-
@ Tommy "The Purchase"
2025-05-22 05:04:47
I'm very sorry but that is mostly the MMT argument. It's true that in 1971, Nixon essentially ended Bretton Woods and made the dollar no longer redeemable in specie but there have been taxes before that, even when the gold standards of the world were fairly rigid, there have always been taxes as long as there have been wars or standing armies.
There is a graphic here:
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
that details how much revenue the US government has made and how much it has spent. The deficit (i.e. the percentage covered by debt rather than taxes) is about a third which is mind-boggling but even in the current system, spending is mostly tax-financed.
Your argument of taxation being price level control that your friendly government uses to help you originated in a school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory which is essentially Keynesianism on steroids but not based in reality, in fact taxes very much are revenue.
But even if everything I said was false, imagine what the theoretical switch to bitcoin would do to government budgets:
They can no longer create new money and thereby inflate away your purchasing power while increasing theirs so how are they gonna finance themselves?
A bitcoin-based monetary system would be the best there had ever been and I would do a lot of things to bring that about but as long as there are governments, there will be taxes.
The Mises Institute (misesmedia on YouTube) have a lot of resources on Austrian economics, monetary theory and all kinds of related things if you're interested, here's one for example:
https://youtu.be/bKGW1lN1u-M?si=AVrji4q9xpxnqcsS
So again, I'm not trying to be mean or anything but fixing the money, while absolutely necessary, is only step 1.