[soneil]

I always find "but they're small" to be a lazy argument for things like this - I heard it recently in regards to Estonia's digital services also.

"It's easy for them to do, but we're a huge country with near-infinite resources, we couldn't possibly". I mean sure, it means you have to scale the operation to match, which is why the IRS has more staff than the Faroes have population. But "we can't take on these projects, we're too big" makes it sound like we should have expected Belgium to land on the moon instead of the US.

[NoboruWataya]

Landing a man on the moon is not a problem that increases in complexity with population size, taxation is. "Things like this" are exactly where "but they're small" is a perfectly legitimate response. To say "oh just scale the operation" ignores the fact that scaling is just about one of the hardest problems we face in human organisations.

[pigsty]

I think there’s a difference though when a country has a population less than a typical large corporation and no major industry whatsoever. It’s at a scale where everyone knows somebody who can help you get things done.

[soneil]

What I'm not convinced of is that complexity is actually a necessity.

For example, what's the real difference between operating a fire department in a town on the Faroes, vs a town in the Mid-west? It seems like a fairly cookie-cutter operation where requiring more of them in total does not add complexity to each operation.

Possibly even the opposite, where the scale of the US turns into a net benefit, so you can support your own industries building and providing tenders/appliances - where the Faroes are (I assume) more likely to ship one from Germany.

So I'm not clear why taxation within a single state has to be more complex than taxation within a small nation. I'm not going to deny that it probably is, and probably will be, but I'm less comfortable with the assumption that it must be.