Treat voluntary taxes as a multi-stage crowd-funding campaign (updated)

[Murf]

Hopefully the crowd-funding part is understandable for all readers. The multi-stage part means that stage 1 must be crowd-funded to a minimum (voluntary taxation) before other stages are opened up for crowd-funding. Some examples:

-Congress must be funded before anything that is regulated by Congress is opened up for funding

-The IT dept that maintains the e-voting system must be funded before anything that uses the e-voting system can be funded

There must be a hierarchy of needs in what gets funded. The neighborhood park should not be available for funding if the police are still unfunded.

-1st round funding opens up to voluntary taxation crowd-funding to all law and order programs (Any funds taken in are applied to all of these equally): Congress/admin/clerks, IT/digital infrastructure, police, prison, courts, defense.

Once all the above 1st round programs are funded to the “bare-bones” minimum level, then the 2nd round opens up (And also 1st round funding for the following year opens). At that point, givers can give to individual 1st round programs to bring them up to “optimal” budget funding. And the second round programs will have 2 levels: bare-bones minimum funding, and optimal funding.

-2nd round funding opens up to voluntary taxation crowd-funding (funds can be applied to any project the giver wants): parks, roads, police watchdog organization and militia (Civil Defenders), stopgap emergency healthcare system, volunteer fire dept, etc. One-time projects might also be added to this section, such as a bridge to Serbia.

Right on the main LL website can be a tab that says “2026 Govt programs - voluntary funding” and also tabs for 2027, 2028, 2029, and 2030. Once 1st round programs for 2026 are fully funded, then it opens up 1st round programs in 2027 for funding, and then once that is funded, 2028 1st round opens. This ensures that the bare minimum for a functioning society is funded several years out.

[How the webpage will look]

On the page for “2026 Govt programs - voluntary funding” it will have 1st round funding programs (and a list of all the programs) and then it will say money needed for bare minimum (amount) and then money raised (amount). There will be a button to hit to be able to voluntarily give money.

Under the 1st round section will be the 2nd round section. This section will be grey in color and un-clickable until the 1st round is funded to the “bare-bones” minimum. Once that happens, it will have color and have clickable buttons to be able to give money to individual programs until they are minimally or optimally funded.

There should also be a button that says “distribute my donation to all programs equally” for givers who do not want to take the time to give to separate programs.

(I think it is worth adding an additional point that each giver of voluntary taxes (1000 euros per month is the current placeholder amount) is publicly listed (if desired) for giving up to this amount and this counts towards giving them additional 1X voting power in the next election and also can be used as criteria for voting them into office. But also that amounts given above this amount are intentionally not publicly listed. This is to prevent one person from donating a million euros to the 1st round programs and then using this info to intimidate the police into not arresting them when they are accused of a crime because the police are afraid of losing funding.)

[Murf]

I think of the above post as one of the most important I have written for the new country. And this is because it gives us a starting point. Just like every business starts with the money needed to hire people, build a building and buy equipment, a country starts with the same things.

Now that we have a starting point, many other things can start to form in our minds. We don’t need to artificially limit the size of our govt, because (to some extent) the people will fund the stuff they want. The only limiting will be done by Congress, and they will make sure the list of programs is not too big for citizens to go through and will manage the budgets of the programs to do more with less money.

I believe the LL govt should release many recommendations for all types of things. One of the things should be a recommended minimum wage. For reference, Poland’s minimum wage is about 7.2 euros/hour and they are the highest in Eastern Europe. Once we have a recommended minimum wage, then we can pay all elected officials and other govt workers at least that amount. Workers like IT and other difficult to fill jobs might need to be paid much higher. Once we have a recommended minimum wage, then the entire govt budget can really start to become visible.

Another recommendation from the govt should be that each citizen give a % of their income each year towards having a working govt. If there are 1000 citizens that each make 20000 euros per year, 5% would only total 1 million euros and so 10% would be 2 million euros. So perhaps the initial recommended amount should be 8% of each workers income. This gets us past the 1.5 million euros from my fictional budget thread and it beats nearby Serbia’s tax rate of 10-15%, and far surpasses Croatia’s 17-35%. We will have to hope that any budget shortfall from the citizens who will choose not to pay is made up for by high-earning “whales”.

These recommendations from the govt must come just like an ad campaign via different routes to ensure all citizens stay informed. It is critically important we create a CULTURE of voluntary giving or the voluntary taxation idea won’t work. Creating this culture (because it does not already exist) and maintaining it are the highest priority for LL.

[Murf]

Shame must be re-entered into society for things necessary to the continuance of the society.

So I add to the above idea that any amount of voluntary tax that a citizen has given, from 0 to the maximum amount for 4X voting power, will be public record. And it will also say publicly in the same spot if the citizen has done volunteer community service work.

So even if the person has contributed zero and done zero work, it will say:

[Full legal name, Amount of money contributed to governance by year (zero), Hours of voluntary community service by year (zero)]

Without this slight public shaming, I can see it becoming too common for citizens to not contribute towards the well-being of the whole group and then the entire country fall apart.

[Martin_Bates]

I will present my article as my response to your op.

Murf presents a good case for how crowd funding can gather funds for Liberland to function properly and I think it is a good method to use. There are other mechanisms that I have been battling with mentally as to whether or not they are something that a libertarian society should use I will now go over them.

1 Registration of various assets

This part entails the registration of various things from automobiles, fishing boats, trailers to much larger items like airplanes and yachts. The issue I have though is how to regulate such a system, the libertarian argument is that registration is to be voluntary and not forced. This registration system could be a huge cash inflow as I have shown in Liberland vs The Bahamas how they utilize cruise ship registrations to their advantage in brining in money that way. I see a sliding scale based on the fair market value of said asset as I have pointed out in previous articles. The only way around making this not mandatory for everyone is if the asset stays in Liberland for more than 6 calendar months in a given year it will be exempt, although the issue boat and automobile license plates still would have to be issued I think IF the said asset is to leave Liberland for either a different country or enter international waters. Since the Danube River is an international boundary all boats would still have to comply with such registration requirement as required by international law and given the small physical size of Liberland I don’t see very many automobiles staying inside the territory of Liberland permanently but some people may be able to pull it off. Upon review of my previous list of international treaties that I presented to the Minister of Foreign Affairs I have realized that in error I did not include the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic nor any seafaring related treaties that ships at sea would be need to have such as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) which was created in 1914 after the sinking of the Titanic and has been periodically updated since. The bottom line is I think we can get around the “pure” libertarian thinking with making registration voluntary, you just can’t take the asset outside of the 7km area that is Liberland.

2 Registration of Businesses

This one is a more straight forward in my opinion, you either do or do not want to register your business in Liberland. I think though here again there should be an incentive for businesses to actually have a physical nexus on Liberland soil. That is if they have a building and conduct business in Liberland they should get a discount, furthermore if that business ONLY conducts business in Liberland they should only pay a de minimis registration fee, which if I am correct the Liberland business registration law has a such pricing system in place. So based on this there would be 3 different classifications for businesses:

1. Those that operate solely with the geographic limits of Liberland.

2. Those that operate BOTH inside and outside of Liberland with a physical nexus inside the geographic limits of Liberland.

3. Those that operate exclusively OUTSIDE of the geographic limits of Liberland.

I know Murf may come back and respond with, “What if the companies only have a shell company inside Liberland and get around the physical presence rule,?” if that is the case we need to figure out a formula based on gross revenue of how to overcome that, I see this as a problem but I am not an expert in this area and cannot rationally come up with a formula on how to address this issue at this time. But no matter what though tax evasion should not be considered a crime and again I am at odds mentally as to how to address this component, I think that established rules ahead of time need to be addressed in this area before large billion-dollar multinational come to register in Liberland and also render the use of shell companies illegal which I think is already the case in the company law but I would defer to the Minister of Justice on that a question.

I think between these two methods I’m addition to the crowd funding and the sovereign trust fund that I have referenced to before would suffice for Liberland’s revenue sourcing as most tasks as I have noted before would be undertaken by various DAO’s who will do most of what we now consider to be “government services” so the actual amount of expenditures once full international recognition is gained I think will be very small when one compares the government expenditures to GDP measured against every country in the world. I think this is the way Liberland needs to approach spending, secure the funding of various projects by crowd sourcing combined with the trust fund dividends and registration fees should be the perfect formula for future government funding.

[Murf]

I agree with 90% of what you have written.

Registration:

One critique is on the law enforcement side. License plates are a huge help with solving crimes each year (AI says license plates contribute towards solving 700000 crimes in the US each year). I wouldn’t want to lose license plates as far as law enforcement goes.

I know that a car that stays in LL wouldn’t really need a license plate because the place is so small that people will probably recognize vehicles, but I try to make all my LL ideas scalable for other countries to potentially adopt in the future.

So my opinion is that registration of any sort of vehicle should be free for all citizens, but also mandatory. An e-system can verify the citizens identity (send them an email verification to authenticate) and then automatically issue registration and a license plate number (if for a car) at almost no cost to the govt. For a car, the citizen can buy a license plate with their issued plate number from a 3rd party vendor using govt specs.

And perhaps, for non-citizens, we could look at potentially charging for registration like many countries do with world-travelling boats, and try to be competitive with the current best options for that to raise a bit of money. Surely Liberland’s proficiency in automated systems can beat the value proposition of countries like the Caymans, BVI and Marshall Islands. The video linked below indicates that LL would probably be competing with the Marshall Islands because it has the lowest organizational costs to run, so if LL had a higher ranked legal environment (for a better insurance ranking) then LL would probably be the best option.

Why We Did NOT Register Our Boat In The USA

Businesses:

I believe anything taking a percent of a company’s revenue is just tax by a different name and that businesses will immediately understand this. Although, maybe LL wants to implement tax on a certain size corporation like the agreed on 15% in the OECD. LL doesn’t have to formally agree to the OECD agreement, it could just make its own rule that happens to be at the same 15% rate to generally keep corporations from spoiling LL. LL does not have a shortage of entrepreneurs interested in it.

The categorization of businesses is very difficult. For myself, I might potentially start a business in LL doing manufacturing (as long as LL stays on a good course…) and so my business will be making a product, but the buyers for the product will be 99% outside LL. Would my business be forced into the “inside and outside” categorization?

Also couldn’t a multi-national corporation afford to have an office in LL with a few employees that do nothing just to get the more coveted “inside and outside” categorization versus the “only outside” one?

And yes I definitely agree to ban shell companies, but the exact way to do so is not known to me. We could have a law that says every business must be owned by a human or a group of humans, which is a good start. But maybe corporations could still find a way around it. I guess it just requires more thinking…

[llTB (Tadeo Brown)]

Murf & Martin,

Thank you for your discussion on this forum.

My thoughts on this subject;

1. There are no taxes or no financial support (not even voluntary), if there is no operating commerce in place. –> Let’s take care of local LL’s businesses first.
2. There are no local businesses, if no clear guidelines/laws in place and no secure place to conduct commerce are given. –> Let’s build more responsive, informative place (even online first) to promote LL’s business.

PS: Business also mean marketplace; Example “I do this for you and you give me that”, if we only knew what is needed (now & high priority) and the exchange values (LLD & LLM). All this of course, without elaborated bureaucracy.

[Murf]

I’ll try not to repeat what I said in the other thread, but anything I write on here is to position LL (and any other country that wants to adopt the ideas) as the innovative country of the future. I’m mind-working on future LL to make sure it is better than other countries.

The LL politicians don’t hardly interact with us or publicly express much of the on-the-ground realities of current LL. Without this knowledge, it seems somewhat of a fools-errand to be working on solutions for today.

But again, this is just the path I’ve chosen. Please work on whatever you feel called towards.