[rtempaccount1]

Ultimately any country/state needs a variety of services, from utilities like water/sewage/electricity to emergency services like ambulance/fire/police to a military to defend what you've got from other countries. you also need things like roads, telecomms infrastructure and other things that have been built over decades/centuries in established countries.

You also need things like a foreign service to liaise with other countries so that the fate of your state isn't the same as the Thai SeaStedding adventure. Then you may also need things in the longer term like social services, pension funds etc to care for your citizens in the long term.

Those all need to be paid for somehow, and that somehow is taxes. A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow. I'd guess that these low tax environments intention would be to skimp on the services that richer people don't need in exchange for having those richer people pay less tax...

So I'm not really surprised by the comments in the article that they're having trouble getting "host" countries to buy into this, what's the upside for them? These low tax environments will obviously not provide good long term environments for workers (the low tax is likely to == low social care standards) so it'd seem likely they'll take in workers where it's suitable and ship them back out once they're not productive any more, back to the host countries they came from.

[m463]

> A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow.

I think this is preception, not reality.

The US was formed with checks and balances amongst the branches of government yet there seems to be no checks and balances against government spending or taxation.

The fact that the Laffer curve[1] is a thing leads me to believe that government will continue to tax until the maximum taxation is achieved, or beyond.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

[Gibbon1]

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

[m463]

wow, check this one out:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

[stkdump]

> The fact that the Laffer curve[1] is a thing leads me to believe that government will continue to tax until the maximum taxation is achieved, or beyond.

Isn't that circular reasoning? Afaik, the Laffer curve just is a concept that discribes where the maximum tax revenue is (i.e. neither at 0% nor at 100% tax)

[munk-a]

The way this is (IMO) envisaged to work is that the population would be so extremely wealthy that only a very low proportional tax would be required to sufficiently fund social services - also, you'd sort of opt out of all the less fun parts of being a society. Maybe you'd exile the homeless, criminal and mentally disabled - also you could benefit from industrialization without any of the pollution. Such Utopia!

[kapuasuite]

There’s a difference between Somalia and states that tax lightly and derive that tax revenue in economically efficient ways.