Overview

• Some essential services, like the courts and defense, need to be voluntarily funded in a free society. That challenge will be made easier by the greater prosperity that ensues from freedom, in both reducing the cost of services and the prosperity of those funding them.
• There are many ways that can be envisioned for accomplishing important goals without violating the Legal Principle. Some of these voluntary funding mechanisms are explored below.

Essential services will require funding

• It is unavoidable that some cost would be incurred by enforcing and adjudicating the Legal Principle. These services are essential to sustain a free society.
• Currently, these services are paid for via taxation, which itself violates the Legal Principle. All goods and services, including essential ones, should be voluntarily paid for by the people that want them.
• However, as we intelligently transition away from our addiction to taxation, police services, courts, and national defence should remain funded via tax until voluntary sources of funding are established. Without these essential services, the viability of the free community would be unsustainable, so these must be the last to be de-funded by tax.

Freedom reduces costs

• Some estimate that decriminalising victimless crimes would reduce the majority of the costs of the justice system.
• Global free trade also would also increase the incentives for peaceful cooperation, such that we can expect the required spending on national defence to decrease.
• A free society is likely to be much more prosperous, such that even the least wealthy could better afford these services.

Freedom increases prosperity

• Entrepreneurship
  • Unfulfilled market needs are exactly what successful entrepreneurs seek for a durable business model. We don’t need to look further than the phone in our pocket to see what innovation and competition can achieve.
• Eliminating taxes
  • Eliminating taxes frees up vast amounts of money that would have gone to the government to inefficiently spend on politically motivated programs (to secure votes).
  • The transaction costs alone of paying people to administer the complex tax systems detract from the total wealth of the society.
  • Instead, this money would be immediately available for its owners to start or expand businesses, invest, or spend on the consumer goods and services of their choice, such as increased security, better quality education for their children, better quality food, or a better family vacation.
  • It is an error to imagine that eliminating taxation would remove even one dime from the economy. Instead, the same amount of money would flow more efficiently according to the preferences of the owners of the money rather than from inefficient political decision-making.
• Prosperity’s multiplier effect
  • The spending of the money that would otherwise by paid in taxes would create more jobs, and has a multiplying effect on wealth creation, benefitting rich and poor alike. Even when a billionaire purchases a giant yacht, the billionaire inadvertently helps the less fortunate low-income workers who manufacture, sell, and service the yacht, along with many other workers whose jobs depend on such transactions.
  • Even if the richest people simply save that money in a bank, those savings increase the money available for banks to lend at lower interest rates, which also helps contribute to a more robust economy.

Specific voluntary funding sources