Today it cannot be done.
Too many people talk. Piss one off and it’s over.
People can’t go five minutes without their phones and commenting about SOMETHING.
Will never work.
Interesting graph.
I remember in the late 60s when I worked in an auto plant in Ohio, there were always guys in the parking lot selling cartons of low tax Kentucky cigarettes. And this was when cigs were a quarter a pack.
If the government is repressive enough sometimes the black market is the only thing stopping mass starvation.
“What if Bill Gates could have just gotten a gun and FORCED everyone to use windows?”
Well, that’s exactly what’s happening with ObammyCare.
This happens all the time. How many restaurants don’t ring up a sale here and there? Does Garcia’s landscaping report every dollar of income? Every waiter report every tip? Electrician working after hours report every dollar of income?
That’s the underground economy.
In the US it is highly likely that illegal immigrants are major players in the underground economy.
There’s a whole separate underground economy just with individuals bartering goods and services - basically “cash under the table”.
It doesn’t require organization nor a mob and the chances of getting caught are basically nil.
If you look for it, you can find it all over the place. Some of it is blatantly illegal, most is in the grey area between a business and helping your friends and neighbors.
The article could not resist putting all the emphasis on the part of the black market that is inherently illegal, which makes sense because that is the most profitable part of it.
However, there is a substantial black market where goods and services are not inherently illegal, that exists to a great extent solely because there is no government involvement with them.
Importantly, there are also many people, citizens, not just illegals, who do their darndest to not involve themselves with government in any way. Many have little or no ID, don’t want it, don’t want government largesse, earn too little to pay taxes other than sales tax, and exist off the radar.
In the 1980s, a TV show, Max Headroom, called such people “blanks”, because they have no government issued public face.
So how do such people live? Everything they do is bought and sold for cash. They are helped by people in the system who rent them shelter, get them things that can only be purchased with ID, drive them places unless they drive without a license, etc., etc.
And there are quite literally millions of them. Legal citizens who reject government, and live, better or worse, without it. They are non-persons. Blanks. Free.
A good book to read on the underground economy is “System D”. How the black market or grey market exists in many developing nations simply because they have horrific bureaucracies that many cannot cope with, from weeks to import anything to bribes.
The book had good observations such as:
* Being illegal meant an organization couldn’t become larger than a mid-sized business.
* Off the books businesses like in home stores and street vendors were often simply a means to survive, not an effort to circumvent the law.
* Where there were restrictive regulations, System D popped up to get around it. Shopping in the cheap country and bringing items back under personal exemptions to sell at below the market value + VAT tax were common.
* Infrastructure could arise under System D. The common example was the cell phone network powered not by monthly contracts but cell phone cards sold and traded like currency. That is how Africa pays for its wireless network.
* The U.S. underground economy is fueled and powered by illegal immigration. Illegals work with fake papers in some cases, without any legal cover in others.
My observation:
There may be a partial answer to how our economy isn’t collapsing with falling participation rates and the end of the 99 week unemployment with the growth of the underground economy. As someone commented, the shift is when the day labor centers have fights between blacks and hispanics or Hispanics and Asians, because citizens are joining the illegals at the day labor centers.
And selling services from childcare to lawn service to technical work via craigslist, business cards and Fiverr without paying taxes generates income but rarely income taxes.
If the largest growing segment of your economy is the black market, you’re government might be a banana republic. (- with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy)
It became apparent to me after Yeltsin stood up to the tanks and toppled the Soviet rulers, that black market is what broke the communists. Note how quickly the new elite dismantled state enterprises and began operating as capitalists. They had hone their skills in the last decades of the Soviet Empire. There is a lesson here for Americans.