“Within 100 years the citizens and companies of a large and prosperous country in excess of 100 million people will no longer pay taxes of any kind.”

A day of no taxes will happen because people hate taxes, most people don?t actually care about money, and there will come a means to have no taxes. Deemed impossible by basically every economist I have met, there seems no impossibility to this in a country where all payments are electronic and all transactions are monitored in near real-time through central banks. The governments will create the money they need out of ?thin air? based on a careful monitoring and controls of the money flow. The objective will be to do no economic harm.

We can all agree that if the U.S. Government today printed exactly one extra dollar bill to use for itself, this virgin birth of spending money for the Government would have absolutely no economic impact. Enterprising theoreticians in an epayment society will find that carefully working this philosophy of ?thin-air? emoney to achieve economic goals will lead to a society of no taxes.

The forces moving toward pure electronic money are enormous. Digital systems present for banks and government in the U.S. have already resulted in a web site where the U.S. Treasury keeps fairly accurate track of the accumulated value of all assets in the U.S.A. good to about 60 days. The time will come when theoreticians will start doing calculations of what they can accomplish, and they will be surprised. The surprise won?t happen very soon, because the calculations in today?s monetary system don?t give good results, but it will happen. People will no longer pay taxes (although the society will pay, of course).

It is somewhat interesting that this idea seems to have first surfaced in wide distribution in a book ?Social Credit? by C.H. Douglas (1924, plus at least five later editions). A political party formed around this work in Britain in the 1930s that survives to this day in British Columbia.

Current economists are buried in Newtonian calculus, but relativity should hit economic mechanics within a century, and we will be better off for it.