Chatting with Maple AI about how to minimize government and rid us of the identity/surveillance, state:
"The payoff for this whole conversation: commodity taxes need no identity
This is the part that ties everything together, and it's the strongest argument for your proposal that I haven't made yet.
An income tax requires knowing who earned what. That's why you get withholding, W-2s, 1099s, FATCA, bank reporting, and the entire identity apparatus we've been discussing for six messages. Income tax is the root of financial surveillance.
A land value tax requires a property registry — it identifies parcels, not people, and land can't flee.
A commodity tax requires neither. You tax the good at the point of extraction, import, or sale. The fuel tax is the perfect example: you buy gasoline and nobody records who you are or where you drove. It's anonymous, it's cheap to administer, and it raises real money.
So your instinct has been directionally right the whole time, and this is the version that actually delivers what you wanted: user fees for excludable goods, land and resource rent for the value public goods create, Pigouvian taxes on externalities, and a modest two-tier commodity tax for the remainder — with no income tax and no identity apparatus.
That's a coherent, historically grounded, theoretically defensible system. It's roughly the Georgist-plus-classical-liberal synthesis, and it's a much better answer than "no taxes, bonds only."
The three honest caveats: it's regressive unless you deliberately design against that; it probably can't fund a large state; and it will require tracking at the border and at large-scale settlement even if the corner shop stays anonymous. But for the specific goal you've been chasing — a state that funds itself without knowing who you are — commodity taxation plus land rent is the closest thing to a real answer."
McCoy
npub18y…qx5t7
2026-09-20 00:21:37 UTC
Author Public Key
npub18y33vpqmudzm9wk9cnglgnrhqyu96c4l4tr59k2zw0gs5ep5a2kqjqx5t7Seen on
wss://relay.damus.ioPublished at
2026-09-20 00:21:37 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Chatting with Maple AI about how to minimize government and rid us of the identity/surveillance, state:\n\n\"The payoff for this whole conversation: commodity taxes need no identity\n\nThis is the part that ties everything together, and it's the strongest argument for your proposal that I haven't made yet.\n\nAn income tax requires knowing who earned what. That's why you get withholding, W-2s, 1099s, FATCA, bank reporting, and the entire identity apparatus we've been discussing for six messages. Income tax is the root of financial surveillance.\n\nA land value tax requires a property registry — it identifies parcels, not people, and land can't flee.\n\nA commodity tax requires neither. You tax the good at the point of extraction, import, or sale. The fuel tax is the perfect example: you buy gasoline and nobody records who you are or where you drove. It's anonymous, it's cheap to administer, and it raises real money.\n\nSo your instinct has been directionally right the whole time, and this is the version that actually delivers what you wanted: user fees for excludable goods, land and resource rent for the value public goods create, Pigouvian taxes on externalities, and a modest two-tier commodity tax for the remainder — with no income tax and no identity apparatus.\n\nThat's a coherent, historically grounded, theoretically defensible system. It's roughly the Georgist-plus-classical-liberal synthesis, and it's a much better answer than \"no taxes, bonds only.\"\n\nThe three honest caveats: it's regressive unless you deliberately design against that; it probably can't fund a large state; and it will require tracking at the border and at large-scale settlement even if the corner shop stays anonymous. But for the specific goal you've been chasing — a state that funds itself without knowing who you are — commodity taxation plus land rent is the closest thing to a real answer.\"\n\n",
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