this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Fun fact: The government doesn't actually need to use taxes to pay for things. The amount of currency in the market isn't fixed, and so the government actually is fully capable of "printing more money" however, this has the potential to cause rapid inflation. So, taxes are a way of reducing inflation, rather than paying for government services.
That's assuming printing money is the default solution. Taxes have existed for longer than that. The earliest taxes were literally a portion of a farmers harvest. You can't just print more food, or gold, or whatever else. Printing money to fund government was never really an option, so positioning taxes as a solution to inflation just doesn't make sense. It's like saying that instead of eating at a restaurant, you could eat roadkill, which you aren't going to do because of disease, and therefore restaurants are a way of reducing disease rather than providing food.
I'm not operating with a model of solutions being "default" or not, so no it absolutely does not. What I'm doing is intentionally ignoring the historical context of how these systems developed to observe how they work in the present moment. Doing so allows me to understand the flaws of the model where money is viewed as a resource, rather than a pure social construct that exists in the minds of those who use it. Resources are limited by physical reality, whereas money flows like a clockwork river who's source is infinite and who's sink has infinite capacity. Changing the ammount of money available too much, too quickly, or in particular ways has negative consequences but it is possible. Resources don't do that.
I'd say they have more to do with entertainment, but they do all of those, yes. It's just a matter of perspective.