Imagine you were tasked with creating a prosperous society in which there were no taxes, how would you do so? To elaborate on "prosperous", the society would need to at least have a good standard of living and have citizens who are happy living in it. Your only restriction is that you may not use violence.

Camping trips, typically by the Boy Scouts or something, are mini-societies that are prosperous and without money ergo taxes. They are also cooperative and thusly happy and create for themselves decent living conditions. Alternatively, religious orders that form monasteries and live communal lives fit the requisites perfectly, yea?

@ fma. So without taxes how are you going to pay for roads and other transport systems (which are a prerequisite for prosperity in the modern world). Who will pay for education, the police forces, the fire brigades, ambulance services, universal health care (ok America doesn't have that but the rest of us are a bit more civilised)?. What about national pension schemes, waste disposal or prisons? Not to mention an army to protect your new Utopia from invaders. How will you pay those and a stack of other bills without taxing the beneficiaries of all those services? @ wargamer. Boy Scout camps may be free for the boys, but someone had to put his hand in his pocket to pay for transport to the camp site, food, equipment and so on. And do you seriously consider a tent to be decent living cinditions? It may be fun for a week in summer, but slightly less fun in the middle of winter, especially if you live somewhere like Canada.

Unfortunately that would be the equivalent of anarchy. Taxes can potentially be reduced a lot to maximize the opportunities of the free market and opportunities for businesses to grow and thus not only profit more themselves, but also provide more jobs. But as was mentioned in the first few sentences of the above poster, you need some taxes to fund services like the police, military, and road construction and maintenance. Unless the biggest corporations would consent to take up providing these services, which wouldn't be profitable to them, but they could still afford it and still be profitable.

> *Originally posted by **[beauval](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13021339)**:* > @ fma. So without taxes how are you going to pay for roads and other transport systems (which are a prerequisite for prosperity in the modern world). Who will pay for education, the police forces, the fire brigades, ambulance services, universal health care (ok America doesn't have that but the rest of us are a bit more civilised)?. What about national pension schemes, waste disposal or prisons? Not to mention an army to protect your new Utopia from invaders. How will you pay those and a stack of other bills without taxing the beneficiaries of all those services? > > @ wargamer. Boy Scout camps may be free for the boys, but someone had to put his hand in his pocket to pay for transport to the camp site, food, equipment and so on. And do you seriously consider a tent to be decent living cinditions? It may be fun for a week in summer, but slightly less fun in the middle of winter, especially if you live somewhere like Canada. > Your answer is based on the assumption that the society would operate based on capitalism, and would be internally driven by money. It's a hypothetical. You are in control of the society, and may impliment anything you like, as long as the people of the society are happy and have a good standard of living. Think creatively.

There are no taxes in North Korea.

Possibly chaotic results, the world needs balance something for the civilians to pay for living on the land. Although i will admit some taxes are kind of expensive.

I'd say it couldn't be done, but sure, creativity exercise... Populous, ActRaiser, Black or White... these all have essentially mindless sheep followers, so they aren't very useful for comparison. If you wanted a road built you'd tell them to do it, possibly providing the materials and telling them their role is to provide the labor. Socialism: the Marxist ideal is a pipe dream that pretends humans are not in fact human, thus have no problem with demotivation when efforts are decoupled from reward. Several attempts at enacting this, some with significant changes designed to cover the flaws discovered in the philosophy, have proven that this does not work-China's latest attempt to encourage properly 'live for the group, not the self' socialist behaviors verges on the Orwellian Horror, cameras everywhere that people are moving slowly enough for accurate facial recognition or license plate reading and automatically debiting or crediting your social account based on your behavior. I'm a little fuzzy on the positive sides (the article preferred the negatives, like how anyone who is deemed a deficit to society winds up slaving until their debt is paid off) but the intent of encouraging their citizens to all behave like the success of others was at least as important as their own went over like a lead balloon; subjects of China have been confirmed to spend time engineering methods by which they can accrue significant social points, most often by making life difficult for their own peers unless they do something that can earn the culprit a whistle-blower award. Clearly bigger and more invasive measures are not the way to make a happy socialist society work, so we should look the other direction. Back to early tribal societies, which some theorize socialism was based on. The difference is quite possibly that if you were a Sioux then you knew everyone and your life was effected when they suffered; there's nothing like making the consequences personal to make your citizens care about them. The problem is that this is inherently limiting. If I can only have a couple hundred people in my society before groupthink breaks down, there won't be much accomplished... but the objective is a happy society with a nebulous good standard of living. Nomadic life following plentiful resources throughout the year, a shipwrecked society or feudal period village, all work as long as everyone feels the pain of someone else blowing off their part, including the one who didn't work properly. Some instances of that last group existed in Europe and managed to maintain a single main road simply because it hurt them all if the venue was difficult enough to pass through that the traveling merchants would prefer to go elsewhere; in those days the merchants seldom dealt with the peasantry, but would dicker with the land owner to take the excess produced by the village and give what he had and the lord felt was needed by the people. However, if you want to insist on things like heating, air conditioning, running water and internet as part of good living, none of them work... anyone who wasn't happy working for the good of all instead of self would know where to go for a less limiting existence. Capitalism: beauval already raised objections to this but capitalism's intrinsic motivating force is still probably the best we have available for now. How do you pay for all those things without taxes? You produce incentives to make people want to produce them. Easier said than done? Of course it is, but this is creative reasoning, not trying to fix a broken system before everything falls apart. As omniscient ruler I have the power and time to determine how to best use my personal assets to pay for the development of public works or technologies. It would be slow-possibly slower than I had time for, not unlike Gorbachev's attempts to keep his society on track while he worked on the damage caused by the communist regime-but I would be capable of improving the quality of life and my own income until my massive personal holdings can easily afford to tell those that I think will be best at it to sink their time into sewer repair that I'll pay enough to make it profitable. More urgent or constant matters like mass transit will require a certain degree of campaigning to promote public support in the form of donations to keep things running. Patreon seems to manage well enough and Hypothetical Rail can provide free rides per month a lot more easily than a game maker can produce status reports with pictures and playable demos. Take it to the logical extreme and the ruler of the capitalist society who helped communal growth by ensuring he or she was just so profitable they could pay to direct it will become a totalitarian government leader, with no serious restrictions and nothing to help those they almost literally own if they turn out to be evil. Good thing it's you and not an evil person, right?

I actually think it might work. Several states don't have state income taxes and they are thriving...look at Texas for one.

Now i'd say that a society without taxes would be good, but then i'd just be lying out my behind... Taxes are what keep economical growth a float.

> *Originally posted by **[EnemyArcher](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13064050)**:* > Now i'd say that a society without taxes would be good, but then i'd just be lying out my behind... Taxes are what keep economical growth a float. What are your thoughts on the concept of a post-scarcity society? Would such a society, in theory, surpass the need for not only taxes, but even currency?

> *Originally posted by **[terroriztical](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13021741)**:* > Unfortunately that would be the equivalent of anarchy. Taxes can potentially be reduced a lot to maximize the opportunities of the free market and opportunities for businesses to grow and thus not only profit more themselves, but also provide more jobs. > > But as was mentioned in the first few sentences of the above poster, you need some taxes to fund services like the police, military, and road construction and maintenance. > > Unless the biggest corporations would consent to take up providing these services, which wouldn't be profitable to them, but they could still afford it and still be profitable. Would just like to ensure this is recognized as law.

> *Originally posted by **[fma1](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13067475)**:* > What are your thoughts on the concept of a post-scarcity society? Would such a society, in theory, surpass the need for not only taxes, but even currency? In theory, a post-scarcity society would not just surpass the need for an overarching currency (taking taxes out of the equation too), but it would surpass the need for a cohesive society as well. You're talking about a world where matter replicators are commonplace, as well as a world in which as much energy as you could ask for is abundantly available. At that point, there's no need to maintain an infrastructure for all of society to build upon. Every individual can build their own infrastructure from scratch, and power it themselves. At that point, the need to rely on other sapient beings for *anything* goes completely out the window. The first thing you'd probably get, is war. Lots and lots of war. In a system where each of us can be completely independent, with no need for a shared foundation, we'd likely interact with one another less and less. Soon we'd be laying down our sweeping creations, and our personal dream worlds anywhere we pleased - and inevitably the one limited commodity we'd hit, would be available space. That's where the war comes in, where each individual, hating the prospect of being in error (our base nature, yay!), would spread out; access to everything they need to create their ideal world, right up until they slammed straight into someone else, with an incompatible (or even just different) vision for an ideal world. It would in the end, lead to a lot of societies of one, or at best, small groups with a shared vision of their ideal world, widely spaced apart.

Create a populous-enough society, and community leadership ("the government") forms naturally. Without taxes as a means of funding community-level investments such as security and roads, one could try soliciting voluntary contributions. It's very well possible but far less effective than taxation. For an example of the decline in effectiveness, juxtapose the governments of the United States Constitution and its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation.

> *Originally posted by **[fma1](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13019182)**:* > Imagine you were tasked with creating a prosperous society in which there were no taxes, how would you do so? > > To elaborate on "prosperous", the society would need to at least have a good standard of living and have citizens who are happy living in it. > > Your only restriction is that you may not use violence. basically think of it like this, you would have a war torn city with two three or even possibly four sides always fighting, or a constant gang war on every city block. theres NO punishment legally if i shoot a man dead in cold blood, only thing that might happen is one of his friends may shoot me. no fire police, roads, public transport, water, power, ect. taxes arn't fun, but it keeps us from being in what is basically iraq.

> *Originally posted by **[fgdhdrfsd](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13143643)**:* > > *Originally posted by **[fma1](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13019182)**:* > > Imagine you were tasked with creating a prosperous society in which there were no taxes, how would you do so? > > > > To elaborate on "prosperous", the society would need to at least have a good standard of living and have citizens who are happy living in it. > > > > Your only restriction is that you may not use violence. > > basically think of it like this, you would have a war torn city with two three or even possibly four sides always fighting, or a constant gang war on every city block. theres NO punishment legally if i shoot a man dead in cold blood, only thing that might happen is one of his friends may shoot me. no fire police, roads, public transport, water, power, ect. taxes arn't fun, but it keeps us from being in what is basically iraq. The question though is, if you had full control to create the society, what would you do to create a prosperous society without taxes? It's a thought experiment. You bring up problems. The question being asked is, in this society without taxes, what would you implement to prevent those problems?

> *Originally posted by **[fma1](/forums/9/topics/1798676?page=1#13143799)**:* > The question though is, if you had full control to create the society, what would you do to create a prosperous society without taxes? It's a thought experiment. You bring up problems. The question being asked is, in this society without taxes, what would you implement to prevent those problems? Take one of those problems. They all seem to be about a public good of some form. The normal solution to that problem requires a source of revenue to handle costs and maintanance. Currently that revenue is from taxes which gives an incentive for the workers to lobby (or even campaign for) the people writing those laws. Without that revenue stream they would need a new stream. They could start to charge for their services, in which case the public good can become unaffordable by some of those that currently benefit[1]. Or you could double the workers and have them each produce a side product that is sold, in which case there is a perverse incentive to prioritize that side business to the detriment of the public good[2]. [1] Even with an elevated price for normal users and a free service for the less fortunate, you run into an issue about whether they will ever be enough funds. If you raise the price, then you also price out more and more users. This means more $ per paying user results in fewer paying users. Additionally, since this is not a tax, if the price gets too high then some users who could afford the price will opt to not pay the price. Again this means more $ per paying user results in fewer paying users. These negative feedback loops severly limit the maximum possible revenue you can gain and thus bring concerns about feasibility. [2] If they were splitting their time 50:50, they could increase their revenue by shifting to 25:75. More revenue means profit for those at the top of the organization. Those at the top would be the ones choosing the allocation of time between the two endevors. So the whole organization is incentivized to prioritize the side business.