There is a kernal of validity to your point, but let’s not pretend like those things are at all the same. The difference between copyright violation for personal use and copyright violation for commercialization is many orders of magnitude.

Well, yeah. If you’re self employed, you have to report yourself too.

A flat tax is a poor tax. 5% of your income means WAAAAY more to someone working minimum wage with two kids than someone who has a second home, even if dollars and cents it’s way less. And the wealthy will evade a flat tax as much as they already do a progressive tax.

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It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.

They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.

Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.

I saw you already solved your own issue. Just want to make sure you understand what the actual issue was and why.

In order to use a class/function, such as Light(), the interpreter running your script needs to know what that class/function does. To do that, either you need to have defined it in your code (like you did with your main function) or you need to have imported it from from a another source like lifxlan where it is defined. In your original script, you imported the class LifxLAN, though as you discovered, you forgot to import the class Light as well. I’m assuming those are classes, btw, from both context and the fact that they follow the python naming convention (functions and variables are all_lower_case, Classes are CapitalizedWords, and CONSTANTS are ALL_CAPS)

Additionally, instead of importing each class, you could have also imported the entirety of the lifxlan library by changing your import statement to import lifxlan. I’m not recommending you do that. It’s not best practice to import more than you need and it can cause issues if what you’re importing is not just a library but also executes code. But, if you did import the whole library, that would have imported all of the classes and functions in lifxlan including both LifexLAN and Light. You could then create objects of those classes or call those functions by prefixing the library name to their name. For example, lifxlan.Light().