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>>Naïve but serious question: what are the serious downsides aside from "my social circle would collapse in jealousy and rage", which sounds like a problem with

>>Naïve but serious question: what are the serious downsides aside from "my social circle would collapse in jealousy and rage", which sounds like a problem with the social circle? Serious downsides include: * making it harder to keep money making opportunities secret. If you are known as the truffles guy, who spends time hiking Mt. Cayenne, and then suddenly every one knows that your income rose 20X last year, people can deduce that Mt. Cayenne has a big stash of truffles. It reduces the incentive to spend years scouring the forests looking for sites rich in truffles, and makes it more profitable to track income tax receipt rolls to find sudden surges in income among truffle foragers. * requires that certain people in the state inspect all of your private economic interactions, and that you allow this under pain of imprisonment, so that accurate income data can be collected. This gives massive power to those who do the inspecting, and has collateral damage for things like encrypted communication, which due to its ability to aid in evading these inspections, could become restricted.

igorkraw 5y ago
First one I don't buy (someone will still do the things worth doing because they will make some more, they will simply have more competition...I also believe in antitrust), second one...no, aside from what we do anyway? Every developed nation has a robust taxation system, this simply makes that information public.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  When the profitability of creating valuable information decreases, and copying valuable information increases, people will do more of the latter and less of the former. I don't see how it wouldn't turn out like that. With regard to the second, yes a case can be made that since countries invade privacy any way, utilizing this information like this doesn't add to the privacy invasion. Maybe. But an admittedly speculative argument could be made that it makes more people economically dependent on income taxation (like the hypothetical tax receipt roll scourers who identify and stalk successful truffle foragers), making it harder to abolish the institution. The way I see it, the less we normalize income taxation, the better.

igorkraw 5y ago

First one I don't buy (someone will still do the things worth doing because they will make some more, they will simply have more competition...I also believe in antitrust), second one...no, aside from what we do anyway? Every developed nation has a robust taxation system, this simply makes that information public.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
When the profitability of creating valuable information decreases, and copying valuable information increases, people will do more of the latter and less of the former. I don't see how it wouldn't turn out like that. With regard to the second, yes a case can be made that since countries invade privacy any way, utilizing this information like this doesn't add to the privacy invasion. Maybe. But an admittedly speculative argument could be made that it makes more people economically dependent on income taxation (like the hypothetical tax receipt roll scourers who identify and stalk successful truffle foragers), making it harder to abolish the institution. The way I see it, the less we normalize income taxation, the better.