How to fund community expenses (such as distributing wealth)

Some history

Vanity

Adam Smith (also called the father of capitalism) who first wrote about the economic ideas that we take for granted today. Even he realised that the society must have functions to distribute resources. However he did not like taxes, instead it would be the vanity of the rich that would distribute resources. A factory owner, for example, would feel pride that his employees had it better.

Taxes

In hindsight one can tell that the "pride" was not so big, which led to the next idea of how to distribute resources: Communism and tax-society (where money was distributed in a more brutal form). This is of course negative since people loose a huge incentive to do things such as working, studying and venturing.

Consumerism (encouraging consumption)

Encouraging consumption means that more needs to be produced, and thus more people would have a job, and more money would be distributed.

The drawback is of course that the earths limited resources are wasted, it destroys the environment and it surrounds us with crappy products.

Especially troublesome is when the more perverted form (the ideas of "planned obsolescence") comes around.

Revisiting "Vanity" with new (internet) tools

Now with all the new tools (that new technology allows) one can't help but revisiting Adam Smiths ideas of helping vanity to distribute resources.

We have for example already established technologies:

• Crowd-funding
• Go-fund-me

New ideas:

• Let those who pay tax brag about it (share it) on social media.
  • Compare how people playing computer games can share their high score and other achievements on social media.
  • Sharing doesn't need to be to social media, but also to more custom made sites meant to compare different peoples individual acts. Imagine a map where one can zoom in and see the best contributor in your neighbourhood.
• Let people brag about all the "boring" expenses (bills which when unpaid have an tendency to end up on the societies table). Examples:
  • healthcare insurance
  • unemployment insurance

Can vanity really be such a power-full force?

Most people doesn't want to pay unnecessarily for stuff, but I'd say most people have their pet project or pet ideas which gets all the surplus of money.

Such as your own status. Compare how people buys huge houses or changes to a new car even if the old one worked perfectly well.

Imagine a news-group (or what ever), where your contributions are displayed upfront (perhaps with badges or symbols), it would incur just as much respect and status as a fancy car (which no one would see on the news-group anyways).