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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Some taxes are the price of civilization. I don't know how anyone can look at our current taxation scheme and how it is spent and make the argument that what we're subject to in the US is civilized. Just look at how much of taxes go to government largesse in Washington DC and bombing people that don't look like us abroad.

It's 2023. We have the technology to run more and more parts of the government in a way that we pay directly for the things we use so that each need currently met by government is forced to be more efficient if people saw how much they are paying for that. Locally, I pay a separate fee for trash pickup. That's awesome. If all government services moved to a fee based approach, you could literally pick and choose what parts of being civilized you want and what parts you don't want.

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> If all government services moved to a fee based approach

This is essentially just privatizing everything. Just have all the kids pay for their own schooling. Eliminate Medicaid, kids can afford their own healthcare. All social safety nets would be eliminated, as if they require the people receiving the benefits to fund it then those programs would just never actually work.

> Locally, I pay a separate fee for trash pickup. That's awesome.

Its not awesome when your neighbor decides to just no longer pay for trash service and starts piling up trash heaps right along your property line leading to extremely unsanitary conditions right next to your home. Or when your neighbors don't bother paying their fire department fees and that trash heap right next to your house starts burning but the department won't bother doing anything until its your house on fire.

I see this working by being forced to pay some $X (your taxes) but you can distribute that however you see fit. Another option could be packages such as "childless" where fewer of your taxes (but still some base amount) go to schools or "carless" where the bulk of your taxes go to local roads and mass transit rather than highways. I'd love to see this attempted on the municipal level. Especially in a city like my own, Toronto, where council loves to give yet more money to the police even though people are screaming for bike lanes or a home they can afford.

> Another option could be packages such as "childless" where fewer of your taxes (but still some base amount) go to schools

Good plan if you want to drive birth rates down even faster.

(which, some people actually do want)

>If all government services moved to a fee based approach, you could literally pick and choose what parts of being civilized you want and what parts you don't want.

And screw the poors while we are at it! Added bonus!

It's worse than that: it defeats the main benefit of having government at all, which is the ability to overcome thorny coordination problems.

> We have the technology to run more and more parts of the government in a way that we pay directly for the things we use

If it doesn't have externalities that make this undesirable, why is it a government function?

In your world, people living in poverty would not have access to a basic K-12 education.

Ideally all children would get a good education, but I find it morally repugnant that unrelated person Y gets tossed in a cage if they don't fund person X's children.

your childhood was funded. or did your parents build the roads to the place where you were born? like it or not, a continuous society is a ponzi scheme of sorts. one which you benefitted from.

The funding of my childhood can be traced back capital investments and production in an old farming family, amongst other places.

The initial roads layout were likely put there by slaves. The capital growth needed to propel the family into generational wealth to fund our childhoods likely was fueled by slaves. We need to perpetuate slavery because muh roads were made possible by slaves and I benefitted.

Fortunately we can put the descendants of those slaves to work yet -- we'll call it 'property tax' and they still to this day work the fields, even if they're childless, to subsidize education of my farming family. If they don't pay it the sheriff just boots them out onto the street!

Taxation is not slavery.

It's not slavery. It just happens to be that these descendents in rural America often have to work agricultural jobs to pay their property tax (a tax that in turn pays for my extended farming family's kids' educations). And if they don't pay those taxes they get booted onto the street. And if they get booted on the street they eventually get tossed in a cage (instantaneously if they resist the booting). And when they get tossed in a cage, the 13th amendment against slavery no longer applies them. You see, you can't make them slaves (again) unless they don't do their forced field work!

Fortunately at least we seem to have understood the fact I benefitted and got roads from it, doesn't mean it needs to be perpetuated.

Funny that you never complained about farm subsidies.

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