See: this is totally false. But it doesn't matter, because it's obviously predicated on a whole lot of other ideas about how societies operate and grow that are also false that we sort of have to go to a more fundamental level of discourse. I actually have no idea why you'd think that a zero tax rate or even a low tax rate would be a sign of things being better. In the real world, shitty places have low tax rates and good places have high tax rates. This is both a cause and an effect: the causation flows both from better places giving rise to higher tax rates and to higher taxes giving rise to better places.Tussock wrote:30% tax vs 0% tax.
If you think about the extreme cases, the correlation is obvious: the Scandinavian socialist paradises that are consistently rated the best places on Earth have a total tax burden so high that the government's spending accounts for about half the economy; while in a Mad Max-style or zombie infested post-apocalyptic wasteland with no government you actually pay zero taxes, which is the lowest a tax burden can be.
But sure, let's walk you through the logic. Imagine for the moment that government is run by greedy bastards who want all your money. Crazy, right? Now given that scenario, what would they set the tax rate to? The highest amount people could pay, right? And how much can people pay if they are richer or poorer? More and less, respectively. If you're making exactly enough to feed yourself, the maximum tax rate you could pay and not starve is 0%. But if you are making twice as much as you need to live, you could pay a tax rate of up to 50% and still not starve. Peoples' productivity and ability to produce surplus acts as a cap for how high taxes can be.
But now let's look at it the other way: Taxes don't make you poorer. Sure, they take wealth away from the singular you, but the collective you (y'all, if you have the right dialect of English) is unaffected. Because the government that is receiving the wealth is also part of your society. It's just a wealth transfer within the community, nothing has actually been lost. If you have to give some of the wealth you would have spent to the government and then they spend it instead, GDP is unaffected. The number of silver pennies or whatever that are being spent on end use items is the same. Whether taxes are 0% or 70% or somewhere in between, the effects on total wealth are always zero.
But it's actually better than that, especially back in the bad old days when there weren't a lot of non-governmental large firms. Bulk discounts are totally a thing. Capital investment is a thing too. It is more efficient to contribute to a single large project than it is to have a bunch of tiny projects. It's better to build an aqueduct than to have a lot of people haul buckets of water from the lake for their own use. Even though the total spent wealth may be the same, the efficiency of large scale production is simply better than the efficiency of small scale production. Having a large amount of taxing and spending means that more is being gotten for the money (for example: how the United States spends twice as much on their healthcare as other industrialized countries for the same outcomes because the US doesn't have bulk rate benefits that other countries enjoy).
And you know what? It's better than that. Because taxes are paid out of surpluses, which fucking peasants are much more likely to squander or hoard than they are to spend or invest. So in very real terms, taxing and spending in an agrarian economy makes your society wealthier in an absolute sense. You're taking wealth that would be spent at a low rate and spending it at a higher rate. Even if you just spend the tax incomes on hiring dancers and flute girls for your lavish parties, that's still economically stimulatory compared to just letting farmers leave their surpluses in a pile. At the very least it means that sexy ladies in your empire get to eat and practice dancing instead of starving or poking seeds into the ground. And that's awesome.
You and TNAMP both are subscribing to bizarre libertarian fantasy world where being a subsistence farming hermit is a preferred state rather than the reality in which we have societies and economies for fucking reasons.
-Username17