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by travisb 556 days ago
Harberger taxes seem like a spherical cow solution.

It works in abstract economic theory, but encounters serious problems when you introduce pragmatic complications like cash-flow, malicious actors, non-rational actors, asymmetric value, transaction costs, lumpy probability distributions, and other things. Fixes to those various problems can be bolted on, but the end result loses much of the theoretical advantages which made Harberger taxes appealing in the first place.