Salve,
riporto da Slashdot:
Programmers write free software to subvert a system that denies them the protection of
their intellectual property rights by pricing legal defense of those rights out of their
reach. That guys like Gates would be unsympathetic to this cruel dilemma facing the vast
majority of programmers is not surprising. Indeed, given the fact that even giving all
his wealth away, except some "modest" estate for his children, his childre will
still be able to afford good legal counsel to establish protection for themselves.
If programmers were able to capture enough of the value of what they write to
pay for the legal defense of their rights they'd probably write a lot less free
software.
This gets to a fundamental problem with the incentives created by taxing things
other than asset value (exempting house and tools of the trade which are
subsistence assets protected by bankruptcy tradition):
Possession is rewarded over creation.
Think about it: Once you possess something, you basically have no tax burden.
You enjoy the benefits of young men dutifully going out to die in wars,
government subsidized infrastructure paid by wage earners, the entire legal
edifice describing and protecting your rights and without you having to pay a
cent. You can just soak the public for these benefits by paying only the
lawyers fees to extract the benefits for yourself.
Taxing everything but possession (income, capital gains, sales, value added,
etc) is just a way to tax the creative process.
Naturally, creators who are trying to get a leg up on the situation end up
selling their creations cheap to those whose possession is subsidized by the
tax payments of the creators.
Well, there is one exception to this rule of no taxation of possession -- and that is the
patent maintanence fee. Patents are the only assets that the government taxes. This is an
incredibly regressive tax hitting hardest those who are earliest to support the
realization of a new technology's value -- forcing them to sell their rights
("assign") cheap to someone who has been sitting around enjying the
government's protection.
It all adds up to a very nasty way of sucking capital out of the hands of
creators and giving over to the hands of possessors.
So the creators, unable to change the tax laws to tax assets rather than
creative processes (becuse they can't buy the Ways and Means Committee) become
socialists.
This is directly related to the issue of outsourcing since if programmers who
had created the value of the information industry had been allowed to retain
the value they created, they wouldn't need jobs. The corporations would be
paying them royalties or be paying companies owned by the programmers for the
rights to their software instead of just throwing creators out on the street
after extracting their youth and creativity.
A system that would work would elimnate all existing taxes (although not
necessarily tariffs) and just tax net assets at a rate equal to the interest
rate on the national debt -- exempting from taxation the same assets that are
exempted by personal bankruptcy protection: home and tools of the trade.
Does Gates think he can beat the competition if they aren't beaten down for him
by the government? This sort of arrogance by people who are the wealthiest
isn't offset by giving their money to charity. They are eating the children of
the middle class and destroying the future of the country that made them rich.
A me è parso un punto di vista estremamente interessante, qualche commento ?
Davide Bolcioni
--
There is no place like /home.
|