[andrewflnr]

Good, he practices what he preaches. The point remains, paying higher taxes is not an efficient way to help your fellow man. You'll get much better bang for your buck donating to a worthy charity. Thought of this way, it's a simple question of utility.

[wpietri]

> The point remains, paying higher taxes is not an efficient way to help your fellow man.

Maybe true, maybe not, but totally irrelevant. Taxes solve the free rider problem. Individual charity can't.

[JVirissimo]

True, but what solves the forced rider problem and why presume that it is more benign a problem than free riding? One man's public good is another man's public bad.

[wpietri]

There's no a priori answer: democracy is how we decide. But one way to check how we're doing is by comparison with other countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu...

The US's tax burden is already the lowest of the OECD countries bar Chile and Mexico. It's 30% lower than Great Britain, and half that of Denmark. And what that hides is we spend an extraordinarily large portion of that on "defense", so in terms of money spent on citizens, we're necessarily lower.

But if that's still too much governmental interference, then tax haters are able to select from a wide variety of third-world countries. I might suggest Somalia, where effective tax burden is zero. There being no effective government at all, of course.

[dwolfson20]

This is an extremely abstract argument. It's a matter of degree. If everyone gave all their money to charity, we'd have no government at all.

[rooshdi]

Exactly, as much as some individuals would like to focus solely on the ills of government, there are socially beneficial programs supported by the government which need continual funding:

http://know.about.com/Government_Programs

[andrewflnr]

You're taking my abstract argument farther than I intended; perhaps I should have been more careful. I'm not saying we should give all our money to charity, just that it should be strongly preferred to paying increased taxes, especially with the goal of helping people.

[Andrew_Quentin]

I think the rich can do both. They can pay taxes and give to charity like most ordinary people do. What is so special about them?