With the tax deadline now mercifully past, taxpayers might anticipate what taxation may be like in the 21st century.

In the nation’s capital, the Republican Congress is losing its resolve despite record budget surpluses now and into the future. When Kentucky amassed a huge budget surplus, state leadership raced to hand out pork barrel projects to their favorites, with scant consideration for tax relief.

In spite of such recent political events, John Fund, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, contends that the long-term outlook on taxes will be brighter. Fund claims that technological developments in the new century will make it difficult for traditional nations and states to capture income, tax heavily and force burdensome regulations.

The world’s largest and fastest growing market in the next 20 years will be in cyberspace, not in China as economists predict. Fund believes big bureaucratic governments in the West will fail to survive the advances of the first half of the 21st century, just as communism in the East failed to survive the technological advances of the last half of the 20th century. Businesses, when faced with intensified global competition, have been forced to become more efficient, productive and cost-conscious or go out of business. Universally, governments have not felt the same pressures to become more competitive and efficient for their customers and stockholders -- you and me. They merely increase their revenue through increased taxes.

Fund predicts that easy access to "cybercash" and encryption will protect and conceal assets, making it difficult for nations and states to tax at punitive rates. Jurisdictions will lose their most talented citizens through mass desertion if they do not adopt more common sense tax policies. The more technologically savvy individuals will choose to set up shop where their capital is best treated.

Tax collectors will face increasing challenges as they try to penalize successful entrepreneurs. Goods will be made in one country, sold in another, financed in a third by investors living in a fourth, whose profits are sent to a fifth, which is a tax haven.

Look around at your neighbors and friends in Kentucky who, for tax reasons, have found it more beneficial to be legal residents of another community or state jurisdiction and register their businesses in a friendlier tax home. It is living proof that punitive tax policies drive away talented, productive citizens and businesses. While Kentucky is beginning to recognize the problem, it is simply not "there" yet.

Individuals and businesses can and will aggressively seek out less punitive tax homes. States and nations whose governments are slow to recognize this phenomenon will be the losers.

The present American tax system is on the verge of collapse. The IRS cannot answer tax questions correctly half the time. The average tax return requires over 40 hours to complete. Fund believes the U.S. will institute a flat tax system, a national sales tax or some other version of radical tax reform in the next 20 years. This will happen because the people will demand it.

A global tax revolt is brewing because people in every nation have had enough of confiscatory taxes on wages, savings, investments and entrepreneurship. To keep this global revolt from boiling over, governments will finally turn to the free market as a final resort.

We know that estate taxes kill family businesses, with 70 percent failing to make it from the founding generation to the next. We know that job creation is hurt by payroll taxes. We know that Americans regard the IRS and the federal government with outright fear. And, we know that there is a point beyond which Americans will not tolerate further confiscation of their hard-earned incomes.

If America cannot have a tax cut in the face of record budget surpluses, when can it ever get any tax relief? It is not that Americans do not wants to pay taxes. It is simply that taxes, spending and income redistribution are out of control, well beyond what is appropriate and fair.

The curiously titled 1997 "Taxpayer Relief Act" added 800 amendments, 290 new sections and 36 retroactive provisions to an already voluminous federal tax code too complex for taxpayers or the IRS to comprehend. Where’s the relief?