> Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.

It doesn't work scaled down, though. (I'd argue that it's a bug in existing policy voting and adoption frameworks that it can be enacted when scaled up, but that's a different argument.)

You can't sensibly enact a policy like this if it draws its funds from the taxes of people who aren't within the city in question (and it would be horribly unjust if you could). So you're talking about paying for a basic income within a city by adding a substantial tax to the residents of that city. That would result in a substantial motivation for any mobile business or person to relocate (and higher-income people are often more mobile), and for any new business to set up shop elsewhere.

Cities are small enough that it's entirely possible to relocate if your local government becomes too obtrusive. A policy like this only "works" if you have a scale large enough that the majority of people opposed to the policy are nonetheless forced into it by virtue of finding it less awful than moving.

The burden of moving to a new country is high enough to deter it for all but the most egregious issues; the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a country is far higher than the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a city or even a state. As a result, the average person will likely find themselves far less aligned with the policies of their country than their city or state.

But doesn't that also mean that the rich have more mobility to move to another country with much lower taxes or just hide them like they do now? Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion? Let alone the costs of lobbying (which must be expensive) and the negative costs from the consequences of said lobbying(Iraq War). Not to mention the costs of lost productivity due to monopolies(Comcast).

I guess the more important question is does it even make a difference no matter what you do. The rich will find some way to break down the system sooner or later. This seems exactly what happened in the last 30-40 years.

The answer doesn't seem to be financial, it's social. And maybe it will take an entire generation to suffer(somewhat comparable to the Greatest Generation) to truly appreciate being poor and disenfranchised.

I can't answer the rest, but

> Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_in_the_United_State...

Googling also yields some results that ballpark in the same area.

Check out the Sea Steading Institute. They are pushing towards colonizing the ocean and allow groups to form their own nations. If we can form tons of new nations to test out new ideas of government we will quickly learn what works and what doesn't.

Mostly we'll learn what governments are better at taking over others.

"There are no governments. Only corporations." ;)

Or my favorite phrasing, "Any sufficiently dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government."

I like that line. I'm stealing it.