Free Subscription! 
iTunes 
Our podcast will keep you up to date...
Why is it the makers of a Facebook game understand what the US gubment doesn't?
I play one Facebook game and it's started a thing where people can sell the "stuff" they accumulate. When you sell something you have to pay a 10% "coin fee". A tax right? Wrong! The instructions of the game say flat out that it's to keep too many coins from being in circulation. If there are too many coins ou tthere it will cause prices to go up.
http://superpokepets.com/spp/playground/topic?tid=9drGhDggsSu4dJShv5Mt6A...
So, why don't Bush, Obama, Bernake etc...understand this?
Here it is cut and copied incase you have to play the game to view the forum.
Why is there a 10% fee on Marketplace transactions?
This is somewhat complicated, but I'll do my best to explain it in a way that's easy to understand.
The 10% fee is actually our way of fighting inflation by removing some Coin from the SPP Economy. Every time you earn Coins, those are new Coins added into the Pets economy. Over the course of time, the effect of constant addition of new Coin into the economy is that Coins are worth less and less, and prices rise as a result. By removing Coin from the economy, we hope to keep the value of your Coins and prices (both in the Shop and the Marketplace) intact.
So yeah, a bit complex - but there know you now there IS a reason why
__________________
--
Jackie Fiest
The issue with games is how money is generated. Generally speaking, when you perform a task in a game, that money is generated on the spot(a faucet). So you need a way (a sink) to pull the money out of the game.
http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/QEN/QEN_Q4-2010.pdf
This is a link to the Quarterly Economic Newsletter 2010 Q4 for EVE online. Page 19 shows the sinks/faucets for the game in which broker's fees and transaction tax fill a role simular to that 'coin fee'. EVE actually has a full-time Economist on their staff to evalulate their economy, and many players (including myself) disagree wholeheartedly with the guy. One of the things the guy was considering was regulating the price of PLEXs(Pilot License Extensions, basicly 30-day subscriptions u can buy with real $$ then sell to other players in game for in-game money). These are provided by players who pay CCP $35 for 2 PLEXs, then can sell them in game for ISK if they want to. RMTs (Real Money Transactions) is an interesting phenomenon and its their way of providing a legitimate way to do it. I digress, but the Economist they hire wants to set these items to prevent excessive deflation/inflation, which seems to me like a self-correcting issue.
Another major difference is that games are voluntary, meaning that the companies producing such games have to keep their customers happy if they want to retain them. Since money in both senses are a reflection of your efforts, inflating currencies in a game can trivialize those efforts and push people away.