You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.
To prevent social collapse, people individually enforce the old ways by shaming and ostracising individuals who have not paid their share, and over time this spreads to become an ironclad system where no one will employ you or trade with you if you haven’t made your (entirely voluntary!) tax payments.
Amazingly, this decentralised coordination arrangement produces identical results to our current system, only it is Philosophically Pure as the essential virtues of liberty and freedom are not compromised by men with guns, etc.
Then the people realise all this shaming and ostracising is a lot of effort to go to, and decide to coordinate the enforcement of the tax code in a central authority- oh no, they’ve relapsed into a state of sin! Despite absolutely nothing changing, their community is now Impure and they have all become Slaves once more.
Perhaps this can be called the P-slave hypothesis, for philosophical slaves who will swear up and down that they are not slaves despite clearly living in a world with an income tax code.
You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.
To prevent social collapse, the government fired corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats by the thousands, and consolidated the services they provide to be more efficient and offered them at a reasonable price.
Amazingly, the services offered were hot in demand, and the RGDP grew by 4% the next year even though there was some mild deflation. People brought more and more services for a while until for and not-for profit competitors started to emerge.
Then the government decided that they can better benefit the livelihood of their customers by split themselves into several smaller entities operating in smaller geographical regions, demutualizing into common stock corporations and spinning off some of their assets such as their road portfolio into a REIT.
Is this before or after the Communist revolution that occurs because all of a sudden entire classes of people cannot afford basic Sovereign Services, or find that suddenly Hyper-Platinum™ GovCorp members are immune to prosecution for murdering their servants for sport?
