Replying to Avatar Jeff Swann

If there is no national tax base to take over then there is no nation to defend. If people can defend themselves from domestic taxation then they can defend themselves from foreigners who want to tax them too.

The govt as an organization is nothing but a manifestation of the tragedy of the commons. Everyone just tries to get what they can, while they can, without putting in any work. It's people seeking to become a parasitic authority as a source of wealth rather than working to create value for others.

The divide between good & evil is the prioritization of the pursuit of truth vs the prioritization of the pursuit of status & power. It's not a coincidence that God in human form was a man who spoke truth to men of arbitrary political authority & was killed for it. I'm quite certain that a large part of the point (no matter how few people choose to see it today) is that men in govt, clinging to status & power, will destroy the truth & kill God to maintain it. God or reality or the universe (or whatever label people prefer) wants people to see that force funded institutions are evil, & the cycle will repeat until we learn.
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mark tyler 2y ago

The first paragraph is very interesting. It makes me wonder how a bitcoin system compares with a gold system for freedom from oppression. Reading through the thread, maybe a good case in point could be comparing Jerusalem under Roman rule at the time of Christ and now. Do bitcoin and encryption make us more able to resist an occupier now? How so? Did the centralizing tendencies of gold play a roll in Rome’s ability to conquer? My intuition is no, but I wanna think this through…

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mark tyler 2y ago

There were four primary kinds of taxation in ancient Rome: a cattle tax, a land tax, customs, and a tax on the profits of any profession. These taxes were typically collected by local aristocrats. The Roman state would set a fixed amount of money each region needed to provide in taxes, and the local officials would decide who paid the taxes and how much they paid. Once collected the taxes would be used to fund the military, create public works, establish trade networks, stimulate the economy, and to fund the cursus publicum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_ancient_Rome

Comparing some other empires, they mixed centralized collection and decentralized. Sounds like the Chinese system where taxes were due based on land ownership worked well for the empire since land ownership was easy to verify. So today, where our work is to a large degree difficult to verify, we may have a special advantage. Especially if the laborer and the contractor can not know each other. Though AI will affect that…