It's a bit like an Emacs user's reductio ad absurdum : a keyboard that is all modifiers.

As long as a corporation is a separate "person," that can take on loans and enter into contracts with no liability on dividend recipients, the money passing through dividends is "new" money in the same way that a landlord receiving rent is getting after-tax income from his tenants, money that is also "taxed twice."

Income taxes aren't taxes on money, that would be a wealth tax; an income tax liability attaches to the activity of acquiring money in various ways. As long as the activities of a corporation and the activities of a shareholder are distinguishable, and they're independent economic actors, their tax liabilities are distinguishable.

Texas counties have some of the highest property tax rates in the US.

What Texas does not have is a state regular income tax, but then again Texas saves all kinds of money that other states would normally spend on death penalty trial defenders and non-fraudulent arson investigators.

Hey that's a lot of money. Just $97 billion to go :P

In my rather normal Mazda hatchback, my phone can be in its cradle in the dashboard, about three feet away, and the transcription is generally faultless; definitely different results when I try to use it with the radio on :)

Communication (which is to say, unidirectional data transfer from a non-human entity via a billion-dollar computer network) is human nature!

I confess I respect your honesty, in that you don't actually dangle the bullshit argument that professional artists will have a modus vivendi in your proposed utopia. Most freepers aren't so forthcoming.

Actually come again, I think I sorta get it.

However, given regime change (really this sort of legal reform would be called "expropriation"), don't you see a huge deadweight loss from pricing high quality and low quality entertainment at the same rate? The "experience" is the fundamental value proposition to the viewer. My biggest bitch is that ISPs and cable companies make a mint shipping this material to people's houses, and their whole value proposition is based on offering this stuff. Basically the risk is that you'll make the Internet a huge common of the most tragic sort.

Why? My position is that it's a failure regardless of the regime, and that it'll never work for provision of entertainment. The point is that even under ideal conditions it'll never pay for entertaining motion pictures, it simply doesn't map to the entertainment market or to the natural demand signals that entertainment consumers send. Even in fields where copyright is basically demolished, like music, people don't fund albums and tours with Kickstarter funds. The model is fundamentally incompatible with having a good time. It basically turns artistic work into the sort of political clusterfuck that ruins the open source movement -- raising $25 million from five people is political enough, imagine the nonsense of having to sell yourself to 50,000 donators and keep their politics satisfied.

And it would absolutely impact the quality, as I said, the end result would be the end of professionalism in art and creative crafts. All recorded creative works, be they films, music, computer software, or books, would become the province of hobbyists.

I don't really see the "competition" argument -- how does someone giving money to a Kickstarter project keep them from going to see a movie, or vice versus? Is it that they're competitive, or that you'd prefer a different cultural norm? 'Cause that's a different thing.

Yeah, it's no fair that crappy-looking Kickstarter movies have to compete with awesome-looking Hollywood movies, if Hollywood movies looked crappy then it'd be a fairer fight. I call it the "Harrison Bergeron Film Reform Plan." The quality of product would go WAY down, but our ideological commitment would be satisfied...