| ▲ | bigfishrunning 18 hours ago | |||||||
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but the purpose of taxes isn't to "compel people to acquire their currency", it's to remove that currency from circulation and prevent the currency they've printed from inflating itself out of existence. | ||||||||
| ▲ | saulpw 17 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||
Reducing inflation is indeed one of the reasons, but what I was getting at is that the government doesn't "need" people for tax revenue to pay for its services, contrary to popular belief. It needs taxes to make its money valuable. L. Randall Wray, "What Are Taxes For? The MMT Approach" (2014): > Sovereign government does not really need revenue in its own currency in order to spend. It is the tax that 'drives' the currency. If we eliminated the tax, people probably would not immediately abandon use of the currency, but the main driver for its use would be gone. | ||||||||
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