THE SUBSCRIPTION STATE Brian and Toly are correct about how complex the tax code is. But I propose an even more radical-yet-proven simplification: the subscription state. 1) Begin with the observation that large tech companies like Google, Dropbox, and Netflix collect billions of dollars from millions of people around the world without pointing a gun at anyone. 2) If you don’t pay your SaaS bill, these cloud services simply shut you off. You can’t log in till you pay. They issue a few warnings, then flip a switch. And this nonviolent mechanic for global “tax” collection nevertheless allows the largest tech companies to pull in more revenue than most countries[a]. 3) That means subscription can scale like taxation. Extended to communities, it’s the new SaaS: society as a service. You would pay to maintain your digital passport, which is the next step after digital currency. 4) And what does a digital passport do? Much like a login to a cloud service, it would gate access to a country’s land services — like the ability to drive a car, open a bank account, or cross the border. If your account isn’t in good standing, your ability to access land services is gradually tapered. 5) Just like cloud services gradually increase the severity of warnings to people who haven’t paid before shutting them off, there are many ways a state can gradually and nonviolently taper the services offered to nonpaying passport holders. It’s hard to imagine it being less humane than the current system, which is implicitly quite violent. 6) Moreover, digital passports already exist in some form from Estonia to India. We just need to think of them as “logins” to the physical world. And connect them to existing logins, private keys, proof-of-human, and hardware wallets. 7) Finally, the amazing part about the subscription state is that it’s not even a flat tax, it’s a flat fee. If you think about it, these super profitable tech companies mostly don’t care how much you make. They just charge a monthly fee for a useful service. And a subscription state could do the same.