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I’m not saying invent tax systems that model philanthropy. Philanthropic intentions are generally reactionary, tribal, worse than kin-selfishness. But it has the right kind of expressiveness of inclusion relationship: to people, whales, climate, space programs, whatever.
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In genetics, every individual organism’s genome is a map of relationship to the entire biosphere. If you pass on your genes directly or indirectly, you also pass on 99% genes of chimpanzee genes, 80% of lobster genes etc (look up actual numbers... they’re in the ballpark)
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You are a holographic model of Gaia effectively. Inclusive fitness - Darwinian competition between competing Gaias, not genes, individuals, groups or species. Selfish Gene = Selfish Gaia theory. A more powerfully expressive post-capitalism economics would do the same for memes.
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Let’s call the memetic equivalent of Gaia... Maia! Selfish Meme = Selfish Maia How do you translate this refactoring into an economic idea? Trick might be to map transactions to reproduction rather than feeding.
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So here’s an idea. Set aside a fixed tax fraction on my dollars. Every time I spend a dollar buying something from you, it strengthens a weight. My tax fraction is then periodically distributed among my transactional counterparties in proportion to the weights of transaction.
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So current direct spending drives future redistribution. With a shifting weight and forgetting/discounting factor. Eventually more and more of everybody’s income comes from the redistribution rather than direct. Private morphs smoothly into public utilities.
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This also sort of kills advertising. Current income sort of translates directly into brand equity that makes future income cheaper.. while moving it from private property to public commons. Lean into commoditization.
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This scheme would need a lot more computation per transaction btw, and effectively perfectly eidetic transactional memory. That alone inspires confidence it would be smarter. Price becomes a richer signal, with a past and future. Today’s economy is kinda amnesiac.
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Not just brand equity, but regular equity could get absorbed by this scheme. You wouldn’t need a stock or bond market. Every transaction would be an implicit stock/bond tx as well. No need to bolt on a bottleneck long-term memory capital market onto amnesiac transaction market.
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Public markets are, in theory, a two sided platform. Returns that may more effectively be dealt with by your suggestion, but also investment capital (in theory) needed by firms so they can add value to the economy. How do you account for or replace that?
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Love the idea, but it certainly would put a governor on new businesses--and the job creation they're normally credited for. Not to ignore the finer points of the math, but we might not have Amazon or Netflix--at least the way they exist today...