GREEN PIRATE

There is a serious Pandora’s box that will be opened if we allow Blizzard’s new Diablo III game to lead to taxing players for the dollar value of weapons and items they find in the game. These things are imaginary items, ffs.

I like Blizzard’s games and the idea that they will have a system for players to sell items to each other in a legit forum is cool. But putting a tax on data is going too far. Not only will this subject unwitting players to owing taxes for items they may not even sell to other players, but it creates a terrible precedent for taxing all things virtual.

How are we expected to tax virtual items? Are we going to tax them on a per pixel basis? What happens when we treat unlimited resources as if they are limited goods to be taxed? Oh right. You get the US FIAT dollar and a nation that is trillions of dollars in the hole for being complete dumbasses and overlooking what is most obvious.

When will dinosaurs realize that playing a game for hours to find a rare game time for somebody else is a service that is being provided!? These are not limited commodities being sold. That is an illusion for people who still think computers run on magic.

Let’s compare scenarios. Johnny has an apple. He sells that apple to Suzy. Johnny doesn’t have an apple anymore. Suzy pays sales tax on the apple. Simple, right?

Now let’s try the digital version of that. Johnny has one of these . He sells it to Suzy for $10. Now she has one of these , but she has to pay sales tax on that $10.

Johnny notices he still has one of these so he decides to give one to his best friend, Bobby, for free. Bobby appreciates the gift, but because these are now considered to have a $10 value, the IRS raids Bobby’s house and locks him away in one of these for tax evasion. All because Bobby didn’t know to report that he received something of monetary value. After all, his was made on his own which he paid for with his own . BTW, he already paid sales tax for for his .

Meanwhile, Johnny still has one of these on his . In fact, Johnny has an infinite number of for sale. That’s because everytime someone buys from Johnny, the customer actual builds a separate copy on their own .

Johnny buys a patent on these so that he is the only one allowed to sell and with virtually no production cost he becomes the richest man on Earth until the value of is reduced to nothing because Johnny and others like him were allowed to convert something of zero monetary value in to something of monetary value over and over again.

This is the same as printing your own currency except for with one extra step. I recommend everybody find a way to sell pixels while you can still get away. It’s best to get in on these things early before they go the way of the tulip bulb.

PS – Yes, I was patronizing you with the kindergarten level analogy because that’s how simple this is.

Tags: 3, blizzard, diablo, game, iii, items, pixel, pixels, tax, taxed, taxes, video

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 9:48 AM and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.