An Idea About Taxes

It seems to me that it might possible to have an entirely voluntary system of taxation but that it would be likely to be under-funded for even the most minimal set of services to be supplied by government. People in general simply wish to pay as few taxes as they can. But involuntary taxation opens the way to an unlimitedly rapacious government squandering resources until an inevitable economic collapse. History is replete with examples.

Even in representative forms of government in which elected officials allocate and redistribute the wealth and determine who gets taxed how much, and for what, the problem remains. The representatives only seem to represent their electorate. Once they attain power, in large numbers, they become predators of the very flock they swore to represent.

Yet, it is easy to see that the average citizen is either too incompetent or unwilling to engage in the effort to determine the direction of the resources he contributes to the functioning of the body politic.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that a small part of the population, like a tenth, have both the desire and the intelligence to make reasonable decisions as to the allocation of their particular resources, which have been drafted for the good of the system. This would constitute an additional substantial buffer against the abuses currently taking place in the typical representative democracy. In prior times, the practical logistics would have made it impossible. In the age of the computer it is not.

These individuals would contribute to resources to the same extent as their fellow citizens, but would take on the additional responsibility of directing those funds to the particular branches of government and services that they believe are worthiest of funding, and excluding those areas they believe are over funded or destructive to the general good.

We would not now have a utopia, but certainly that extra substantial block of decision makers would be an additional buffer against the abuses which now seem so rampant in national governmental structures.