[2023] I am noticing that the way currencies tend to be handed out for free early game on many servers quickly creates severe inequality.

Originally posted by DonaIdTrurnp

Not unless your taxation is past the Laffer maximum, which would be hard to do.

If you tax sales instead of profits, you’ll make it very hard to calculate prices.

Originally posted by SkinHungryC-3PO

Would taxation so early in the game dissuade people from going for certain industries known to generate heaps of cash like smelting and such?

Originally posted by MetallicDragon

This is, essentially, deflation in action. I've seen it a bunch of times on servers that just don't hand out enough currency. A very easy and effective solution that tends to make everyone happy is to just implement a UBI (funded by just printing money), like /u/SLG-Dennis mentioned. It makes those less active or late-joining players some spending money, and the large producers get to sell more at higher prices. It's a win-win.

Some people may grumble about inflation, but I've never seen that be an issue under UBI in this game.

Originally posted by MetallicDragon

but how could this stop the initial creation of immediate winners and losers from the first injection of new global currency by server admins?

It doesn't, but it does keep that from being a problem, since there will be more currency to go around, so those early winners will need to keep selling goods that people want to maintain their advantage.

With barter and minted currencies distributed through a player store perhaps at least those who pursued advanced tech could only get as many resources as people could collect themselves

The problem is not the free money. The problem is not enough money. You still end up with the tech players having all the money regardless of how the money is distributed.

Government stores buying goods to distribute money works OK, but has its own problems. Usually what happens is one or two goods are overpriced, someone notices this, and exploits it to make all the money. Or the store ends up with a ton of resources it has no use for, so it stops buying that resource, and now we're back in the "Deflation" stage of things.

Deflation happens when the amount of currency in circulation goes down. When a few wealthy players hoard money for one reason or another, that means there's effectively less currency in circulation, which causes prices to go down, which causes the wealthy players' wealth to have even more purchasing power, exacerbating the problem. To counteract this, you NEED to inject more currency into the economy one way or another, and it needs to go to people who will spend it and not uselessly hoard it.

Originally posted by DonaIdTrurnp

Yeah, it just adds a lot of math in figuring out pricing of complex items. A mechanic will need to sell some items at prices different from the cost basis they need to use to determine the costs of other items.

Originally posted by DonaIdTrurnp

It’s not a very big drawback, especially since a VAT would be prohibitively difficult to calculate.

Originally posted by DonaIdTrurnp

The other thing that sales taxes prevent is using stores to create implicit transport requests: if I sell something at one location for 12.35 and buy it at another for 12.36, that’s offering 0.01 per unit to transport it (as well as putting market orders at those prices. But a 1% sales tax would mean that the smallest amount to offer to pay for shipping intrinsically would have to be .13, of which the shipper gets .01.

Shipping contracts exist but need to be interacted with each time they happen.

Originally posted by working4016

Where can I find info on White Tigers UBI? I can't seem to find it.