willy denner

Considering tax is the most powerful policy lever of the state- your proposals in this regard are pretty uninspiring. Basically the same system of taxing wages and transactions that has got us where we are. Look at any successful nation today or in history- and you will see that taxes are kept largely away from the average wage or domestic trade- and the means to fund the state is raised instead from land values. This might be through direct state ownership of land like in Singapore, through selling land leases like in Hong Kong, or simply by higher property taxes like in the USA. Free markets work far better when land monopolists are kept from privately capturing all the surplus generated by the productive people in the economy(or economic rent)- and even more so, when accompanied by a state that is reinvesting these rents back into the nation. I can give you any number of real world examples of this mechanism in action. Conversely, states that look to raise revenue from taxes on wages and sales die the death (as we are seeing across much of the the developed world today).