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> if you don't have to pay taxes by working in an alternate currency, then you would obviously want to use that Unless you want to legally live and do business
by djur 13y ago
> if you don't have to pay taxes by working in an alternate currency, then you would obviously want to use that
Unless you want to legally live and do business in a country, in which case you're going to have to pay the taxes that country levies in the legal tender currency.
The value of the US dollar, in essence, is the value of being able to live and do business in the US plus the avoided cost and risk of doing so illegally (which is generally quite high).
- andrewla 13y agoYou may have misunderstood me. Barter transactions and foreign currency transactions are perfectly legal. At that point you have no dollar income, so you wouldn't have to pay taxes _except_ for the fact that you do have to pay taxes on the dollar equivalent for those transactions. Provisions like those (together with legal tender laws) are necessary to prevent people from abandoning the "official" currency wholesale. Thus it seems that denominating taxes in a currency is a huge negative for a currency _in and of itself_. Edit: after reading further, I think I see the disconnect. I was thinking purely in terms of income taxes and sales taxes/import duties. For taxes in absolute terms, like property taxes or luxury taxes, then the government demands a certain number of dollars, which does mean I need to get that money, even if in my day-to-day life I don't use it, which creates a demand for the finite resource of US dollars. Still, the federal government in the US, anyway, does not demand any taxes of this nature, so it doesn't seem to follow logically that the taxes relate to the value.