| | I'm firmly of the opinion that a minarchy can be funded by voluntary contributions by businesses, independent of individuals. My arguments are that there would be a dynamic equilibrium of the following effects:
- the financial needs of the government as communicated to the electorate
- the desire of businesses to curry favor (and thus, profit) with consumers by donating to the government and having the public aware of their generosity (or stinginess)
- on the other hand, businesses would have to stay competitive and not donate too much because their merchandise would become expensive relative to their competition
- if consumers feel that the government's expenditures were ill-conceived, or profligate, they would be less inclined to discriminate against vendors that were not donating as much as their competitors and government revenues would decline.
Businesses would view government donations much the same as they do advertising dollars. They would have to continually assess the level of their expenditures. If they spend too much, either they have to increase prices or lose profits. If they spend too little their volume dries up or they have to drop prices. It's a matter of optimizing by detecting how much consumers want to support the government and what the competition is doing.
The public would demand that all businesses divulge the amount of their donations. At the present time many large corporations are making a huge effort to appear "green" in their advertising and, in my opinion, this is to augment their bottom line and not for altruistic reasons. I would argue that the public's response to this kind of political correctness applied to essential government funding would be very much higher.
Underneath it all would be legions of analysts, commentators, advisors, political pundits, etc. similar to those we have today.
And it would all be done with the laudable goal of good old capitalist greed and profit. There would be virtually no free-loaders as, I expect, all businesses would make donations of some amount, so the costs to the consumer would be similar to a consumption tax. There would be virtually no paperwork comparable to income tax today.
Sam
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