wkmac
Well-Known Member
Journalist/author Robert Neuwirth did an interview with Christiane Amanpour on ABC News about his book "Stealth of Nations, The Rise of the Informal Economy" and one thing he pointed out was not so much a police issue, granted it seems it would be costly, but that to police it would harm this solid revenue stream coming back into the "on the books" companies.
Let's be honest here, if you think out the process especially here in our American economy, all money at some point passes back to be held by gov't. Even the money I make after taxes that I then pay to someone for services or products off book, that dollar may go through several off book transactions but at some point it will re-enter the on book economy of which taxes once again at every transaction point will be extracted. As this dollar circulates around, after each taxing transaction it becomes less and less until it reaches $0. At this point through taxation, gov't will have all the money at which point it picks winners and losers and spends it back out again. But what did it really do to earn that money other than to sit there as a monopoly rent seeker with a gun and tell you to hand it over?
The black market economy or what I call the agorist economy by-passes this rent seeking of the political class and keeps more value of ever dollar in full circulation amongst the general population at large. Also by withholding said dollars from the "on the books" economy, the political class is unable to take extracted rents and then spread back around as political payoffs and favors to various voting blocks that benefit holding power. Black and gray markets therefore are a means of non violent protesting to the established political order that works off exploitation and brute force.
Even those here who think of gov't as a noble means of caring for dis-advantaged people never consider the fact that for every tax dollar extracted from the economy for public welfare purposes, from local tax collection to channeling up through state and then to federal hands and then reverse course coming back from federal down through the state and into local hands for disbursement to the poor, a good portion of those dollars are extracted out for administrative and gov't agency costs (think distant jobs program as in distant from the actual local need). However, what if instead of shipping those dollars out of the local economies to only have each dollar return in the amount of somewhere around $.35 cents of it's original value, we kept all dollars local, allow real free market access with no entry barriers (no license or business fees) and then see what might happen to the poor. Hey, why not end all zoning laws and other laws used to prop up excessive property costs including turning land into a commodity so as to create a real estate and debt/loan market and then see what happens to the poor? Why would you even need such if you begin to abandon the fiat currency/fractional reserve banking system? Funny how the bigger the Federal Reserve got with the total debt and money in circulation, it needed high real estate prices and land values or the economy went into crisis. Is there a relationship there?
How about ending all legal tender laws and tax laws that forbid or limit local creation of currency or other mediums of exchange? Why are we locked into a monopoly monetary unit when a dollar as we know it is nothing more than an expression of labor over time?
Hmmm!
