An Objectivist Individualist

An Objectivist Individualist 1

The rational man obtains the great majority of the products and services he needs and wants from the private sector where individuals enter into voluntary investments and agreements. In the private sector each individual selects his own values and is absolve to act relative to his individual ideals. On the other hand, in the federal government sector, the government uses force to supply services and sometimes goods, for which it requires compensation in the form of some mixture of taxes, mandated services and expenses, and the approval of a devalued money.

Individually, we’ve little capability to find the services we will acquire from authorities, the expense of those services, and the way in which where they will be delivered. We have also come to comprehend that government services are given very inefficiently. For many of these good reasons, it is clear that the Folks are best served with getting the private sector to supply them with the majority of our goods and services. But, it holds true that some government services are required also. Our Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution acknowledged this in the Constitution which provides for a minor, but necessary, government with very limited powers.

They were always mindful that government was pushing and it was to be very carefully controlled. Why don’t we call the full total cost of the federal government, whether taxes actually, or effective taxes like the devaluation of the currency and regulatory mandates of provisions and service of goods, by the name of taxes in the further debate simply. If the taxes are levied on income, on the size of trade transactions, profits, or taken as forced labor, they can effectively be said to represent some fraction of the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Let us note that the bigger taxes are, the more they discourage folks from working and the more they discourage reinvestment to increase the productivity of the economy.

But, financial or trade activities do require that violent works such as thievery, assault, fraud, rape, and property destruction be controlled. These are aided essentially by the enforcement of contracts also. A region and people living there also need to be protected from invasion or assault by other countries, if they are to prosper. For these minimal attractive services, the national government will need to have a baseline level of taxation. That baseline taxation level I’d estimate to be between 0.05 and 0.10 times the GDP.

  1. Not useful when there are few or no comparable companies
  2. 801-900 $953 – –
  3. Violations of the section 415 restriction on benefits and contributions
  4. A $100,000 property should lease for at least $1,000 per month
  5. 8 POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES
  6. Non-market transactions are not included in GDP
  7. 2 “Aha!,” you squeal, “a hint!” Okay, okay, I admit it: I am Iron Man

Government requirements for spending above that level are optional, though I’d argue they are also immoral. Spending beyond this level is clearly influenced by one’s values and upon one’s willingness to use force to obtain what one wants from others. Whatever size federal government attains, some of its activities must scale with how big is the population plus some scale with how big are the GDP. The cost of security from personal assault and rape scales with how big is the population. Some types of robbery and scams also do. The enforcement of contracts scales more almost with the size of the GDP, as do some types of fraud and most areas of property protection.

I believe that the components influenced by the size of the populace and on how big is the GDP would be similar for a constitutional federal government. But, in any case, the effective tax rate can be indicated as a small fraction of the GDP and we’ll call that rate t. As time passes, the GDP of a country will change. We have an extended tradition in America of watching it grow in many more years than not.