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Comment by TheCoelacanth | Hacker News Reader

That's nonsense. The richest people benefit the most from having a stable government with well-funded police protecting their property.

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It's not nonsense, you just looked at the extreme case on the other side. You can try to make arguments like that for the "richest" people, but what about everyone else? Someone making $1 below the Medicaid income limit should pay a ton more in taxes than someone making $1 above it because they get back a lot more in return?

If they're benefiting so much, why are they poor? Clearly wealthier people are getting more benefit.

Does someone below the poverty level qualify for more government assistance than a middle class person?

Does a middle class person have more choices in how they want to live their life?

I didn't say being poor was better, this was in response to who uses more government services. And I'm not event stating it as a problem, I think poor people use more services because they need more services. But I thought it was important enough to correct the claim that they don't use more services.

> Clearly wealthier people are getting more benefit.

No. Their wealth doesn’t come from government provided services.

The government defines how wealth works, what property is, and how people relate to and may benefit from it.

That’s settled by law, not by the actions of the current government. If you want to pin down the source of how the wealthy can retain their wealth, that would be the courts and broader law enforcement. So going this way the wealthy would contribute more to the justice system, while they wouldn’t pay as much for public education, health services, and social welfare? Doesn’t seem like something anyone would want.

How would law get enforced without taxes?

Clearly the wealthier you are, the more benefit you are getting from taxes because the government stops everyone else from taking your wealth.

Yeah, but they don’t benefit from public health services, since they can pay for a private insurance with a higher quality of services. They don’t benefit from social benefits, since they have much more efficient ways of making money. They don’t benefit from public schools personally, since they can send their children to private schools. So if I were to go with the reasoning that people should pay for received services proportionally to the benefit they get from them, I don’t think we’d end up with a system where the rich support the poor better. That’s all because the needs of the poor are very different from the needs of the rich.

Those things are nice, but the benefits are a rounding error compared to the benefit that the rich get from government enforcing the existence of property rights.

Those are enforced by courts and police. So you may end up with well-funded police and courts, but defunded public health services, public education and social benefits.

In your system, courts and law are not part of the government?

No? Government is the people currently elected. Nothing to do with courts. And law was decided by previous governments. Giving money to the current/future government to create new law which you like is called lobbying, or bribing (whatever floats your boat).

Taxes don't only pay for what you have defined as "government". They pay for everything the state does, including courts and enforcement of laws.

Yes, but if you demand that everyone pays proportionally to the benefit they get, then the threat of moving capital to another country has an outsize influence on politics within the country. So the rich get even more say about how taxes are spent than they normally do, by literally voting with their wallets. And thus state’s spending is optimised to protect the interests of the rich with little regard for the poor.

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