Caltrops - Balance of Power





	[quote name="Welcome to Omsk"]If there were a dependable fashion in which to defend a simple tax code from becoming complicated with even an ounce of fairness to the taxed, it'd have existed in human society by now. We've done it with force and without fairness at times - read some Roman history and you'll find out about it, then you can tell me how great it is to have the patricians in charge to ensure you're well-treated. There's always complications that result from success. Like Rome, Bourboun France got big enough that different peoples and traditions and laws had to be respected. The differences arose not merely from advantage but from geopolitical differences because the woodland's produce of timber for building naval vessels is different from the wheat fields' produce and they're not owned by the same people and the logistics for exploiting the resources differ. And in France, they created such complexity from the interplay of the involved economies that the state had to contract out legislation and justice to the locals, let alone the maddening complexity of tax collection, which was an outcome of all these groups interacting. The sheer scale of the state was enough to make them adopt tax farm policy because it was more practical than doing it themselves by a huge factor - the crown couldn't collect the taxes itself because the crown was in Paris and Paris was far enough from the periphery that the long arm of the law looked stumpy. America is bigger, far more complex - robots do legal discovery and have probably started drafting legislation, the teachers of law teach procedure more than anything else - and far more logistically interdependent. You and I can no more grasp the complex interactions of parts of the cybereconomy than the kings of France. You think reforming tax law is simple and doable, that a platform can ignore all this, that people's position in society can just be brushed aside in a political process when we expect not to be left behind by democracy? We already have a tax farm. The tax farm was a big part of what made the revolution capable of becoming so bloody, by the way. Or we could overhaul today's East India Company, 'cause who the fuck needs Google. Thanks for the piercing observations of what today's society looks like from a rathole carved into the floor molding, your perspective is illuminating.[/quote]