Comment Horse pucky!!! (Score 1) 254
Small tribes typically ran on some basic math. A charismatic leader would band together with a small group of thugs who would then tax the rest of the tribe right up to but not the breaking point. The idea was to balance having enough thugs that no grouping of the remaining tribe members (except for maybe all) could take them on, while not having too many thugs that the spoils were spread too thin.
Then if the chief's son took over and didn't understand this balance either he would cut back on the thugs and get overthrown by someone who could then gather more thugs, or he would have too many thugs to feed making thuggery unattractive, or he would over tax the tribe resulting in being killed by an angry mob.
Basically nothing has changed in the last 100,000 years. My hope for a truly modern society is one where we brutally tax thuggery. My suggestion has long been that tax levels should be partially set by the ratio of the average salary to the highest salary. So a guy earning 20x the average salary would find himself facing a 100% income tax level. The corporate tax would also be based upon the salaries of the employees as compared to an area average. So a Walmart may very well find itself owing 150%+ corporate income tax in a rich city if it tried to pay its employees minimum wage.
Then if the chief's son took over and didn't understand this balance either he would cut back on the thugs and get overthrown by someone who could then gather more thugs, or he would have too many thugs to feed making thuggery unattractive, or he would over tax the tribe resulting in being killed by an angry mob.
Basically nothing has changed in the last 100,000 years. My hope for a truly modern society is one where we brutally tax thuggery. My suggestion has long been that tax levels should be partially set by the ratio of the average salary to the highest salary. So a guy earning 20x the average salary would find himself facing a 100% income tax level. The corporate tax would also be based upon the salaries of the employees as compared to an area average. So a Walmart may very well find itself owing 150%+ corporate income tax in a rich city if it tried to pay its employees minimum wage.