"They're just not buying it in formats we can measure."
You're not writing, composing, or playing the music. There aren't any execs in the recording studios helping to put it on disc. Your only job is to take a cut of the money that someone who isn't you is trying to give to someone else who isn't you... and you can't even be bothered to keep track of how much money you're taking?! Is there anything scheduled in your day planner besides interviews, hookers, and blow?
1) remove armies from around the world; restrict your armies for your defense only. 5) stop interfering with countries of the former Soviet Block. 10) stop interfering with South America countries. 11) minimize weapon production. 12) start a military campaign against drugs; burn all the drug-producing fields around the world (the ones that your satellites know about).
(cue Sesame Street music)
"One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song?"
I just keep a few files there for friends and family, and I certainly never explicitly authorized anyone else to use it, but nothing stopped Google from scanning and indexing it too. Be careful of which search results you click on; you never know if I'm the kind of guy who would send some curious websurfer to jail for looking at pictures of my cat without my direct permission.
We can conduct trillions of dollars of business electronically
If those trillions of dollars had to be transacted via "secret ballot", I'm pretty sure that hundreds of billions of them would have disappeared. Somehow it's a lot harder to write error-free code when you know that nobody's going to be able to do something as simple as checking their bank statements to catch your errors.
It was only after a strong central government was formed - and further refined with our help
Where by "further refined" you mean "tried to brutally conquer a hemisphere", and by "with our help" you mean "was effectively replaced after their surrender from years of war was finally forced via the nuclear incineration of two cities".
This is not a shining historical beacon to the values of conformism and obedience to authority.
Your American examples are effective at illustrating the point that the Japanese aren't specially susceptible to those failings and that the United States is not immune to them; but they're not very good pro-obedience lessons either. If it wasn't for the worship of authority here, we'd have impeached and imprisoned the torturers and unwarranted wiretappers years ago, and we'd at least be able to have a reasonable discussion about military and economic power without one side being constantly accused of "hating America".
requiring convicted criminals to use a vpn would be a step in the right direction.
The smart criminals have been using encryption (and steganography) to communicate with each other since before the government figured out that export controls don't keep strong encryption out of the hands of foreigners.
They'll happily keep using encryption, too, on top of whatever "second internet" you force everybody to use. This isn't about not being able to spy on scary cybercriminals who are hiding from the law, it's about being able to spy on people who don't realize they have anything to hide.
When another producer in your market has the ability to indefinitely create products whose quality and cost make them preferable to anything you can create, that is supposed to destroy the market for your products. It's a form of "creative destruction", a process in which going out of business is just the final signal to the terminally clueless that yes, it really is time for you to find a job you're better at.
In this case, if you can't make a better product than something that is already available to the whole world for free, you're not doing anything productive. Either make better software, or quit whining that people won't pay you for what you do make.
The problem is the voters. As long as people let their decisions be swayed by what they see in the mass media (a situation which may never change), it's going to be impossible to keep money out of politics, because the money that buys tropical vacations is a drop in the bucket compared to the money that buys mass media exposure.
If the First Amendment wasn't an obstacle, what would you want to do? Limit political contributions, and all you do is restrict the power of middle class individuals' money (which must be pooled to buy a single commercial) in favor of the rich (who can afford to advertise without going through campaign middlemen. We've seen some of that in these primaries, where the $2,300 cap on ordinary Americans' contributions obviously doesn't apply to wealthy candidates who can "loan" millions of dollars to their own campaigns. Limit political advertisements, and all you'll do is force some of those advertisements to call themselves "fair and balanced news", concentrating power still further into the hands of media owners. Limit news that doesn't pass "Fairness" laws, and that just moves the power into the hands of the incumbent politicians and judges who get to write and arbitrate such laws.
The best we can do is encourage the dissemination of less corrupted political information, to inoculate people against the misinformation that money can buy. By the time a voter is watching the commercials that have been pushed at him rather than trying to pull information on issues and candidates for himself, it's practically too late.
a US citizen who is tried using evidence obtained in this manner would finally have standing to contest the government's actions
What makes anyone think that illegal wiretapping is about giving people fair trials? They're not even concerned with convicting suspected terrorists, and the fact that these wiretaps are too dubious to deserve even FISA warrants should make it clear that terrorists aren't the target.
FISA was created after Nixon's attempts to use espionage for political gain. If Bush is doing the same thing then the illegally obtained results won't be seen by judges. Anything incriminating will be leaked to the media or used to anonymously blackmail the target; anything innocent will be exploited by campaign strategists. Even if the most damaging use of an unwarranted wiretap's results is a prosecution, it won't be done by introducing unconstitutionally obtained evidence in court. They'll use "anonymous tips" to launder the results to get seemingly-legit evidence instead. The "fruit of the poisoned tree" rule won't help when the connection between the evidence and it's original source has been hidden from sight.
You need to read Reflections of Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson
Or to go to the extreme, read "They" by Robert Heinlein. It's a short story not a paper, but it gets the point across that you can never be mathematically certain you're safe from all possible observers. After realizing that, you'll have a choice: You can decide to give up entirely. Or, you can realize that eliminating one simple attack vector (such as publishing source code that is only a part of a compromised binary) is still a good thing, even if it doesn't stop other incredibly complicated attack vectors (such as secretly compromising gcc binaries, along with the binaries of every other C compiler that might be used to initially bootstrap gcc's source code, in such a way as to make the result capable of inserting compromises in as-yet-unwritten encryption products).
The lock on your front door is vastly easier to crack than an open source compiler would be. But I'll bet you still use it; protection doesn't have to be invincible to be helpful.
It's hard to imagine anything more anti-geek than Reality TV.
Geeks may not like watching reality TV, but for decades we've appreciated stories *about* reality TV. Isn't reality TV a staple of that futuristic dystopia that arouses a weird combination of gut-dropping dread and insatiable curiosity in the geek heart? We can't let it stop now! Between America's abandonment of the idea of "prisoner rights" and our proliferation of "reality" shows, we're *this* close to getting a live-action Running Man!
There are no laws to quote. Flying is not mentioned in the Constitution.
Yes, it is. It's in the Tenth Amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
There are always exceptions, but unless you're looking at obfuscated (whether deliberately or via writing in Perl) line noise, it seems that briefer code factored into smaller functions ends up being easier to understand and easier to test. For those reasons it ends up with fewer mistakes per line as well as more functionality per line.
I suspect the same would be true for the US Code, which IIRC contains tens of millions of words now. Nobody would expect most citizens to even read a fraction of it, but we're still required to follow it or risk the consequences.
This is a natural failing when most of the people creating a product are experts, with nobody specifically concerned about making things easy for laymen to understand. At least in the computer industry we now have more accessible options than "man grep", but in legislation there's no financial incentive and seemingly little social incentive to make the same improvements. As we can see in the above article (which, no, I didn't finish...) even the most well-meaning reformers may not see brevity as a necessary part of reform.;-)
Being too brief can have it's own problems (we've been arguing about the intent behind "well-organized militia" for how long now?) but there's got to be some way to get the best of both worlds, with layers from terse statements of principles all the way down to nitpicking applications to case studies.
Party activists at the lower ranks of the party would tend to select the most extreme candidate, who would ultimately lose to a more mainstream candidate.
Ah, so if it turned out that one candidate beat John McCain in six out of nine of this year's opinion polls, whereas the other candidate lost to John McCain in seven out of ten polls this year, the one who was more likely to win would be chosen by the superdelegates, even if the one who was more likely to lose had better party connections?
That sounds like a wonderful system, but I hope you'll forgive me if I'm skeptical that it will actually work that way.
instead you shove forward crap about Marijuana and "our elected officials deceive us"? We all deserve the shitty response we got.
Indeed, we do deserve the shitty response we get from our politicians. Not because a hundred Slashdot moderators think that imprisoning Prohibition violators and dissembling about torture is bad, but because a hundred million voters think that those things are acceptable.
We'll take your suggestions into consideration next time, though. Two questions on intellectual property might not have been enough, but it's theoretically possible that four or five would have made the difference, once we got that crap about unjust imprisonment and dishonesty out of the way to make room for more detailed complaints about software patents. Just because they don't all respect you enough to give you a straight answer about waterboarding, that doesn't necessarily mean they won't respect you enough to listen to your detailed explanation of patent office flaws and compose an equally complex and informed reply.
I also worked the bunker in trap shoots, over 110F operating the machine. My dad did the same thing picking potatoes for 60 cents a day growing up. I have gutted chickens. I have dug ditches and hauled rocks. I have worked in a butcher shop. Good luck doing any of that now. You can't compete with the illegal immigrants for those jobs that were traditional for high school or college students on break or temp jobs while trying to land better employment.
Bear with me if I'm being naive, but is that currently a problem? The examples I always saw of traditional student jobs were as stockboys/cashiers (as well as doing deliveries if you had a car). Those bottom-rung jobs have paid well above minimum wage for many years, so my guess is that it's not that students "can't compete" for dirty jobs, it's that the hard working ones can get better jobs with little more than English fluency.
So what am I missing? Are my examples of better jobs really worse than digging ditches? (I suppose ditch digging can develop your work ethic and physique, whereas retail sales may just develop your misanthropy) Have I been looking at the unskilled job market in the wrong cities, or not recently enough?
Anyway, regarding Paul and immigration it's a question of principles. Someone who values freedom should have more respect for freedom of movement; even if someone can't vote or collect welfare here, if someone wants to sell or rent them a home here the government shouldn't get in the way. It's also a question of humility: a good politician should also have more respect and fear for unintended consequences. Not every job in America can be done by a non-American, but many of the rest can be outsourced regardless of whether or not you let the non-American inside US borders. The only difference immigration restrictions make in those cases is to ensure that a multinational corporation gets to take a cut as middleman.
The "not campaigning until Florida" decision wasn't some strategy that Giuliani had from the beginning, it was an attempt to lower expectations after it became obvious that he wasn't going to win Iowa no matter how much work he put in there. The only thing Giuliani's campaign thought was that conceding the Iowa race wouldn't look quite as bad as trying his hardest to win it and then losing anyway.
Or how many people say "I agree with him, but he's not going to win." Folks, if people want him to win, they'll vote for him and he'll win. Why is that such a strange concept?
It's not a strange concept, and it's totally consistent with the fact that, while I mostly agree with him and will vote for him, he's not going to win. There will be millions of primary election voters. Ron Paul will get about 10 percent of them. Just because I will be one of those voters will not make 10 percent sufficient to grant him the Presidency (unless Proposition 304 passes, and we all pray it will).
So why is that such a strange concept? *Every* candidate has people who want them to win and will vote for them; nevertheless, all but one of those candidates will lose or give up. Polling data isn't yet sufficient to predict who the "one" will be, but we can start to make a few good predictions as to who it won't be.
And since there is a currency market, the forces of that market can be brought to bear.
Let's hope not. One of the forces of the US dollar market in the past has been that countries all over the world have wanted to hold large reserves of it due to its perceived superior stability, and one of the natural market forces that may come to bear in the future is that if that perception of stability ever fails, large holders of dollars will each have incentive to dump their own holdings before everyone else dumps theirs, in an example of (ruefully named) positive feedback.
At least for people who invested in stocks and houses based on what they could "flip" their investment for later, there was often some intrinsic value in profits and rents to fall back on. With dollars the only intrinsic value is that you can use them to pay back debts denominated in dollars.
The real solution is to tax wealth rather than income
I'm a big fan of the fairness of that idea, but who are you going to convince to implement it? Notice that one of the biggest economic activities of our current government is taking money from people based on income (the IRS) and giving it to other people based on their accumulated wealth (interest payments on government debt). That might not be an accident; "old money" is much better connected than "new money".
so that investment becomes the best strategy for tax avoidance.
Really? How? Presumably stocks, bonds, CDs, savings accounts, etc. would still count as "wealth".
It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.
It's fairer, but I'd worry about the unintended consequences. For instance, our current policy of "The government has to know about everything (including your time) you sell, and everything deductable you buy" is already pretty intrusive, but "The government has to know about everything you own" would be even worse.
Slashdot Mirror
"They're just not buying it in formats we can measure."
You're not writing, composing, or playing the music. There aren't any execs in the recording studios helping to put it on disc. Your only job is to take a cut of the money that someone who isn't you is trying to give to someone else who isn't you... and you can't even be bothered to keep track of how much money you're taking?! Is there anything scheduled in your day planner besides interviews, hookers, and blow?
1) remove armies from around the world; restrict your armies for your defense only.
5) stop interfering with countries of the former Soviet Block.
10) stop interfering with South America countries.
11) minimize weapon production.
12) start a military campaign against drugs; burn all the drug-producing fields around the world (the ones that your satellites know about).
(cue Sesame Street music)
"One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?"
Or am I going to have to send future emails to @gmail.com?
I just keep a few files there for friends and family, and I certainly never explicitly authorized anyone else to use it, but nothing stopped Google from scanning and indexing it too. Be careful of which search results you click on; you never know if I'm the kind of guy who would send some curious websurfer to jail for looking at pictures of my cat without my direct permission.
We can conduct trillions of dollars of business electronically
If those trillions of dollars had to be transacted via "secret ballot", I'm pretty sure that hundreds of billions of them would have disappeared. Somehow it's a lot harder to write error-free code when you know that nobody's going to be able to do something as simple as checking their bank statements to catch your errors.
It was only after a strong central government was formed - and further refined with our help
Where by "further refined" you mean "tried to brutally conquer a hemisphere", and by "with our help" you mean "was effectively replaced after their surrender from years of war was finally forced via the nuclear incineration of two cities".
This is not a shining historical beacon to the values of conformism and obedience to authority.
Your American examples are effective at illustrating the point that the Japanese aren't specially susceptible to those failings and that the United States is not immune to them; but they're not very good pro-obedience lessons either. If it wasn't for the worship of authority here, we'd have impeached and imprisoned the torturers and unwarranted wiretappers years ago, and we'd at least be able to have a reasonable discussion about military and economic power without one side being constantly accused of "hating America".
requiring convicted criminals to use a vpn would be a step in the right direction.
The smart criminals have been using encryption (and steganography) to communicate with each other since before the government figured out that export controls don't keep strong encryption out of the hands of foreigners.
They'll happily keep using encryption, too, on top of whatever "second internet" you force everybody to use. This isn't about not being able to spy on scary cybercriminals who are hiding from the law, it's about being able to spy on people who don't realize they have anything to hide.
When another producer in your market has the ability to indefinitely create products whose quality and cost make them preferable to anything you can create, that is supposed to destroy the market for your products. It's a form of "creative destruction", a process in which going out of business is just the final signal to the terminally clueless that yes, it really is time for you to find a job you're better at.
In this case, if you can't make a better product than something that is already available to the whole world for free, you're not doing anything productive. Either make better software, or quit whining that people won't pay you for what you do make.
The problem is the voters. As long as people let their decisions be swayed by what they see in the mass media (a situation which may never change), it's going to be impossible to keep money out of politics, because the money that buys tropical vacations is a drop in the bucket compared to the money that buys mass media exposure.
If the First Amendment wasn't an obstacle, what would you want to do? Limit political contributions, and all you do is restrict the power of middle class individuals' money (which must be pooled to buy a single commercial) in favor of the rich (who can afford to advertise without going through campaign middlemen. We've seen some of that in these primaries, where the $2,300 cap on ordinary Americans' contributions obviously doesn't apply to wealthy candidates who can "loan" millions of dollars to their own campaigns. Limit political advertisements, and all you'll do is force some of those advertisements to call themselves "fair and balanced news", concentrating power still further into the hands of media owners. Limit news that doesn't pass "Fairness" laws, and that just moves the power into the hands of the incumbent politicians and judges who get to write and arbitrate such laws.
The best we can do is encourage the dissemination of less corrupted political information, to inoculate people against the misinformation that money can buy. By the time a voter is watching the commercials that have been pushed at him rather than trying to pull information on issues and candidates for himself, it's practically too late.
a US citizen who is tried using evidence obtained in this manner would finally have standing to contest the government's actions
What makes anyone think that illegal wiretapping is about giving people fair trials? They're not even concerned with convicting suspected terrorists, and the fact that these wiretaps are too dubious to deserve even FISA warrants should make it clear that terrorists aren't the target.
FISA was created after Nixon's attempts to use espionage for political gain. If Bush is doing the same thing then the illegally obtained results won't be seen by judges. Anything incriminating will be leaked to the media or used to anonymously blackmail the target; anything innocent will be exploited by campaign strategists. Even if the most damaging use of an unwarranted wiretap's results is a prosecution, it won't be done by introducing unconstitutionally obtained evidence in court. They'll use "anonymous tips" to launder the results to get seemingly-legit evidence instead. The "fruit of the poisoned tree" rule won't help when the connection between the evidence and it's original source has been hidden from sight.
I'm sure it was even better in the original German.
You need to read Reflections of Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson
Or to go to the extreme, read "They" by Robert Heinlein. It's a short story not a paper, but it gets the point across that you can never be mathematically certain you're safe from all possible observers. After realizing that, you'll have a choice: You can decide to give up entirely. Or, you can realize that eliminating one simple attack vector (such as publishing source code that is only a part of a compromised binary) is still a good thing, even if it doesn't stop other incredibly complicated attack vectors (such as secretly compromising gcc binaries, along with the binaries of every other C compiler that might be used to initially bootstrap gcc's source code, in such a way as to make the result capable of inserting compromises in as-yet-unwritten encryption products).
The lock on your front door is vastly easier to crack than an open source compiler would be. But I'll bet you still use it; protection doesn't have to be invincible to be helpful.
It's hard to imagine anything more anti-geek than Reality TV.
Geeks may not like watching reality TV, but for decades we've appreciated stories *about* reality TV. Isn't reality TV a staple of that futuristic dystopia that arouses a weird combination of gut-dropping dread and insatiable curiosity in the geek heart? We can't let it stop now! Between America's abandonment of the idea of "prisoner rights" and our proliferation of "reality" shows, we're *this* close to getting a live-action Running Man!
There are no laws to quote. Flying is not mentioned in the Constitution.
Yes, it is. It's in the Tenth Amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
There are always exceptions, but unless you're looking at obfuscated (whether deliberately or via writing in Perl) line noise, it seems that briefer code factored into smaller functions ends up being easier to understand and easier to test. For those reasons it ends up with fewer mistakes per line as well as more functionality per line.
;-)
I suspect the same would be true for the US Code, which IIRC contains tens of millions of words now. Nobody would expect most citizens to even read a fraction of it, but we're still required to follow it or risk the consequences.
This is a natural failing when most of the people creating a product are experts, with nobody specifically concerned about making things easy for laymen to understand. At least in the computer industry we now have more accessible options than "man grep", but in legislation there's no financial incentive and seemingly little social incentive to make the same improvements. As we can see in the above article (which, no, I didn't finish...) even the most well-meaning reformers may not see brevity as a necessary part of reform.
Being too brief can have it's own problems (we've been arguing about the intent behind "well-organized militia" for how long now?) but there's got to be some way to get the best of both worlds, with layers from terse statements of principles all the way down to nitpicking applications to case studies.
Computer World MUST know more about this than me.
You'd hope so, but no.
Party activists at the lower ranks of the party would tend to select the most extreme candidate, who would ultimately lose to a more mainstream candidate.
Ah, so if it turned out that one candidate beat John McCain in six out of nine of this year's opinion polls, whereas the other candidate lost to John McCain in seven out of ten polls this year, the one who was more likely to win would be chosen by the superdelegates, even if the one who was more likely to lose had better party connections?
That sounds like a wonderful system, but I hope you'll forgive me if I'm skeptical that it will actually work that way.
instead you shove forward crap about Marijuana and "our elected officials deceive us"? We all deserve the shitty response we got.
Indeed, we do deserve the shitty response we get from our politicians. Not because a hundred Slashdot moderators think that imprisoning Prohibition violators and dissembling about torture is bad, but because a hundred million voters think that those things are acceptable.
We'll take your suggestions into consideration next time, though. Two questions on intellectual property might not have been enough, but it's theoretically possible that four or five would have made the difference, once we got that crap about unjust imprisonment and dishonesty out of the way to make room for more detailed complaints about software patents. Just because they don't all respect you enough to give you a straight answer about waterboarding, that doesn't necessarily mean they won't respect you enough to listen to your detailed explanation of patent office flaws and compose an equally complex and informed reply.
I also worked the bunker in trap shoots, over 110F operating the machine. My dad did the same thing picking potatoes for 60 cents a day growing up. I have gutted chickens. I have dug ditches and hauled rocks. I have worked in a butcher shop. Good luck doing any of that now. You can't compete with the illegal immigrants for those jobs that were traditional for high school or college students on break or temp jobs while trying to land better employment.
Bear with me if I'm being naive, but is that currently a problem? The examples I always saw of traditional student jobs were as stockboys/cashiers (as well as doing deliveries if you had a car). Those bottom-rung jobs have paid well above minimum wage for many years, so my guess is that it's not that students "can't compete" for dirty jobs, it's that the hard working ones can get better jobs with little more than English fluency.
So what am I missing? Are my examples of better jobs really worse than digging ditches? (I suppose ditch digging can develop your work ethic and physique, whereas retail sales may just develop your misanthropy) Have I been looking at the unskilled job market in the wrong cities, or not recently enough?
Anyway, regarding Paul and immigration it's a question of principles. Someone who values freedom should have more respect for freedom of movement; even if someone can't vote or collect welfare here, if someone wants to sell or rent them a home here the government shouldn't get in the way. It's also a question of humility: a good politician should also have more respect and fear for unintended consequences. Not every job in America can be done by a non-American, but many of the rest can be outsourced regardless of whether or not you let the non-American inside US borders. The only difference immigration restrictions make in those cases is to ensure that a multinational corporation gets to take a cut as middleman.
If someone who can't print dollars held a multi-trillion dollar debt, that would be a hell of an intrinsic value.
When the US government, who can print dollars, holds a multi-trillion dollar debt, that's not "intrinsic value", that's just "moral hazard".
Adding a few more search terms should clarify things.
The difference is that Thompson didn't campaign, and Guiliani thought he didn't need to campaign until Florida
Both Thompson and Giuliani spent more time in Iowa than Ron Paul "frantically" did:
http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2008/ia08/iavisits08r.html
The "not campaigning until Florida" decision wasn't some strategy that Giuliani had from the beginning, it was an attempt to lower expectations after it became obvious that he wasn't going to win Iowa no matter how much work he put in there. The only thing Giuliani's campaign thought was that conceding the Iowa race wouldn't look quite as bad as trying his hardest to win it and then losing anyway.
Or how many people say "I agree with him, but he's not going to win." Folks, if people want him to win, they'll vote for him and he'll win. Why is that such a strange concept?
It's not a strange concept, and it's totally consistent with the fact that, while I mostly agree with him and will vote for him, he's not going to win. There will be millions of primary election voters. Ron Paul will get about 10 percent of them. Just because I will be one of those voters will not make 10 percent sufficient to grant him the Presidency (unless Proposition 304 passes, and we all pray it will).
So why is that such a strange concept? *Every* candidate has people who want them to win and will vote for them; nevertheless, all but one of those candidates will lose or give up. Polling data isn't yet sufficient to predict who the "one" will be, but we can start to make a few good predictions as to who it won't be.
And since there is a currency market, the forces of that market can be brought to bear.
Let's hope not. One of the forces of the US dollar market in the past has been that countries all over the world have wanted to hold large reserves of it due to its perceived superior stability, and one of the natural market forces that may come to bear in the future is that if that perception of stability ever fails, large holders of dollars will each have incentive to dump their own holdings before everyone else dumps theirs, in an example of (ruefully named) positive feedback.
At least for people who invested in stocks and houses based on what they could "flip" their investment for later, there was often some intrinsic value in profits and rents to fall back on. With dollars the only intrinsic value is that you can use them to pay back debts denominated in dollars.
The real solution is to tax wealth rather than income
I'm a big fan of the fairness of that idea, but who are you going to convince to implement it? Notice that one of the biggest economic activities of our current government is taking money from people based on income (the IRS) and giving it to other people based on their accumulated wealth (interest payments on government debt). That might not be an accident; "old money" is much better connected than "new money".
so that investment becomes the best strategy for tax avoidance.
Really? How? Presumably stocks, bonds, CDs, savings accounts, etc. would still count as "wealth".
It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.
It's fairer, but I'd worry about the unintended consequences. For instance, our current policy of "The government has to know about everything (including your time) you sell, and everything deductable you buy" is already pretty intrusive, but "The government has to know about everything you own" would be even worse.