Markets left to their own? And what is your magic solution? Socialism? How come do you trust more people who rob others with tax and enslave society more than the rest of others (the market)?
I don’t understand this mentality. Every sufficiently large collection of people in the history of the world has had taxation. The evidence suggests that taxation is necessary to have a functioning society. Reasonable people can and do question taxations levels but not on the necessity of having taxes. It is unreasonable to consider taxation theft.
Neither of these models works at all.
> Every sufficiently large collection of people in the history of the world has had taxation.
That's not really an argument in favor of taxes, many things have existed for a long time. And many wars were fought purely or most importantly on taxes: most of the american revolutions of independence were largely about taxes or tax-like sanctions.
Taxation has always been a contentious topic.
> Reasonable people can and do question taxations levels but not on the necessity of having taxes. It is unreasonable to consider taxation theft.
There are many arguments and school of thought within libertarians and anarco-capitalists. I'm no expert, but the taxation is theft argument does have nuances.
Taxation IS theft, because it is involuntary, and unless you concede the tax man a privilege over yourself, he is stealing from you. To me this is a non-negotiable concept: you are one way or another being forced to give your labor under threat of liberty.
But the reality is there are ways in the which theft can be justified, the same way we tend to forgive a robber that eats for sustenance, theft can be justified to pay for the military that gives you freedom in exchange of their lives.
You can eliminate taxes 100% if you made contributions voluntary. This is utopic in today's world, maybe, but not in the next world, the one we get to design and work towards to.
If I didn't have roads in the area where I live, I wouldn't complain about it, I'd leave.
There's a pretty big difference between these two situations. It's easy to focus on the bad side of taxes, but it's important not to forget that they pay for some very basic stuff that shouldn't be taken for granted. There are plenty of things we would disagree about spending taxes on, I'm sure, but it's rather silly to pretend that you disagree with the existence of taxes completely when in fact you depend on them.
Would that make people feel more agency and ownership in their nation? Or would it produce (small) chaos?
I'm not sure how the rules would have to be changed to allow for giving money back (and use it to pay for state debt, but that is probably not politically wished for either), since there most probably would be side effects. Still, this rule.. (Germany, but I've heard about others as well)
Does somebody know why this rule exists? At some point I complained to a state minister at some election thing, but I think he was too drunk to understand since he kept saying he didn't know what I was talking about and wanted to know who is doing this thing.
The context of my comment about roads that you jumped on was that I was responding to a poster who was saying taxation is theft.
EDIT: Given the things you are complaining about, it seems like we're fairly in agreement about how we would like tax spending to be allocated.
It seems like you believe that removing/reducing taxes is more realistic than reallocating spending. It's a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I can see how this is choosing a realistic imperfect solution over an unrealistic perfect one.
In fact, I'd agree with you if you could separate the issue of taxation from the issue of spending allocation, but unfortunately, you can't. Taxation isn't actually strongly correlated with spending in the US. Historically, conservatives have decreased taxes while increasing spending (largely on the military). If you vote for people who run on a platform of decreasing spending, what you end up with historically in the US is people who cut a few token programs (welfare, for example) and pump far more money into the military than was saved by their cuts, increasing the national debt. The result is that by pushing for tax cuts you actually exacerbate the allocation problems you've pointed out.
Yeah and I think that mismatch is exactly how it's gotten so bad. How is it that we still have "the war", undeclared, after 16+ years? It's because everything is now enabled through whether or not there's a budget for it, and you can pretty much accept the budget or shut down the government, and everyone keeps choosing to just accept the budget and not hold their party responsible for promising shit again.
I consider it unreasonable to claim it is unreasonable to consider taxation theft. It happening for a long time isn't a strong enough argument.
The proper view is that government regardless of political system needs taxation to function. Calling taxation theft is unreasonable because the evidence is that it is a necessary aspect of having a society. It is not theft by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
It is obvious that any system doing useful work needs resources, and money is a fungible way of representing those resources. However, in my opinion, it is unreasonable to say with certainty that taxation is the uniquely existent solution to this problem or even the best one.
Taxation has an inherent element of force to it, taking forcefully the product of someone's labour to redistribute it to other parties. I would say the element of forced redistribution qualifies it for at least some reasonable definitions of theft (albeit a theft with a good intent, under some definition of "good"). In any case, I am having a hard time drawing a clear line between taxation and, for example, Robin Hood-style redistribution, other than the current governments of the world being recognised as a sanctioned, official, good-enough Robin Hood occupying a local minimum.
Another problem of taxation is the well known market inefficiency of the very act of piling up resources in a central place and then trying to allocate them manually to where they are needed. There is plenty of empirical evidence that systems like this tend to swell in size for no good reason other than serving their own existence.