[simondotau]

Or if that’s too abstract for you, think about how the securities in your vault would fair in the absence of government maintaining basic law and order; honouring and enforcing otherwise fictional property such as copyright, trademarks and patents; some degree of redress in a court system; and some degree of stability of regulation of markets.

So much of the wealth on this planet relies on Governments for it to exist and to persist.

[greenwich26]

These sort of administrative and bureaucratic activities are less than 1% of federal spending though. So your argument makes no sense.

[simondotau]

I disagree that you can compartmentalise Government in that way. To the extent that there's aspects of Government which don't directly prop up the value of assets, many of them still play an important role in maintaining the social license required for Government to govern—and thus provide whatever it is you imagine is in your "1%" bucket.

The fact that a lot of unrelated money transits through Government to pay for social services is completely irrelevant to the point.

[cableshaft]

Military spending is 54% of the federal discretionary budget, though (the discretionary budget is about 1/3rd of the total budget). That all contributes to its security, if not all directly.

[greenwich26]

According to the 2020 figures, national defense was 11% of federal spending. Discretionary vs. mandatory seems irrelevant here. We might as well say military spending is 100% of military spending. It's just dividing it by something to make it sound higher, usually for propaganda purposes.

Nevertheless I totally agree some part of that 11% will benefit business and commerce. But it is still a terrible deal. In any other context no one would ever buy something with a 90% "commission".

[cableshaft]

I overlooked that I was looking at the chart from 2015 sorry about that. I was reporting the number on the chart I was seeing, which is why I specified discretionary and also said that discretionary was about a third of total spending, so it was clear. I just didn't have the exact number.

So I did look up actual numbers and the numbers I saw were different to yours. In 2020 the percentage was 15% (721.5 billion for military of 4.79 trillion budget).

But the exact percentage isn't that important. I still don't get the 'not a great deal' part. It's not some good you could either buy from retailer X or brand Y. If no money is spent on military than the country is ripe for invasion, so it's either secure or it isn't. And it's not like we want the percent to be higher. Like we don't want to spend MORE than the Department of Defense thinks we need to secure the country. That's an even worse deal.

Even if you choose to move your assets/business to a country that spends a lot less on military, you're likely benefitting indirectly from how much the US spends on military (assuming it's an ally and the world is stable, that might not stay true in the next couple of decades).

Unless you're arguing to pay for a private security firm to secure your assets, then maybe you can pray we get to a Mad Max style future where it makes sense to do that.

Or you're suggesting it can be bypassed by buying cryptocurrency, which is secured by other means than government might. If that's the case then I'm on board with that thinking.

If your main argument is 'I want all of the money I spend in taxes to solely be spent on securing my assets, so reduce my taxes!' then that's ignoring the other government services those taxes provide.