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Or in terms of design of money, the design reflects inner psychological realities of the collective rather than outer material realities of survival and wealth creation.
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Or to put it in terms of a sociological metaphor, the "debt huddle" is so inward focused, it behaves like a locust swarm in the external world, feeding unsustainably on anything it can find.
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And opting out of the monetary system with gold or bitcoin is no use because the real base of value is people, and if the majority of people are in a locust-huddle due to economic-environmental stress, a few choosing not to be locusts can't change anything.
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The only way out of locust mode is to get back to equity > debt mode, which means finding new sources of external wealth and value that lower the sense of extreme risk, scarcity, and deprivation and unbundle the "collective family" into independent economic actors.
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Okay that thinking out loud helped. I think I understand debt better now. Not that it helps. Now I'm more convinced I'm very ill-adapted to this world since I refuse to be a locust bound to other locusts via mutual public debt obligations. I'll pay higher taxes, but that's it.
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Now I need complementary mental models for taxes. I think my theory of debt implies people with the highest likelihood of discovering new sources of wealth should pay the lowest taxes, and everybody else should be taxed to the limit of yield while they go hunting.
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In a fucked-up, heavily distorted way, full of self-congratulation and self-dealing, this is what conservatives and libertarians try to do. The imagine themselves to obviously be "essential" workers in wealth creation even if participation is via 3 degrees of tenuous separation
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For the sake of argument, imagine that all wealth is created by selfless academic scientists making new discoveries, with their students going out and building startups based on those discoveries, invested in by VCs, in turn invested in by LPs.
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In this cartoon wealth pipeline, the scientists would be paid tax-free NSF money just to exist, their students would enjoy low tax rates for building startups, the VCs would pay a slightly higher tax rate, and the LPs higher than that. We're talking net income tax rate here.
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Replying to
Isn't this the current US system? NSF exists (though with income and institutional taxes), startups don't pay taxes until profit, VCs get tax free carried interest, etc., and I think it depends on the LPs what taxes they get, though that's likely closer to VC level.
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