After a longer break, I started doing business again. As the tax return approaches, I’m starting to consider ways to optimize my income so that, for example, if I accidentally lose one of my orders next year, I don’t have to pay crazy insurance fees and statutory deductions because I don’t have a job at the moment.
Optimizations, such as establishing a limited liability company, keeping the trade license, zigzagging between the crazy governmental constants (did you know, for example, that if you have a turnover of up to €49790, you pay 15% income tax, but if your turnover exceeds €49791, your tax increases to 21% – in other words, the 1 euro will make you lose 6% of your turnover – about €3000? This will, among other things, cause a flurry of creative ideas to artificially reduce the turnover from, say, €60000 to the required magical €49790, that novels could be written about it. Richard Sulík should take a good look at such constants.
This whole tax collection circus strikes me as an unnecessarily expensive theater, a breeding ground for all sorts of monkey business practices and a whole segment of creative accountants. And I’m not even a VAT payer (I don’t quite know how it works in this mode). The carousel scams were our national sport during Fico’s regime.
In short, things must be different. I read about how things should be in the second half of the 1990’s in Neal Donald Walsch’s book Conversations With God 2. At that time, Mečiar’s privatization was raging in Slovakia, and the difference between what was happening in Slovakia and the kind of society described by the author was so vast that I realized how far off base we were. Walsch wrote that in a truly developed society – where no one wants anything at the expense of others – money is fully visible and transparent. This includes assets, of course. I don’t know where the author found the information about them: there’s no such society – at least in our solar system! In the worst case, he just made it up. But when I started thinking about it more deeply, I came to the same conclusion. Making money fully transparent would be a step with such far-reaching consequences that the society that adopts this system can easily be dubbed “a new social system”. Fully visible money would solve a wide range of problems of today’s society and, despite the opposition that this idea evokes in today’s people at first sight, it is definitely worth trying.
But, back to the topic of this article: according to Walsch, taxation – thanks to the fact that money is fully transparent (it can always be ensured by a constantly accessible banking information system; something like Facebook where anyone can view the assets and cash flows of anyone else under certain conditions) – works on a fully voluntary basis or at least at much lower rate than currently. I think he writes about 10%. By knowing who pays taxes, how much and from what turnover, people will begin to change their behavior. Those who have no problem to share their successes with the rest of society will be acclaimed. This will create enough pressure for the society to finance itself. In addition, with the existence of a central clearing system in which every penny would be registered, taxes as a deduction of profits could switch to quantitative easing financing, which would, however, be under the full control of the society’s central clearing system. In such a system, inflation could be determined in advance. Or better, deflation. With scientific progress, prices should fall and not rise over time.
It’s been almost 25 years since I read Walsch’s book for the first time. The idea has fundamentally shaped my thinking and I decided to devote myself more deeply to it. I started the https://visiblemoney.org website and I also started developing an information system that would meet the requirements to run such something. (For example, the bulletproofness of data in the system, so that no one could challenge this or that transaction in 10 years. Bitcoin and the blockchain technology played a very beneficial role in the design of this system).
If you are interested in the idea of making money visible, please visit the project website. I analyze it from top to bottom, and from left to right. And you’ll make me very happy if you subscribe to our newsletter. I’ll periodically inform you about how things are.
Thank you,
Peter Boško
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