I used to have a similar viewpoint. I grew up close to poverty, and only through landing a great job in technology have I significantly changed my standard of living. So it does seem painful when a quarter of my compensation is taken away in taxes.

However, I do think taxation serves a very useful purpose. After a certain level of income/wealth, there is conceivably no need for even more income/wealth. But the cruel irony is that its the very wealthy that keep making a ton of money, due to investments and such. So it certainly makes sense for that money to be taken by the Government and used to try and ensure a basic minimum standard of essential services, such as healthcare, education, nutrition for the destitute etc.

I want the community and society that I live in the improve somehow, and am willing to pay for it.

Isn't the "magic number" like $70K which I'm not sure if that is before or after taxes.

Yeah I like roads/schools/police etc... And making more while you lose more you have more...

Yeah I'm trying to land a tech job myself tough.

If you, personally, are freely willing to pay for it, wouldn't it be better if you could be able to do it of your own free will and not forced to do it?

Voluntary action and overcoming coordination problems don't mix well. Best case is the volunteers overpay tremendously for things that benefit a ton of free-riders (those who benefit, and could pay, but choose not to). Worst case it all falls apart and we invent government to compel cooperation and then crush/conquer any societies that don't follow suit and remain awful, disorganized messes.

No, because If I'm completely honest, I want my society to improve but I don't want to spend all my free time looking through a catalog of projects which require funding and choose that. I would rather delegate that job to people who can do that full time.

Then let's talk about a law that would allow you to voluntarily raise your personal taxes.

Instead, we're talking about forcibly taking money from people.

Did that money come into their hands completely voluntarily?

Likely not. When you buy something you need to survive, can that be said to be a "voluntary" purchase? So when that money ends up in the hands of the owners of the productive machines, they get rich, but are they doing so because of purely "voluntary" participation in the economy?

So then why do I have to pay private individuals for things I need to live, and they don't have to pay back into the system that gave them the infrastructure to earn this money in the first place?

> Did that money come into their hands completely voluntarily?

Yes, if it's in the form of an investment. An investment is a risk, and like it or not, investments are a vital part of any economy. In may cases investments are how small businesses and entrepreneurs get capitalized because banks are much more risk averse. So why punish such a critical segment of the economy? You'll only end up moving the money into other areas that have less benefit for the rest of society.

These arguments would be true if most of our economy and transactions would indeed be centered on things we absolutely need to survive, and the difference between being able to pay and not would be life and death.

It's not. Surviving in any modern first (or even second) world society is laughably easy. So I think we can safely describe most of the transactions as being "voluntary", yes.

I never got the taken by force argument. Is your mortgage or rent taken by force?

There are places in this world that to do not collect tax and you are free to go there.

So long as you are allowed to leave, you have a choice otherwise you have implicitly agreed to the social contract to pay taxes by staying and benefit from being within the protected borders of the government and all service provided therein.

Sure, and our current social contract says you pay less in taxes if you are super wealthy. There are places in this world where the rich are taxed to death, you are free to leave and settle in such utopia.

Is that what you are saying?

I made no statement about the "super wealthy". I was simply arguing that taxes are not in fact taken by force (at least in the US where citizens are free to emigrate).

Your hyperbolic example of places "where the rich are taxed to death" also seems to confirm the argument that choice is available.

Thats not at all how taxes work, nor should they.

And that's exactly my point – taxes are money taken by force, while the parent comment somehow talks about how he doesn't mind this money well-spent.

If you don't have a choice about something, it's not your free decision, even you happen to like the outcome.

You absolutely should have a choice.

But if you did, and don't pay taxes, you shouldn't get to benefit from the things those taxes pay for.

"Why should I have to pay for a fire department? My house isn't on fire..."

I think that this started as an argument about a specific thing that taxes are spent on – fighting income inequality. But now you have identified (mistakenly, by the way) the political ideology that, as you think, stands behind my opinions, and are arguing against this political ideology as a whole.

Can we agree on fire departments, roads and military and get back to discussing welfare state, please?

Edit: oh, and by the way, just as lighthouses were actually built by private organizations in Adam Smith's time, 70% of US firefighters are volunteers.

It's interesting that you invoke Adam Smith, given how strongly in favor of redistributive policies he was.

EDIT: As for specific things that taxes should pay for, no, I don't think there's a lot of room for agreement. I know a nontrivial number of people who sincerely believe that roads, for example, should be wholly privatized. You and I may think fire departments and roads matter, but we aren't the only parties to that debate. We don't get to decide for them.

I personally don't want the fruits of my labor, in the form of taxes, being used to bomb civilians (specifically, non-combatants) on the other side of the planet. I don't get that say, and I find murder far more repugnant than "theft".

How do you reconcile that? Should I be "forced" to pay for blowing up women and children over there, while you think having to materially support the poorest in your own country is an imposition — even immoral? How is that in any way in keeping with a philosophy of individual liberty?

> It's interesting that you invoke Adam Smith, given how strongly in favor of redistributive policies he was.

That's exactly my point - he used lighthouses as an example for redistribution through government, and he was famously wrong, as lighthouses were not primarily built by the government. So this is very similar to using fire departments now.

> How do you reconcile that? Should I be "forced" to pay for blowing up women and children over there, while you think having to materially support the poorest in your own country is an imposition — even immoral? How is that in any way in keeping with a philosophy of individual liberty?

I see a lot of criticism to US military involvement that takes only lost lives into account and does not even try to calculate all the lives, lost and saved, to see if utility function ends up above or below zero. Therefore, I can't take this arguments seriously.

That you apparently think there's a "utility function" in play in bombing civilians suggests to me there is no meaningful possibility of dialogue here. Between that and your position that taxes which are used to support the least fortunate among us are "theft" (but not the taxes used to buy bombs — meaning that it's how they're used, not whether they're collected at all, that you take issue with), I can only conclude that other people are somehow "lesser" in your worldview. I so utterly can't relate to that, that we may as well be speaking different languages.

> I can only conclude that other people are somehow "lesser" in your worldview

Curious - how did you come to such a strange conclusion?

You should not

a) Because people are selfish idiots

b) Because society functions on compromises

c) Because your house being on fire increases the probability of your neighbor's house being on fire.

My position is that people who think "taxes are theft" should have to face a world where the things those taxes pay for aren't available to them.

I'm pretty sure, with, as Einstein put it, "a probability approaching unity", that they would change their minds very quickly about whether those things are worth supporting.

It's a purely rhetorical position, of course; I do not actually advocate anyone suffer that experience — because it would be a thing they could only suffer.

EDIT: I'm reminded again of the rural, dues-based fire departments. You're free not to pay your dues. If your house catches fire and you haven't paid, the fire crew will come out, stop at your property line, keep the fire from spreading, and otherwise watch your shit burn. Libertarian paradise, or something...

My apologies if my comment was abrasive, my objection, though, is that pandering to this libertarian slice of the populace ends up costing society more. On a small scale that dues-based fire department might work fine "Oh, it's at frank's house, yea... he'll be surprised" but when you reach a state or country level tracking any sort of voluntary pay-in programs gets complicated and a sane efficient state would find it cheaper to just save frank's house anyways, because the cost of tracking who is who is more expensive than occasionally paying out fraudulently.

This is one of the good motivations for universal basic income, a lot of our social programs have grown to the point where their overhead is getting ridiculous but the solution isn't ending the program, it's cutting any inefficiencies we can find and simplifying the program in a fair manner to get more money to where it needs to go.

Please don't. People who are wealthy came by that wealth via a variety of approaches, but the most important factors seem to all be slanted to keep those on top on top. Another good question to ask is if these people even need another 30 billion dollars or if our modern society has the capability to provide a fair standard of living to everyone.

The vast majority of the "rich" are beneficiaries of generational wealth. They didn't "figure out how to succeed"; they were literally handed everything they have, without ever having to earn a damned thing.

If your definition of "success" is "being born to the right parents", you're advocating an even more unequal society than the one we already have. That is straight-up feudal.

EDIT: phrasing.

Do you have a reference for that assertion? According to some quick searches, it seems like that was true in the 70s and earlier, but in the recent decade the majority of millionaires and billionaires are now self-made. Of course, that googling is confirmation bias, so I'm interested in data from the other perspective.

http://www.thomasjstanley.com/2014/05/america-where-milliona...

My information also comes from Piketty. I appreciate that my confirmation bias is possibly (probably) also in play. The campaign to smear his work, and muddy the waters around his conclusions, probably makes anything short of re-analyzing all of the primary sources one's self an exercise in appealing to authorities whose positions support one's own.

I haven't read the Piketty's. Can you cite specific chapters or data?

Most of the Forbes richest are 1st generation rich. Generational wealth gets called out often, but it's not "the vast majority".

Define 'rich.' If you're talking billionaires or even millionaires, you're wrong.

inherited wealth often disappears by the third generation

> But when I see this I view it as punishment to those who figured out how to "succeed in life" with regard to acquiring wealth.

And this is one of several reasons why we have income inequality: people such as yourself who are stuck in a bad place don't want help getting out of it.

The problem is that you seem to look at rich people as having gotten there as a function of only their own success and hard work, when in reality they got there for a variety of external reasons they had no control over: maybe they were born into wealth, or maybe they were born into a race with structural advantages, or... (the list goes on).

The fact that you are in poverty is likely due to a large number of factors that you've had no control over, or never could expect to have control over, even factors that may have been put into place generations before you were born. I'm not saying you bear zero responsibility for your situation or should bear zero responsibility for getting out of it, but it's also patently false that you bear 100% of the fault, and my belief is that you also should not be forced to bear 100% of the responsibility for getting out of it.

I'll freely admit that some of my motivations are selfish: I hate the higher crime that poverty brings, which makes me feel less safe. I hate stepping over human feces left by homeless people when I walk around my city. I hate being asked for money on the sidewalk. I want more people who are unburdened by crippling financial worries who can help improve our society. But overall the bottom line is that I hold no illusion that I'm in a secure financial state based solely on my own work and actions. I've had a lot of help along the way, and it's insane to think that it's fair for me to avoid helping others improve their situation.

Yeah I can't handle being asked for money too,I inevitably just dump my wallet into their hands (cash).

I remember some lady at a train station seeing me do this and was like "Oh you're just handed out money huh? Give me some too." (jokingly)

I wasn't born into rich but I was dumb. Your parents/society tries to tell you what not to do in life with regard to finances but nope you know better and you get into debt/fear of being homeless because you're marked (credit) and then you can't apply to places/be denied.

I have an okay mind maybe I can get a tech job and get myself out.