[krschultz]

Roads, airports, the internet, at a minimum, not to mention many other technologies. Taxes bought the rest of this country after the initial settlement. Taxes save thousands of people who otherwise would not be able to pay for medical care.

Although if you want to save 30% on taxes, and let thousands of innocent people who do not have as much money as you die at the doors of a hospital they can't afford - you can definitely keep the righteous tone you have going without one hint of irony.

Taxes are a necessary evil, the only question is to what extend we should tax ourselves.

[potatolicious]

Honestly, the GP sounds like an antisocial anarchist, of the sociopathic variety. Just because he's made a good life for himself he is completely unable to empathize with the less fortunate, nor is he able to comprehend how significantly services provided by taxation have contributed to his presumptive success.

He is also unable to comprehend how the fabric of society functions. We all necessarily give up our freedom of total choice in exchange for the opportunity to live peaceably amongst one another. This is the fundamentals of democracy - that decisions are made jointly, and that whatever the decisions may be, people will abide by them (or challenge them in a structured, organized way).

[kaens]

To be frank, I think most of this tax-related drama would be solved if people had a much more direct say in what their taxes went to support.

I don't think that most people who view taxes as theft would view them that way if we were using our available resources and technology to allow them to accomplish what taxes should be accomplishing anyhow - whatever the people want them to.

At the moment taxes accomplish whatever the state, city, and federal governments want them to, with the people only having a (at best) second-hand say in what happens through a system of representative voting that has historically had a high rate of greedy, power-hungry liars being on the receiving end of the votes.

My ideal politics fall much closer to anarchism than not, but I don't think that taxes are always theft. However, at the moment I don't think that it's much of an error to compare the two.

[APLonDrugs]

Roads in Illinois and most of the USA, before Lincoln’s system of spoils were actually private toll roads. In fact, most of the early days of government internal improvement projects, while having serious competition from the private sector, mostly were examples of failure. Perhaps it is far easier to make a case why you/we must be mugged, by the powers that be for some social good then it is to make a case for freedom, in all forms.

“Taxes are necessary evil”… I conceive the idea that this is like 1+1=3