4 Comments

suggestion:

Please list a few memorizable facts in a handy place where we could see them several times.

When discussing this with other people the philosophy is readily at hand, but facts like "5 out of 100 etc." would give our argument more impact.

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Well if you won't demand a revenue from land, and you can't tax mobile capital and insist on taxing the workers into poverty of course you will end up with divorces, child poverty and fewer native workers being born. Adam Smith and the Physiocrats knew this.

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His objection to taxing the wages of common labour was that they were subsistence wages set by convention in part. Hence his comments on the advancing or declining state of society much as a farmer would be appalled by ewes producing 1.5 lambs on average- but none of that seems to worry Western treasuries taxing their subjects out of existence.

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Could you please elaborate on where Adam Smith wrote that? I don't seem to recall the parts of his work where he discusses fertility rates and the like, but I would be interested to see it.

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