Taxes

How will a Socialist government pay for roads, free housing, free healthcare, free college etc. without taxation? Someone help me understand this. Here's how i think it should go;
Here's where i draw a blank. Someone tell me about certain books that i should read in order to better understand worker payments and assigning value to people's labor. I'd like to learn more about hard economic principles in switching to a fully socialist and then to a communist society. I want to understand;
I already know how to encourage people to work without forcing them to, but getting to that point is what i don't understand yet.

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I think you're assuming a system based on money. The only thing that matters are resources and labor. You just divide those two things equally out to everyone.

I don't think it's necessary to incentivize it that much. A lot of people will work for a good cause if they have the free time to do it.
and
are terms that need to be defined. But once you get 100% of the population up to decent living standards you've done more than probably almost any nation on Earth. I would just focus on reaching a uniform living standard and then collectively improve 100% of the populations living standards as the only next step. I would never incentivize the "getting ahead" mentality.

Socialism isn't a single system it's just anything post-capitalism with a socialized goal. That's why it's called socialism. There is more than one way to do things. Labour vouchers is one way and gift economy is another and a resource economy is another but the later is pretty much same as the gift economy in that everything is free but it's centrally planned while a gift economy has no planning of distribution.

not assuming a system based on currency as we know it, but labor vouchers instead. I understand that the value of labor should become more equitable and people should be given the fruits of their labor, but the question is how do we pay them properly for their labor.
I understand that it isn't necessary to incentivize it that much under a global socialist society, but when you're competing with capitalists it most definitely is necessary.
basic subsistence is what a person needs to live a healthy, happy, albeit not luxurious life. In this case, luxury is things such as having 2 television sets, a car, a large but not enormous house, and things like that. Public transport will be heavily funded, car ownership will be discouraged and public transportation will be encouraged, having items such as television sets and extra furniture will not be deemed a necessity and thus a luxury. a house, food and water, a community that isn't threatening to kill you for whatever reason, these are considered a necessity for the individual, and anything more than that (swimming pools and fast internet) will only be given to those that work.
I just want to understand better how to properly reward people who work, how much should a labor voucher buy, what can replace taxation when the regular currency is abolished, and funding public things such as transportation and industry.

bump because question hasn't been answered

What you're asking will probably take a planning computer and a committee of economists analyzing a specific economy to figure out.
Taxation of labour for the upkeep of society?
The investment of labour?

Your mind is still caught up in capitalist brainwashing. Read up on artificial scarcity.

I did answer your question but you don't want to listen. To put it simply: Everything we need or could possibly want and more are a lot simpler than we think.

To give you a metaphor: Let's say running a society is the equivalent of running a marathon. But all our training has been about the strategies of running a marathon while wearing lead boots. Our minds are filled with the intricacies of running such a long distance while wearing such cumbersome and ill purposed footwear. So we speculate the obvious: what would running a marathon be like while not wearing lead boots? Well, it's hard to say when all we've ever known is running with lead boots and we've never even personally tried running any other way. The best answer is to probably try running without lead boots for a distance and then develop new strategies and theories from there.

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I mean you are already suggesting labour vouchers so the answer is pretty obvious. With the direct socialization of production we do away with the mysticism and obfuscation of money. All who can work are obligated to work.

Say you work 30h a week. Well now you get 20h in labour vouchers and 10h goes to the common fund, expansion of production, healthcare, upkeep of pensioners, education etc etc.

Read Critique of the Gotha Programme and Towards a New Socialism

Why do we need to taxe labor vouchers? Why not simply give vouchers to those who work for healthcare, upkeep of pensioners, education, etc.

Here's a topic where I think Cockshott is applicable, since he has by far the most coherent vision for labor-time voucher political economy:


This part I'm a little more fuzzy on though:

Thing is I'm still not entirely sure what the key difference is that would prevent us from providing things like food in limited amounts while also providing them in the market via public manufacture. I can see the danger in having an economy based entirely on these free services as that would simply be a ration-based distribution system, something Cockshott is very clear about having serious faults in terms of efficiency and practicality which might result in discontent in the best case and an actual human cost in the worst.

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it wouldn't

The reason for needs to use taxes is that you can't treat big projects like consumer goods. You need to allocate labor and materials to build a hospital before any patients can use it. This means someone has to "pay". The individual consumer obviously can't pay for a service that doesn't exist yet, which means the resources have to be taken via the tax system.

In theory, you could treat health services like consumer goods and attach prices to them, but one would first have to find a way to raise "capital" to invest in the project.

This is exactly what would happen.

The thing to remember is that labor credits represent not just hours worked but also a claim on existing wealth. This means that one has to take into account the fact that someone providing a public service is also consuming real goods in the form of food, housing, and physical things. These resources are going to be consumed the moment that construction begins on a new hospital. The hospital needs to have these resources allocated in some way, and the simplest by far is by setting aside resources and labor in the form of taxes.


It's largely a question of what should be "public goods" and what should be paid for at the discretion of the individual. Even in capitalist countries the consensus has generally been that certain goods and services are provided far better as public goods and paid for via taxes. Infrastructure and roads are the classic example. Whether or not this model could be extended to other things would probably depend on specific situations.

If you dont "tax" vouchers based on the rate of nonproductive labor (including things like maintaining and expanding infrastructure, administrative duties, etc.) then the apparent amount of available consumer goods represented by the number of vouchers will be much higher than what's actually available leading to shortages.

What is your evidence of this?

Probably the fact that it happens all the time.

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How do you make the difference between productive and nonproductive labor?

I didn't imply any such thing you dick vacuum.

You're assuming there won't be taxes.

You're assuming there will be currency.

If you're going to stick to strictly what Marx defines it as, then nonproductive labor is labor that does not make surplus value. Which is a somewhat arbitrary, socially-defined thing.

From a prospect of labor-voucher taxation it would make sense to define it as the labor not being put into goods that are consumed upon use. Things that get used over and over, infrastructure and maintenance thereof, public social property, and all that stuff.

Or, to put another way: non-productive labor is anything that you're not going to be redeeming a LV for.