Imagine No. 1

Imagine there were no taxes on economic production: no income taxes, inheritance taxes, business taxes, corporate taxes, or excise taxes. Imagine instead that America's taxes were paid solely at the cash register in the form of sales taxes, with exceptions for food, rent and medical care.

Imagine how easy it would be to manage family finances when there were no more tax forms to fill out, no more receipts to save, no more tax professionals to pay, and no more budget-busting checks to write to the government. Families would have far more control over how much tax they paid in any given year by simply regulating their purchases instead of having to actually earn less money to ease their tax burden. What we earned would be ours, what we saved would be ours, period.

Imagine how much easier it would be to be self-employed, and to own and manage our own businesses. We wouldn't have to retain a payroll company to manage our employees' taxes like we have to do today even if we employ only a hand-full of people. No more intentional mis-allocations of resources and financial acrobatics would be required to avoid even greater tax losses. And there would be no more having to predict future income or being forced to prepay future taxes for those of us who employ ourselves, allowing a new Entrepreneur Society to be fully born.

Imagine ultra-full employment as firms from the world over flocked to the US to invent, produce and trade in a vastly simplified and cheaper business environment. The massive new competitive pressures of demand for labor would permanently keep the unemployment rate as close to zero as possible, and force wages to lead the inflation curve instead of follow it. In the United States, employees would cost less in spite of being paid more.

Imagine lower, fairer prices for just about everything we buy when businesses and corporations no longer have to imbed the cost of their taxes in the prices they charge us for their goods and services. Competition would force producers to pass the cost savings to consumers, and sooner rather than later. For many things this would mean lower actual cost even after additional sales taxes are factored in.

And lastly, imagine it no longer being in the government's interest to track the incomes and economic behavior of businesses and individuals. Imagine financial privacy actually being legally possible, with the government having no reason now or in the future to use the computer and communications technology already available to essentially catalog every one of our market transactions, monitoring (and eventually regulating) our economic lives.

It's called freedom, folks, and unlike most things we imagine, we can actually have this if enough of us come together and punch it into the national political narrative.