eder@ssc-vax.UUCP (Dani Eder) (01/24/85)
> Of course! In fact, insurance companies would play a major role in > a libertarian society. Individuals can and do purchase insurance > against the trials and tribulations of an uncertain world, and do so > freely in the context of a market economy. This is an argument against > government intervention, not for it. > In the spirit of the quoted comment, I propose a libertarian style solution to the problem of taxation: tax insurance. Taxes are the one other thing besides death that are considered inevitable, and bad. We insure against one, why not the other? It is well known that the IRS only has the manpower to audit about 1-2% of tax returns, and selects who to audit on a statistical basis. Well, those of you who want to take a deduction that may be rejected by the IRS could buy a policy insuring against that event, exchanging a small known cost for the elimination of risk of large loss on the deduction being disallowed. More extreme tasx protestors who underreport or even do not file at all would pay a larger premium, and if they were fined, would be reimbursed. In the unlikely case of someone being jailed for tax evasion, the policy would pay a substantial sum, say $50000 per year, for jail time served. In order for this to work, enough libertarians would have to band togther to make statistical variations manageable. It would probably have to be operated outside the US, in a tax haven, since if the IRS seized the insurer's records, the statistics would be skewed. I have in mind a 'mutual insurance' style of organization, where the leftovers each year would be returned to the policyholders. Now, questions for the legal eagles: does this violate US or state insurance laws? If it does, how might a group of libertarians go about setting up such a 'Libertarian Mutual Tax Insurance Company' in a foreign tax haven? Dani Eder / these opinions are solely my own, not those of anyone else./ ssc-vax!eder