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The first problem I see is that it's relatively easy to track an existing company that fires ten people and replaces them with machines; it's not so easy with t
by corecoder 10y ago
The first problem I see is that it's relatively easy to track an existing company that fires ten people and replaces them with machines; it's not so easy with the new company someone creates today. How many people are they not employing? How the hell do you determine that?
If you don't get it exactly right, and new companies are at an advantage, old companies will be replaced by new ones. If, on the other end, new companies are at a disadvantage, you risk stagnation.
- onion2k 10y agoThat depends entirely on how it was implemented. A reasonably simple way would be to tax the value of transactions between companies. Essentially, as I understand it, Bill Gates was suggesting we need to move away from taxing people because the number of people employed in a company is going to fall away to somewhere close to zero. Instead, if we want to raise taxes, we need to move towards taxing something else - that could be work done, or revenue, or transactions between companies, or electricity used, or CPU time. Bill Gates isn't wrong. If we continue to link taxation to people as we always have then we will end up with tax revenues that don't even begin to cover the costs of running a functional society.