[ExI] The Dogs of Immortality

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Tue Jul 15 04:46:14 UTC 2008


Gary writes

> The person who dies is not stuck with the taxes.  They are dead.

Yes, but the incentive of the original wealth creator is lessened
knowing that at his death, much of the wealth will be gone
(so he might as well either not earn so much, or just waste it).

> Their heirs are the ones who are taxed on their windfall.  If they
> won $3.5 million in the lottery they would be taxed just the same. 

And so that gives people less incentive to play the lottery.
(Not such a bad thing, actually, since the lottery is itself
merely a tax on stupidity, which seems very unfair to people
who couldn't help being born that way.)

> What does it matter that the money used to create that wealth was already
> taxed?
> 
> Your employer is taxed on the profits he makes that pays your salary.  You
> are taxed again, and the people you spend it with are taxed again.
> 
> It is that chain of taxation that pays for our civilization.

Arrgh!  You're just trying to rile up some of us here!   :-)

What is of value in our civilization is *not* created by governments;
at most, a case can be made that for any particular small group
of citizens, either they're too dumb, or too conditioned, or too 
individualistic, or not individualistic enough, or too colonized by
the central-control/central-planning meme   to make complete
self-rule a realistic go, and need government to safeguard property
rights and rule of law.  Indeed, some citizens of some countries
are so backward that no form of representative democracy is
possible.  A case can even be made for the kleptocracies in that
many exist to forcibly hold together an army to prevent a nation
from being taken over by an even worse kleptocracy.

> Or you could take the Extropian alternative choosing not to die and donating
> most of your money to antiaging research throughout your life in the hopes
> of surviving until the singularity and thus achieving a vastly extended life
> span. 

In this thread, people still think that there is some kind of principle
determining whether the government will take money for this, or 
instead, take money for that.  Governments follow the Willie Sutton
plan: they take the money where they find it.

Lee



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