Mind Readings: Taxes are Subscriptions

In today's mind readings, I was reading uh an article about uh some tax changes and stuff. It's that time of year, it's April as I record this. And of course, uh a lot of folks making uh trying to score political points by arguing for or against certain taxes and things. And it got me thinking, if we want to be able to fund stuff that matters, we might be looking at taxes as really just a branding problem, right? What if we tackled it as a branding problem?

Instead of taxes being seen as this punitive thing, like, oh, you must give your due to to the government. What if you consider taxes essentially as a subscription, right? Imagine that citizenship to a nation was a subscription. Granted, it's very hard to change providers, right? It's a lot easier to go from Netflix to Hulu than it is to go from America to Canada uh or from you know Ukraine to Germany.

Um when you do, you're changing who you pay your taxes to, right? You're you're essentially changing your subscription by picking up and moving from one spot to another. But more than that, when we think of a subscription, we think about what are we getting for our money, right? So if I pay 999 to Netflix a month, what do I get? I get you know unlimited uh views of certain types of of videos.

If I add on the DVD rental add-on, I get you know uh to to rent DVDs for you know like the five people who still own DVD players. Um when I uh subscribe to Disney Plus, what do I get uh out of them? Well, I get different content. I get content that's uh, you know, Star Wars, for example. If I subscribe to, you know, CBS All Access, I get Star Trek.

Um, and so we look at all these different subscription services and and weigh what are the benefits? What are the things that I'm getting out of what I'm paying, you know, 999 a month for whatever? If you think about your taxes, you know, if you're paying 25% of your income, uh, and say you make a thousand dollars a month, um, you're paying $250 a month as a subscription to a government, right? What are you getting for your subscription? What's included in your subscription?

You know, roads, um, national security, right? Uh, hopefully uh your your your uh subscription includes uh things like police and fire, uh fire departments to uh to solve disasters and stuff like that, electrical lines, some regulations, um, things like weights and measures, so that when you go to the gas station uh and you put fuel in your car, assuming you have a car that burns gasoline, um when the meet the meter says you've put nine gallons in your your car, you've actually gotten nine gallons worth of gasoline because someone from weights and measures has certified that the pumps are not crooked. Um so what are all the things that you get in a subscription for your taxes? And then if you don't like what's included in your subscription, what are your choices? You can and people do uh petition governments to to change how they do things, and sometimes it it goes well, sometimes it doesn't.

Often it takes a really long time for any kind of change to go through, which is actually probably a good thing because uh governments moving uh in the uh fevered pitch of a mob is never a good thing. And so you then have to start looking around and saying, well, are there other services out there that if I paid about the same amount for a subscription, uh, would I get more of what I wanted, right? So uh, or is if you say, like, you know, I really don't want to pay uh 25% of my income. Are there other services, aka governments, uh, other nations where I could pay less of my income to pay less for my subscription to citizenship? And there absolutely are.

There are some nations which are known as tax havens stuff, and you can pay a lot less money, uh, you do have to live there. Um, and you get different services, right? If you move to a nation, say like Sweden or Denmark, you know, your your subscription fees are a lot higher there, or France, uh, your subscriptions fees are a lot higher, but you also get very different things, right? In the uh American subscription, uh there are things on on the subscription plan that aren't included, like healthcare. Um and the French subscription, you get universal health care, right?

If you get sick, you can you can get medical help and not have to worry about how you're gonna pay for it. Um if you want to pursue higher education, uh, you can do that and not have to you know think about how you're gonna pay for it or take hundreds of thousands of dollars out in loans to pay for it. If you reframe citizenship as a subscription and put it in a modern context, because very often we talk about these things as you know in the same language as they were written in in legal documents from 250 years ago, uh, if you upgrade the language around it, it suddenly becomes a lot more comprehensible to people to say, oh, well, I'm paying this, and here's what I get in my subscription. And do I am I happy with that? If I'm not happy with that, I could try to make some changes, which is valid, or I can change providers and you relocate.

And as the world becomes more global as the internet allows us to see snapshots of everyday life in other nations, we might want to say at some point, yeah, you know what? I'm I'm not thrilled with the subscription, and I'm gonna cancel it and I'm gonna change providers. I'm gonna go from you know a country that has no universal health care um and then spends you know 27 cents on every dollar for for a defense budget. Uh maybe I will move to a nation which spends you know 11% on its defense budget and spends you know 34% on social services. Maybe you want to move to a place you're like if you're not happy with uh the weapons laws in a place like you want to be able to own and operate you know more and bigger and cooler weapons.

There are plenty of countries on earth where that would be included in your subscription. Uh, there would be other things missing, so you'd have to figure out whether or not uh those trade-offs are worth it. But in reframing the problem as instead of one where we assume that national identity is part of our personal identity, if we change it to thinking about a subscription service, then it frees us to think more about where else we could we be living closer to the quality of life and the things that we care about in our lives while we you know while we are able to do so. If we unwind and remove sort of national identity from our personal identities, then you start to see, okay, I can move around, I can change subscriptions, right? We have this sort of notion of national pride.

And when you think again about it in terms of uh subscription service, then it starts to sound kind of weird. Like, I'm really proud to be a Netflix subscriber. I mean, I I pay Netflix, but I wouldn't say I'm proud, right? I don't wear shirts with you know the Netflix logo on it. Um, they haven't sent me any.

And yet you also have lots of people who will have the colors of their nation or their flag or whatever on their clothing and stuff. And again, once we transition it into a modern mindset, you go, that's kind of weird, isn't it? If if it's a sub if my taxes are really just a subscription, do I have a ton of loyalty towards the subscription provider? Or do I have more of a commercial um relationship with them? Like, yeah, here's the money for the subscription, you give me the stuff that I'm I I've agreed to buy um from you.

And if you don't give me those things, then I'm gonna stop giving you my money, I'm gonna find a different provider. There's something like what, 192 nations on earth, uh give or take, uh, you know, plus or minus 10 or so. Maybe there's a better place, you know, maybe there's a place that gets you more of what you want for the money that you're spending on the subscription fees. So something to think about, something that to mull over. And as we become more global citizens, as our kids grow up with services like you know, Discord or Reddit or whatever, and they and they have friends in other nations, I think we will all change slowly what our our personal identities are versus our national identities, and maybe maybe start to ask more of our governments for what we're getting for our subscription fees.

Give that some thought. Hope you uh have some uh thoughts of your own on this. If you do, just stick them in the comments or whatever, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.