Look around you

If you think you could live without taxes and government, look around you. Everything around you is possible because we pay taxes to a government.

How did you get to where you are? If you take that very literally, you might say you drove. Well, your taxes paid for that road, they paid for the police who make sure traffic flows smoothly. The governments regulations made sure that the car you drove was up to standards that keep it from being too inherently dangerous. The less literal of you may be thinking about your position in life. Maybe you got a good start due to your education – maybe provided in part by the government. Maybe you went to private schools and a private university, in which case the government played some role in making sure that that institution would actually educate you, and not just scam you out of your money (if you feel that you didn’t get your money’s worth, you might could have studied harder – but its not the governments job to make sure everything is great value). Are you living in the middle of nowhere, in contact with no-one, sitting on a stockpile of ammunition and canned food? You can thank the government for funding the military research to develop those guns, and the government for making sure those cans would indeed preserve that food safely until the rapture. You can also thank the government for enforcing property rights, discouraging ransomers from squatting on your land, stealing your crops or just harassing you on your land.

You have easy access to goods because there are retail businesses nearby. They can sell you diverse products at reasonable prices because they have easy access to suppliers. Those suppliers take advantage of taxpayer built roads to lower the cost of delivery. Producers benefit from regulations protecting their property and trade secrets. Meanwhile, nearby farms are protected from becoming a wasteland for the producers by-products. All of this is possible through government.

Taxes are what we pay for all of these things. If you are upset that your tax money has to go to teachers who will never teach your kids, or regulators who will never protect you directly, or food stamps that won’t feed you, just think about all of the tax money that those teachers are paying, to keep your house safe at night, think about the taxes paid by those police officers which pay for the regulatory bodies that support your rights in your workplace or your investment account. Thats how democracy works. We all pay for this.

Lets get the concept of government right. It is a group of people who represent us. They get together and discuss issues that affect us all. We have selected them and given them authority to act on our behalf. They handle those issues so that we can get on with our lives. We don’t always agree with everything the decide to do, and if we get really upset about it, we can pick other people to make decisions for us. Government isn’t bad, it is our collective voice.

Using ‘get rid of government’ or ‘lower taxes, regardless’ as a starting point is pretty useless. Assuming that someone will just take over these duties is misguided. With a government, everyone has a voice in how things get done, with a corporation, we do not have that voice. There is a role for government and taxes, and denying that only exposes your ignorance.