In The USA: the Next Revolution

[Dayuhan]

That's largely intuition born out of Protestant work ethic and a distrust of liquidity.

I confess to having a work ethic, and to not entirely trusting people to manage liquidity effectively.

Here's an example. A Bangledeshi farmer grows a perishable crop only Americans will eat. Let's say this crop has about a month shelf life, so it depreciates in value every day. This farmer needs to round up as many end consumers as possible to buy his crop as soon as possible. Who's better equipped to do that? Your farmer or the "investment flipper?"

Unless the Bangladeshi farmer's crop is valuable enough to air freight, which it's probably not unless it's illegal, he's stuffed from the start, given how long it would take him to get the stuff to market.

I see the point, but I didn't say that type of money movement shouldn't happen, only that it doesn't necessarily need to gety a tax break. If people make money on that sort of trade, fine... that's their income, let them pay income tax on it.

Whether or not the longer-term investment that the rule in question was designed to promote is actually superior is an open question. The point is that the rule was designed not to exploit labor but to create an incentive for a type of investment that whoever wrote the rule wanted to promote. Whether tax policy ought to be used for behaviour modification is still another question, but it is used that way and will probably continue to be used that way.