the real problem with governments and taxes

There is a disconnect with payments and services. In essence, everyone tries to get as much out of the system while paying as little as possible. There is no relationship between what we pay and what we get, and income/payroll/investment taxes are a mess.

The solution is to tax consumption.

A 23% tax (minus deductions for any basic necessities like food, housing, and basic medical care) on everything we buy is a much better deal for all of us.

The FairTax (more at www.fairtax.org):

• Enables workers to keep their entire paychecks
• Enables retirees to keep their entire pensions
• Refunds in advance the tax on purchases of basic necessities
• Allows American products to compete fairly
• Brings transparency and accountability to tax policy
• Ensures Social Security and Medicare funding
• Closes all loopholes and brings fairness to taxation
• Abolishes the IRS

Tie this together with a balanced budget initiative and we'd be all set. Why wouldn't people want this more fair, honest, and patriotic system? Because they want to get more than they put in. They want to game the system to their favor.

I say let them buy Prada, eat McDonalds, and go to the track. I may not agree with those things, as they might not agree with my following Phish around the country. But we are equals subject to the same rules, know exactly how much we are paying for services, and will be forced to see how much.

Only by matching funding with consumption will we get out of this trap.

hippie capatalism

Sometimes nothing is more enjoyable than a good broken stereotype.

I've spent a good deal time following the jam band Phish, and always been in love with the parking lot scene. Nothing like getting into a traffic jam when a parking lot opens 5 or 6 hours before a show. Everyone wants to secure a good spot, for a day of lounging in the sun and frolicking in the sure to be unkempt grass. Frisbees flying, beer flowing, charcoal getting lit, and types of people sitting on blankets, lawn chairs, or car hoods. At a good show you can see license plates from half the union, without trying too hard. Just how many VM buses are there in the Midwest, and how did they all get started this morning?

Every lot, had a "Shakedown Street" ... vernacular left over from Grateful Dead tours ... or it least it did until concert venues and local law enforcement got lame.

This is where the serious "vending" goes on. Nearly everything for sale is contraband of some sort from lot style T-shirts that break trademarks as a rule, tickets (not to be sold at the venue), to delicious food (no permits), cold beer (no id check or distribution license), lovely glass pot smoking devices, and the stuff fill them with.

The vendors are almost exclusively hippies. These industrious wookies (think Chewbacca with dreadlocks), spinner girls, and glass artists need a way to fund getting to and in the next show on the tour. All that gas, sustinence, swill and narcotics has a cost ... and though many might see hippies eschewing the capitalist system they are just playing by their own rules.

The open market keeps customers happy, they get what they want and prices stay low. The hippies get to use their creativity in order to support their vagabond lifestyle, and in the end everyone is happy.

Everyone but the veune (lost sales), the local law enforcement community (drugs), and lawyers/politicians (parents for adults) was happy. The bad news is the good guys lost.

The good news is ... this sort of thing is alive and well across the world. When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin (West Africa) I was amazed at what you could get in the markets ... anything from smuggled gas to children.

The key for freedom loving people like me is there is a line ... and we need to realize that and respect it. I'd rather not fund the coffers of East Troy, WI by giving out $500 tickets for hippie kids selling water ... but realize the selling of severed albino heads is a problem.

Sometime in the near future ... Americans are going to start questioning the paternalism practiced in our land, in my mind the sooner the better.

innovation bubbles up

I'd wager that most great ideas are born bottom up rather than top down.

How many innovative ideas stories' start with ... my boss got an email from the CEO. The telephone sure as hell wasn't invented that way, neither was the internet (despite what Al Gore might say) nor the smartphone.

People on top (board members, CXOs, VPs) see problems in convergence. Why can't these two systems work together? I want to draw up an elegant shell on our existing systems. They are looking for issues where the sum is greater than the sum of the parts, which is not a bad thing. The problem is, there is usually a reason systems aren't already converged. Normally, they don't fit that well together and the additional complexity of bundling them negates any potential benefit.

Bottom dwellers live in their respective areas, understanding both the outputs of their systems and their respective environments. They already know what is a bitch to do and what is not, plus normally why. The top layer is generally too far removed, busy, etc to understand or care. They overestimate the companies importance, and more importantly will to impose ideas/solutions on the market as a whole.

A better approach would be a benevolent dictator, who once a month asks all his reports to impress them. What have you and your groups been working on? Why does it matter? What help do you need with? Are you properly resourced? Do you need anything from other teams? Is your idea better than the last/next guys?

Google looks a lot like this, but so do successful auto companies.

Nothing takes the wind out of a team's sails like an idea that will likely never work out. How are they supposed to get excited and behind their work? A death spiral of apathy, low quality work, and tendency for the team to "check out" are sure to follow.

Let's create environments that foster innovation, and share problems but not mandate solutions.