Is your time worthless?

[tokugawa]

Imagine you trade an item for another item of equal value. No taxable event is generated.
 Now imagine the second item is worth considerably more than the first, and you sell it- the extra, above the cost of the first, is taxable as income.
 When you hire someone, their wages are deductible from the profit on the biz, we  can subtract them from taxable income.
 
So why is it your labor, when receiving wages in exchange, has a tax levied on  100% of hours worked? Are they not saying your time is worthless , otherwise? Why is labor a cost to the employer, and not to the person working? They are saying you are exchanging a "object" of no value(your time)  for "$" . Essentially they are saying your time, your life, has no value at all.

 Seems to me we have a near perfect reverse incentive going-we tax the working, and pay the idle.

[AZRedhawk44]

Sssshhhh.  Don't disturb the proles.   They're napping now.

[French G.]

No, your time is worth whatever you can make with it. The employer producing, selling, getting taxed, deducting the fixed cost of you is a different transaction that you working, making money, getting taxed.

Here's the problem with your hypothesis. The first event of trading ought to be a taxable event if you think like a tax man. Even if you made something at home and traded it you ought to report what you recieved as income, or at least do 15 pages of paperwork to document your costs and profit/loss.

Second problem, tax the working, problem is not taxing you, most of us accept some level of tax as necessary, form debatable. Paying the idle is the problem. Another fun side effect of no income tax and a national sales tax,  idle can't buy all the stuff they want to.

[brimic]

Cash jobs.

[French G.]

Cash jobs.

Eventually they'll figure out how to find that. Even now if you are too good at cash jobs you ought now shovel all that into the bank, someone will notice. Hmm, expect paypal to be the next frontier of tax. Lots of internet sellers use it, easy enough to lean on e-bay to make them cough up all user transactions. Then you get to explain why any transaction isn't income.

[RoadKingLarry]

Barter, black market, under the table, cash only...
The harder they push on taxes the bigger those will become.
Going Galt even on a small scale is a good thing.

[AZRedhawk44]

BitCoin.

PM's.


The nice thing about BitCoin is that there is no label to a transaction.  Wallets/accounts are just anonymous ID's.  A person can have 100 wallets with as large or small of a balance as he wants in them.  And then create a new wallet and transfer all contents from the other 100 wallets into that one.  And there's no way to tell the difference between a balance transfer for multiple wallets held by one person and a purchase between two parties.  You could even hand over your wallet to someone as a purchase (i.e. create a new wallet and transfer the appropriate amount into it), rather than submitting the transaction to the block chain and assigning the funds to the seller's main wallet.

No tracking PM's unless you were there with a camera.

[Balog]

Bitcoin is still bottle-necked at the translation to FRN point. And there is still a record of you interacting with the BC system unless you're using Tor or something.

[tokugawa]

I don't know jack about bitcoin, but there are people I respect who laugh at it- Karl Denninger for one "the market ticker" .
 
 I did not mean this to be a thread about avoiding taxes, but on the moral and legal underpinning of them- especially with regard to the fact your life I.E(time on earth)
 has no value to the authorities, other wise it would be deductible in some measure from the tax imposed.
 Of course to our founding fathers taxing a man on the fruits of his labor and the sweat of his brow would have been considered an abomination no less than slavery- they considered a mans labor his property , no less than anything else he owned or produced.

[AZRedhawk44]

 
 I did not mean this to be a thread about avoiding taxes, but on the moral and legal underpinning of them- especially with regard to the fact your life I.E(time on earth)
 has no value to the authorities, other wise it would be deductible in some measure from the tax imposed.
 Of course to our founding fathers taxing a man on the fruits of his labor and the sweat of his brow would have been considered an abomination no less than slavery- they considered a mans labor his property , no less than anything else he owned or produced.

Government doesn't tax my sweat or my labor.

They tax my profits off of my sweat and labor.  And there's a difference.

They don't tax my recreation time where I profit by means of personal enjoyment.  If I take $100 and buy assorted pieces of mahogany and assemble them into a bookcase, they don't tax the value of that bookcase as it sits in my home, providing me with its true value.

They only tax my labors when I transact in them in FRN's.

If I labored as part of the open source crew to create the BitCoin sourcecode and logic, it would have been recreational and have no bearing on any FRN related value.

If I left my computer running as an early bitcoin mining rig, it would have no FRN value.

If I click a button on my bitcoin app to adjust how bitcoins are allocated, it has no FRN value.

I can take FRN's and turn them into noise in my motorcycle, turn them into cheeseburgers at the restaurant, turn them into beers at the pub or turn them into bitcoins online.  All the same result.  The bitcoin is no different than a "gold" piece in World of Warcraft (which you can also buy with FRN's). 

Taxing the non-FRN based result of a man's time is nonsensical. 

(Pondering when taxes will be levied on MMORPG incomes and if priest-classes will be exempt...)

[slingshot]

Maybe we can start depreciating our bodies as we age based on family history.  In essence, that is what the ObamaCare health insurance is going to do in terms of determining need or justification for surgery or a medical procedure.

The IRS says your personal time has no value.  But you can deduct mileage coming and going when working for a church/charity as a volunteer.

The tax code is twisted.  It needs to be scrapped and a either a flat tax or the Fair Tax need to be implemented.  The big reason for not doing it is the employment of all the tax accountants.  The tax code provides a disincentive to regular people and poor people to try to improve themselves.

[RoadKingLarry]

Isn't bitcoin also pretty much dependent on the whole internet thing still being in place and still more or less unrestricted?

[tokugawa]

Government doesn't tax my sweat or my labor.

They tax my profits off of my sweat and labor.  And there's a difference.

They don't tax my recreation time where I profit by means of personal enjoyment.  If I take $100 and buy assorted pieces of mahogany and assemble them into a bookcase, they don't tax the value of that bookcase as it sits in my home, providing me with its true value.

They only tax my labors when I transact in them in FRN's

Taxing the non-FRN based result of a man's time is nonsensical. 

 They  tax your sweat and labor if you are an employee.
 The only reason they do not tax renumeration in other than FRN is because they have no effective way to do it- legally, the chicken you trade your labor for IS taxable.

[Tallpine]

Yeah, the evil.gov would tax air and sunshine if they could figure out how to do it.

[brimic]

Yeah, the evil.gov would tax air and sunshine if they could figure out how to do it.

They already do with one.
Petroleum = liquid sunshine.

[Ron]

We just think we are free because we are in such a big fenced in yard.

There are a lot of laws on the books.

If the NSA turned its attention on you and marshaled all their resources to dissect your life I suspect they would come up with something they could use or leverage to own your a$$.

Personally I think we are being conditioned to understand this reality on purpose. They want us to live in fear of government.

Just take a couple grams of government provided soma and numb the pain of that unfortunate thought.

[drewtam]

We just think we are free because we are in such a big fenced in yard.

There are a lot of laws on the books.

If the NSA turned its attention on you and marshaled all their resources to dissect your life I suspect they would come up with something they could use or leverage to own your a$$.

Personally I think we are being conditioned to understand this reality on purpose. They want us to live in fear of government.

Just take a couple grams of government provided soma and numb the pain of that unfortunate thought.

Relevant
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/21/ham-sandwich-nation-due-process-when-everything-is-a-crime/