[QED BS] Communes & Domestic Taxes

Day 2,639, 04:40 • Published in Belgium Belgium • by Boklevski

In the previous article, I announced to go a bit more into communes and domestic taxes. Therefore, I’ll launch a QED Blogspot (BS) today about that subject. As the term indicates, this “blogspot” is just some rant written on personal basis. It’s not a direct derivate of the QED research, although related. Therefore you might as well disagree with it. In that case, make sure to post your version or considerations in the comment section.

And in worst case, just consider the double meaning of the abbreviation BS as if it was intended. You know by now I find abbreviations that mean something else fancy, so feel free.

… about those communes and taxes:
I was describing the more economically left-wing oriented economic view of BDP. You can read it in my previous article. In there, the concept of communes was mentioned. I’ll try to explain “communes” first (skip the italic part if you know it already):

Short backgroun😛 communes in eRepublik
I’ll go quickly through the concept of communes in eRepublik. The idea is to produce goods with a certain group of people. This can be any group: many military units form a commune, while also political parties can act as communes. (Not sure if any party in eBE is doing that, but I have been in a political party commune in eUK.)

Basically, there are three ways of obtaining those Q7 weapons: either buy them on the market – which can be quite expensive – or produce weapons yourself in your own very expensive Q7 factory, while also providing the many raws materials. The third way is to join in on a commune where one (or a few) persons own the required Q7 company. People work there at minimum wage to produce goods, which are then given to all in the commune.

Some communes also have their raws produced within the commune, others request that you produce raws yourself and sell them to the commune and return the money. In both cases the commune receives low-cost labor and low-cost raws, and thus produces low-cost goods to be shared among all. It gets even better when the company emigrates to a country with high production bonuses to increase efficiency – producing even more.

Yeah, it’s basically communism as it was meant to be: communism without political oppression and without a few ‘political leaders’ getting extremely rich.

Now back to the good part:
Note that “left-wing economics” (so towards socialism) is something curious in eRepublik: normally left-wing stances would opt for communes and high taxes (to create income equality). Right-wing would rather see free-market wages and low taxes (to increase individual gain).

The most far-left ideal would even be to exclude any form of money in the commune: no wage, no taxes, no product prices. Just exchange (free) labor into raw materials and then into products to be shared to those who produced it – without charge.

However, as minimum wage and taxes are mandatory, commune owners would rather set taxes as low as possible to optimize the efficiency of their commune: minimizing the money spend as much as possible to get near the ideal of no money used at all.

Basically, the foundations of eRepublik are so capitalist based, that you can’t really apply fully efficient communes (i.e. no monetary involvement at all). As eRepublik doesn’t know a progressive tax-system, high taxes also don’t help to create income equality. And as mandatory taxes have to be paid over the mandatory minimum wage, you’ll always lose a bit of money in the commune. Better keep that as low as possible, in eRepublik meaning you’ll keep the taxes low for everybody.

Far-left ideas would thus in eRepublik translate to “communes” and “low taxes”… while right-wing ideas would translate to “no communes” and “low taxes”. So everybody would vote to have “low taxes for everybody”.

Who would have guessed that socialist and capitalist ideals would be so close…

It’s a strange eWorld we live in.

Boklevski
QED Blogger

PS: I never ran a commune, only participated in a few. Therefore, I’m probably wrong on some points. Please point them out in the comment section so we get a clear full overview of this odd observation.