Take a beat to think about what the government does for you.
To be fair a LOT of this stuff is taken for granted.
Things like:
- Hospitals and healthcare
- Roads
- Power and water (although power is largely privatized)
- Social programs
- FDA inspectors
- Police
- Firemen
Federal, state, and local governments are responsible for a lot of infrastructure. As much as I'd like to talk trash and ask, "When's the last time the gov did anything for you?" It's simply a loaded question meant undermine and ignore all the thankless things they do for the people... unless of course you're from Nigeria or whatever and the government is even somehow more corrupt than USA. I can't speak to other countries other than my own, and even then I'm on shaky ground.
If I had to guess, I was personally on food-stamps for something like 10 years. That's $200 a month for 120 months... basically got $24000 for "free" off the taxpayer's dime. Of course I had to be dirt poor that entire time to qualify for the full amount; well under the national poverty limit. Obviously this is not the ideal situation.
Lot's of people will complain when they see a "mooch" siphoning off tax dollars like that. Of course these people are not to be taken seriously because they never mention things like the police state and infinite warfare and meddling, which are much more expensive than food-stamps (and other social programs), excuse me I mean Calfresh/EBT. Never forget to rebrand the name of the thing when public sentiment turns sour.
Does the government thinks it owns you?
They certainly seem to act like it. In fact a lot of my friends from high-school joined the military and the language used in that case seems to be that the government explicitly owns you on paper. They don't seem to be too subtle about it.
Take taxes for example.
If I win the lottery, the government thinks they are entitled to a big chunk of the winnings. Why is that? What if I had paid a million dollars on lottery tickets before I had finally won? If I paid a million dollars to win a million dollars I just lost money because of taxes. The only way to get around this is if the $1M loss was all in the same calendar year and I was able to offset the winnings with my loss... a highly unlikely scenario for lottery winners on the average, especially when taken in aggregate across multiple people. Lotteries are designed to be a scam like that. You lose on average playing them and then the government scoops even more. The math is ludicrous across every metric.
Meanwhile, the government excepts zero risk.
If I take a risk and win the lottery, the government wants my money. Will the government accept the risk of the lottery? Of course not! They want to take zero risk and just take yours no matter what you had to do to get there. Same goes if I boot up an extremely risky startup. To hell with all those failed startups... but government be damned if they're gonna let the successful ones not fork over their winnings. See how this works? Zero risk, all reward.
The government thinks they are so entitled to our money and labor that if we refuse to pay they'll hit us with an even bigger fine. If we don't pay that they send men with guns to take us to jail (which is ironic because the money used to imprison you is siphoned from other taxpayers). If we resist the men with guns they will shoot us, all the while the aggressors will sit on their high horses and act as though they are 100% in the right and infallibly morally superior. Yeah, they aren't though.
This is what we like to call an abusive relationship.
And a really bad one at that; full of gaslighting, superiority complexes, control, and violence. And yet everyone simply accepts it because it's the way it's "always" been.
Except it's not how it's always been.
People like to say things like, "Who will build the roads?" in response to libertarian rhetoric. It's such a bad question; history is my least favorite subject of all time and even I know that it wasn't that long ago that income tax didn't even exist. And then when it came into being it was only like 3% or something, and people were still furious about it. The frog boils slowly.
Taxes no longer make sense except in the context of slavery
Certainly this isn't 100% true today but it is the direction we've been heading in for a long time. Every year the governments around the world get more corrupt. Every year they spend money on things we never agreed to spend money on. Every year is more waste of resources and inefficiency.
And now technology is creating abundance.
The convergence of crypto, 3D-printing, and AI is going to create self-sufficient city-states that don't need the government whatsoever. In less than 100 years the nation-state will be an archaic barbaric institution only read about in the history-books. Unfortunately our abusers will not just let us leave peacefully, just like any other abuser.
I guess that's why they call it window pain.
kek
It's a guaranteed war.
I think it's childish and naïve that so many people in crypto think this is going to be a "peaceful" transition. Really? Really!?! Yeah well unless you figure out a way to upload your consciousness to the Internet that's simply not how the world works. As if the most toxic and brutally violent entities across the planet are going to lay down quietly and die. Good one. Not gonna make it.
The first iterations of these physical crypto manifestations are going to be extremely dangerous to live in. They represent the end of federal government, military industrial complex, and rule-by-force. Many of us will be drawn to them for this exact reason, but I would recommend supporting them from outside the city walls unless you want to put your own life on the line. Of course depending on location it could be more dangerous outside of such a city-state depending on where this insane timeline takes us. Just don't run around thinking it's risk-free like LUNA/UST.
Conclusion
The Balkanization and decentralization of governance is coming, and it's going to be an extremely awkward and absolutely ridiculous transition across the board. Every year that goes by governments across the globe fail more and more in their duty to protect and empower their citizens, and at a certain point technology is going to antiquate them. Beware the angry luddites. They can't win but they'll certainly be able to do considerable damage before they lose. sovereignty
Yep. That's actually what's going to happen. Consider how this will proceed. Let's suppose that there are two citizens of the government, you and I, and government depends on our taxes for it's maintenance. Government is greedy, and they take more than half of each of our production, so you and I live on the smaller part of our productivity. But, we tire of being so poor and working so hard for so little reward, so we figure out ways to increase what we keep of what we make. There are ways we can produce that create no taxable events, such as if we get a chicken we feed table scraps and eat the eggs the chicken produces. No taxable event is created, and we keep 100% of our production. Keeping the chicken is massively more productive than working for wages that are taxed to make enough money to buy some eggs, which transaction is taxed. We get ~4x more eggs for the same amount of productive work by raising our own chicken than we do by buying eggs with wages.
This decreases the amount of tax money the government gets, before the government can take steps to prevent it, if it can figure out a way to do that. Our abuser has less resources to fund abuse a priori, before it can up the abuse to prevent it.
That's how decentralization works. We take production in house, and don't create taxable events when we do. This decreases the amount of parasitic losses we suffer and dramatically increases the amount of resources we have before any steps can be taken to curtail the independent productive activity. That amount of increase in wealth we retain directly decreases the amount of wealth the government receives from us to fund abusing us, before it can act to abuse us and prevent losing it's income. When it gets around to abusing us to restore it's ability to live off our work, it will do so with that decreased income to fund that abuse.
When we undertake decentralized production that doesn't create taxable events in a broad variety of ways, say growing our own lumber and manufacturing our own homes, growing our own food and buying nothing from big ag, growing our own medicine and buying no medical prescriptions, and so on, and trading between us for things we don't make, we can massively increase our own wealth, and decrease the government's take to almost nothing.
When the government sends gangs of armed thugs after us to drag us to the torture center and persuade us to volunteer more taxes, the thugs will be armed with used baseball bats. We'll have 3D printed FGC-9's to hold them off with. The troops will flee to save their lives, and the ebil gubment will gnash their useless fangs in frustration as we skip off into the sunset arm in arm and they slink back into the swamp of eternal uselessness and eat bugs.
Geez. Considering that state actors could just hax us and turn us into apps at that point, that's hardly success. That's just guaranteed fail, all the way down.
Thanks!
Do you have a permit for that chickens? Are they all registered and regularly checked by a state approved vet? No? That will be a massive fine. You do? Ok. Sorry, we have to kill all your chickens because bird flu might otherwise kill some of them and even spread to other farms (where we will also kill all chickens before they get sick). In the meantime go buy some taxed eggs at the mall from chicken factory.
No, I don't. Neither does anyone else. How many they gonna catch? That's how hierarchies work. They tackle a couple and make big scary show trials. Then everyone else chickens out. But, it's not just chickens. It's every personally applicable decentralized means of production. If I'm making customized light switch plate covers, why would I be scared of a prosecution for illegal chickens?
Not buying eggs from the store ever again. Light switch plate covers either.
It is great that there are people who want to live freely even when it becomes harder every year. But I'm not optimistic, at least not for the short term. Tectonic plates of global situation are strained to the max and it can only end with a series of solid earthquakes. We've seen with Covid farce how fast people can turn against each other over bogus government narrative. It already happened and it is only getting worse. Kind and harmless, as stereotypical Canadian, Justin Trudeau, turned out to be a fascist dictator. In Australia, just two decades after banning guns, innocent people were "quarantined" and a man that sneezed inside elevator was portrayed like a mass murderer on TV. I don't know how it looked in other countries, but in Poland everything government did was downright illegal, and even if it wasn't, it still brought far more harm than good - no one will ever be held accountable. One crisis ended, now we have war in the Ukraine. And the same happens again. Whoever does not preach official propaganda to the letter is automatically called "Russian footwrap". Racial, ethnic, national divisions, old vs young, women vs men, workers vs entrepreneurs, left vs right - governments keep fostering those social fractures, because it is the only way they can maintain control. In the end everything will blow up and form new normal, but in the meantime dissidents are likely to find out that they are alone, and they are not going against some well defined evil in form of government thugs, but their families and neighbors.
Did you deliberately keep your reportable income low enough to qualify? I know several people who are careful to not earn so much that they would lose their "subsidy" for Obamacare health insurance. In essense, the subsidy encourges them to remain poor. I was in the same pickle for a brief time when my family was on Medicaid. If we earned another few hundred dollars a year, we would have had to pay a thousand a month in "premiums" for "health" insurance. The time we had to spend on paperwork and visits to governmental offices just to get this "insurance" was absurd.
Government handouts are traps.
Actually my job at Amazon had weird flexibility in that I could make less money when I applied to get the full amount (this was easy because the job itself was already seasonal), and then make more after being approved, but still not enough to be required to report the additional income because it was below the reporting threshold. I had actually forgotten about that till you asked.
The same concept applies to all the tax brackets as well.
Make $1 more and it's possible you lose 10% more of your income.
Pretty insane way to run a needlessly complex system.
Makes you wonder.
Very interesting reflection. Let's recall that the first quote in Satoshi's bitcoin paper was Wei Dai's "b-money" (1998) which starts itself by the words "I like Tim May's idea of "crypto-anarchy"" - Wei Dai was himself referring to the 1988 "Crypto-anarchist Manifesto" by Tim May.
What we are contemplating here is that for the first time in history states, as governance and organisational solutions, face viable competition. Previously, the only alternative to government was Thomas Hobbes "the war of all against all" - not very appealing. This led the governments to perform as poorly as they can get away with.
I reflected on that in a post I published some 5 years ago:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@sorin.cristescu/blockchain-and-the-end-of-the-western-civilization
Roads are built by road building companies and can be financed publicly or privately.
It is completely unnecessary to have government for this purpose.
Almost all the current functions of government are relatively new (in historical terms) and can be replaced by decentralised systems and private enterprise.
The only essential functions of government (IMHO) are national defence, a very simple and limited set of laws (99% of existing laws can go) with Courts and some form of policing (although this maybe could be decentralised).
@tipu curate
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