends in high government office downloading porn and sleeping with not only the people they are supposed to be regulating, but pretty much everyone else they meet. It's crazy. 

Maybe my liberal friend was inclined to exaggerate the situation because he was disgruntled with his ex?  I don't know...but we all have unique perspectives and insights.  It's why we all agree that two heads are better than one.  We should also all agree that, whether you are a liberal or libertarian, the government can produce the exact same levels of public goods using a lot less money.  Getting more bang for our buck is otherwise known as efficiency.

Interestingly enough, the State Department was one of the few cabinet departments that Milton Friedman said was necessary...Milton Friedman on Libertarianism.

In my last post, when I shared my justification for government, there were quite a few people that disagreed with my justification.  How crazy would it have been if everybody had agreed with my justification!?  It's really not a bad justification though.  We just work backwards from the premise that everybody would agree that an entirely redundant government would be entirely unjustified.  A partially redundant government would be partially justified and an entirely necessary government would be entirely justified.

What's necessary for you might not be necessary for me.  We don't purchase exactly the same private goods so it's highly unlikely that we would use our taxes to fund the exact same public goods.  There's no way that the visible hand (congress) can factor all the myriad of valuations and market signals that the invisible hand can.

A pragmatarian is somebody that is well aware that congress, in terms of tax allocation, can be made redundant.  Watch the video again of David Brent being made redundant and imagine the American public telling congress that they've been made redundant.

*I'm a fan of both the UK and American Office but, even though I can appreciate a decent amount of awkwardness, sometimes the UK version crosses the line into unbearable levels of awkwardness.